Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty there’s nothing our God cannot do. 

He is also so big and His mission is so mighty and global, that He is also not bound by our buildings, budgets or blueprints.  He is everywhere, always on His mission of seeking to save the lost.

 While you were sleeping last night, God was down there in Sydney’s gay bars, reaching out to the hearts and minds of men and women who are hungering for love and intimacy, the hunger that can only be satisfied by the One who died on the Cross for them.  While your children were sleeping last night, God was in the hotel rooms in Bangkok, tending the fractured hearts of young Thai girls from being sexually used and abused, gathering them like lambs in His arms.  While your grandparents were sleeping last night, God was in the hospice where a lonely old man with emphysema was taking his final raspy breaths, not failing to give him one final invitation to enter into Jesus’ paradise.  God’s mission never stops and knows no bounds.

 And God is inviting you to join Him on His mission.  “Come, follow Me and I will make you fishers of men and women.”  Come, leave your comfortable home in Ur of the Chaldeans to the place that I will show you, and through you all families of the earth shall be blessed.  Come, leave behind your affectionate father and be lifted up against your will, to sit with your hands bound between the humps of a Midianite camel down into an unknown future in Egypt.  Come, lift up your shepherd’s staff over the Red Sea and lead a scraggily squabbling army of slaves between walls of salty seawater.  Come, let’s go and make disciples together and I will be with you always, to the end of the age.

 There is something within the human heart, though, that wants to tie God down physically.  That natural desire leads Hindus to box divinity into a little shrine in the living room.  It also led the Israelites to mould a motionless, insensible golden calf in the desert.  David and Solomon, who were probably a bit ashamed at how grandiose their palace was and how much time and effort they had put into it, wanted to build an magnificent temple to quieten their conscience, when God Himself preferred to symbolise His presence with a nomadic tent to show that “in every place where I cause my name to be remembered I will come to you and bless you.” Exodus 20:24

 Yet, as the Jewish leaders found out, you cannot contain God in a box!  You may destroy His nomadic temple and roll a stone in front of His sepulchre, yet within hours, the Creator of the universe will burst out, and there is nothing you can do about it!  You might try to hold Him down, but the Hound of Heaven is on a mission to save, and there is no leash strong enough to hold Him from that mission!

 What about you and I?  Are there ways that we are trying to hold God down, to put Him in a box?  Do we seek to contain Him within a 24-hour period commencing every Friday sunset?  Do we believe that we only really meet God in a little A-frame brick building that we mistakenly call “the church”?  Do we defend the need to reverence Him in the “sanctuary”, when Jesus’ true temple is now made out of living stones that, by His Spirit, move and breathe and catch the train down to work in the CBD on Monday mornings?

 Revelation 14 unveils for us the characteristics of the people of God at the end of time.  John tells us that they keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.  But he also tells us that they follow the Lamb wherever He goes.  May the Spirit of Jesus mobilise us to get up off our seats and out of our church buildings and join His discipleship movement and follow an uncontainable God on His mission.

 The book of Acts is drenched with the Holy Spirit.  Reading it is like taking time to play out in the tropical rain!  Read the full stories for today in:

Acts 7 MSG
Acts of the Apostles “The First Christian Martyr”

 Invite your friends to join this journey with you!  You can follow this journey on Facebook too.