Heart Tracks - Half-Baked Life

"My people of Israel mingle with godless foreigners, picking up their evil ways. Now they have become as worthless as a half-baked cake." Hosea 7:8....."We have not seen Him if we are not changed." T. Austin-Sparks

I remember my first pastor remarking that it seemed like so many professing believers only got "about half-saved." Now let me say before anything else that this man walked in, and still walks in, one of the most grace filled and grace giving lives I've ever known. Mercy and grace marked and continue to mark his ministry and ways. Yet, after 30 plus years in ministry myself, I not only understand what he meant, I have to agree with it as well.

When I say this, I'm not leaving out anything that is involved in a believers journey in their growth in grace. I know there are so many spiritual issues in our lives, and that Christ, in His mercy and love, will deal with them one at a time. I know that there is always a next place, a deeper place that He wishes to take us. I know that there is always new "heart territory" for Him to lay claim to in us. It's a life long process, and I believe that it will go on even into eternity. I think it is something of what is meant when He invites us to "enter into the joy of the Lord." Yet how many who say they are His have really entered into that joy?

Billy Graham's daughter Ruth once said that the church is filled with people who do not know Him or the power of His Life. I don't think she was saying that they were lost so much as that they have never been fully found. They live in a kind of spiritual limbo between two realms, His Kingdom, and the kingdom of the world. Austin-Sparks said that the devil's great weapon is to get us to believe in a mixture of the Father's Truth in Christ and the devil's lies. I think this is something that God is speaking to through Hosea. It's the faith life that existed in his people then, and it was a half-baked faith life. In the end, such a life is no life at all. It falls prey to the very things that devour those who are truly lost. Their experience of Him, His power and wonder, is so little as to be almost non-existent. Beth Moore said that we're to tell of what we've seen and heard, but "we say little because we've seen and heard so little."

Anyone who's followed these writings will know, I think, that I don't set myself up as some kind of spiritual powerhouse. I know me, and how far from that I am. But I do remember that when I believed on Him that summer evening in August, 1979, I decided that I would believe all that He said He was, and I that I wanted all that He said He was. From then on, I was all in. I was a "dry thirsty land" receiving all the water I could get. I pursued Him as He pursued me, and who I had been was no more, and who and what I was becoming was everything. I was blessed to have a pastor who faithfully proclaimed what life in Him was to be, and how none who professed to be His had an option for anything less. Living between two kingdoms wasn't on the table. Oftentimes I wonder, consciously or not, whether we've allowed it to be so in the Church today?

In my years of study back at the Bible College I attended, a hymn titled "Called Unto Holiness" was sung at almost every chapel. I don't know how much we're proclaiming that call today. How to have a happy life, solid finances, and successful endeavors and ministries often seem to be in the forefront. With us, but not, I think with Him. We're not created for a legalistic "Do and Don't" faith, but we are called to enter into all the wonder and fullness of His Life, the Life of a Holy God. Half-baked, half-saved lives cannot exist there. We're called to be "all in" with Him. Half-way is no way at all. Are you yet trying to live as if it is?

Blessings,
Pastor O