I don't want to go through the motions

I've had an amazing weekend.  Maybe the best weekend so far this year.

After a few days of training at the Global School of Supernatural Ministry, my fellow trainees and I were required to take what we'd learnt out to the streets and apply it where it's needed most.  After some radical experiences of God's power, I end the weekend with a brief but tantalising glimpse of what it's like to really align with his heart for the broken and the lost.  And boy, it's a far cry from the meagre faith I've settled for these past few years!

Could this be what it's like to really be a friend of God?  To live in the spacious, live-giving, co-labouring relationship he speaks of in John 15?

"I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.  You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name"

Is this the same euphoria the disciples felt when they returned from a similar "field trip"? (Luke 10)

"Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name."

As I've written in previous blogs, I am petrified of wasting my life.  The quickest way of doing this - I've realised - is to settle for a "going through the motions" faith -  which, in fact, is not really faith at all.  It is a cop-out lifestyle which says: 

• “Let’s sit back and see what God will do”

• “God has promised it so it will definitely happen” 

• “If it is God’s will then it will happen”. 

“Going through the motions faith” is, at it’s worst, little more than a religious form of fatalism.  At its best it is really only wishful thinking – a form of spiritual laziness.

Lord, deliver me from going through the motions.  Make my life count for your Kingdom.  You may enjoy this music video by Matthew West - a singer whose voice was seriously compromised through overuse a few years back and who faced a dim and uncertain future because of it.  To these amazing lyrics I say "yes" and "Amen".