Settling for the Explainable – Guest Post by Ryan Tate

 

Ryan Tate over at Doorframes of TaterHouse is a brother from another mother as I like to say!. His blog is on my "you must read daily list" and I'm always encouraged or challenge by his insight. Today he honored me by writing a guest post that I’m sure will bless you!

Since the Adam and Eve, people have been trying to find ways to save themselves. They’ve tried to enter the presence of God in ways that make sense to them, instead of listening to what God says. We’ve limited God to our finite senses and logical explanations that are easy for us to manage. But God doesn’t work within the confines of our senses or our logical explanations. He works within the unexplainable.

In his book Forgotten God, Francis Chan said he doesn’t want to live a life that is explainable without the Holy Spirit. If his life makes sense to him (or to others) than a red flag should go up. They same thing should true for us. Bells and whistles should ring loud when our lives start to become explainable.

Explainable means there is no difference between what your life looks like and what the world looks like. If our lives fit right into the patterns of the world we have ceased to be unexplainable. This includes everything: how we manage our money, how we raise our children, how we give, how we pray, how we are attractive and unattractive to others, how we choose a career, what we value, what we crave, what we say, how we worship, what we worship, everything. Nothing is off limits for God. Nothing about you is worthless to Him, so don’t let it be explainable without Him.

Jesus came preaching about a kingdom. Somewhere along the lines we replaced “kingdom” with “culture”. Kingdom seemed too militaristic and authoritative for us. It was too harsh of word for the language of our time to deal with. The switch seemed harmless to most. A culture of Christianity sounds nice, doesn’t it? We wouldn’t want to be offensive or judgmental by using the word kingdom too much. Christian culture is what we should be striving for right? But the real dilemma is that the central focus shifted along with the word change. You see, kingdom implies a “King” and culture implies a “people”. A culture of people is much easier to explain than a kingdom with a King. People can live inside a culture and be comfortable and explainable with everyone else around them. But to live inside in a kingdom with a reigning King is quite a different perspective.

Many don’t want to admit they follow a King and live Kingdom-minded. The Kingdom of God has an agenda, and it does not share the values and agendas of other kingdoms. The Kingdom of God is full of subjects that live unexplainable lives outside the realm of the world, yet fully in the world. The unexplainable happens when and where the Kingdom of God is on earth as it is in heaven (Matt 6:10). We have to commit ourselves to finding and creating those places where heaven overlaps with earth. That is where the Kingdom of God exists. That is where the unexplainable exists.

I’ll ask you this question: what is the mark of those who follow
Christ as their King?

I think it starts with regarding the voice of God as food. Man does not live by bread alone, right? But we live by every word of God. Try explaining that to your non-believing co-worker.

The Kingdom of God is not what we expect. It never was and it never will be. If we are not desperate for the voice of God we will settle for anything else. We will settle for the explainable.

LiveJournal Tags: Christ,Kingdom,enexplainable