Lockdown Day 29: THE THEOLOGY OF THE COW
Video: Not Alone – a short film by Jon Mierke, son of friends serving in Lesotho: https://rawlesotho.weebly.com/, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjkGSYT6jnfgSfqNAHsdicA
Jeremiah 32:18,20 “You are a great and powerful God; you are the LORD Almighty. Long ago you performed miracles and wonders in Egypt, and you have continued to perform them to this day, both in Israel and among all the other nations, so that you are now known everywhere.” (GNB)
Here’s one of the biggest challenges during an indefinite lockdown. We become like cows. You see the cow has a short span of accelerated growth to adulthood and then, for the next 12 years, it repeats the same routines over and over by chewing grass and giving milk…and then it dies! Being confined to our own limited spaces, we also run the risk of doing the same thing over and over, hour after hour, day after day and week after week. We basically pursue happy OLD routines and lockdown becomes a matter of survival rather than an adventure. The same as yesterday, but hopefully better tomorrow. And then, once it’s over, we simply go back to normal. What a waste!
I read a sermon on the internet recently (for this one I would prefer not to provide the source) of a pastor who asked this question: “Does church bore you?” He then confessed that before he had to plan worship services, preach, and lead all the different aspects of a service, he too would say that church bored him. As encouragement, he then said that we are allowed to be bored by church sometimes. He concluded with these words, “But shouldn’t we be okay with it if every single worship service doesn’t get our blood flowing? We can’t be on a spiritual high all the time.”
It’s not about being on a spiritual high! It’s being intimately connected. In stark contrast to this internet teacher I was reminded of the words of A.W. Tozer when he proclaimed; “I can safely say, on the authority of all that is revealed in the Word of God, that any man or woman on this earth who is bored and turned off by worship is not ready for heaven.”
No, I’m not going to make you feel good about being a bored quarantined Christian. If you are, then you are the one to blame, not your faith, and most of all not God. God the Creator, miracle worker, Saviour of souls, the One who separated the oceans and made time stand still, the One who healed the sick and raised the dead, this God is not a boring God. Following Him can only become boring when we settle into behavioural habits; good habits maybe, but nonetheless behavioural habits that lead to death.
The one sure test to see if we have stagnated our faith into a behavioural routine is to ask this simple question: Is my faith habitual? Even during lockdown. Do I still do what I did in Church, now just from my couch, or have I reinvented something new in this relationship with God. Do I keep on doing what I always did because I am used to doing what I do, because that is the way it’s done? If the answer is yes or even “from time to time” then you are in desperate need to escape from a mundane “cow theology” to a momentous faith.
When lockdown come to an end, beware of living a life of “blowing & going, plotting & planning, ducking & diving, running & gunning, slamming & jamming, moving & shaking, shoving & jiving”.