The Wild

 "Then Joshua told the people, 'Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the Lord will do wonders among you." Joshua 3:5 "Has the Church so domesticated ourselves that we doubt our power?" Francis Chan

I have never liked zoos. I have never enjoyed looking at caged animals. Animals that are being kept from their natural habitat in the wild. No matter how "real" modern zoos try to create that kind of environment for them, they fail, because it isn't real. In a sense, they've domesticated these animals to the point that they've become used to their environment, even comfortable in it. It reminds me of the movie "Madagascar," where shipwrecked zoo animals find themselves in the wild, and don't know how to act. I'm wondering how much like that we've become in the church?

I have in my journal this prayer, "God, set us free from our zoos. Make us the Church in the wild." I wonder if we can be this, because in many ways, we have been domesticated, as Chan says. Would we, like the shipwrecked animals, be at a total loss as to how to live and thrive outside of our organizational zoos that we've made into our homes?

Before Joshua's exhortation to the people to prepare to see God's wonders among them, they were also told that the journey they were to undertake would involve them traveling a path they'd never traveled before. It would be filled with the unknown, the dangerous, and the deadly. They would need all the might of the Father to make it through. They were told to consecrate themselves, surrender themselves, fully to Him. They devoted themselves to their God. Someone said that we in the modern church want to experience awe and wonder, but to experience it apart from devotion to Him. Small wonder then that there is so little of it in our gatherings. So few of us really live lives of devotion to Him. So we witness too few wonders, and have little idea of the power available to us in Jesus Christ. Worst of all, we're not much aware of it, we're so used to our cages, our zoos, that have tamed us. We don't know what it is to be the Church in the wild, and we've little interest in finding out what that is. Zoo animals look forward to feeding time. So do we as we go to our weekly Bible studies, prayer groups, and corporate worship. All held within the confines of whatever local zoo we're a part of. The result is that we doubt our power in Christ because we've not really had to depend upon it. We've done quite well depending upon ourselves and our various "feeders" that we've set up in our lives. We've been domesticated.

We need to be set free into the wild. Like the animals of Madagascar, this will be most terrifying at first, but if we are, we will discover an all powerful God who pours out His power upon His church. We will see, perhaps for the first time, the doing of His wonders in our midst. He will take us places we've never been, especially in the spiritual realm. Yes, there will be dangers, enemies, and challenges, but in Him, we already have victory over them all. It's the life we were made for, the life that the Church, the people of God were created to live.

Chan says that our gatherings are meant to look "otherworldly," especially to those who have never been a part. Can we honestly say that our usual Sunday gatherings look that way? As a teen, I loved Jack London's "The Call Of The Wild," about a once domesticated dog that, exposed to the wild, heard its call. May we, the Church, be exposed to His wild. May we hear His call into it. May we walk away from the shackles that have tamed us and into His great wild. The way of the wild.

Blessings,

Pastor O