GROWING SEEDS: Dessert or Meat & Potatoes?

 

 

 

Dessert or Meat & Potatoes?

When Chuck and I first started attending First United Methodist Church several years ago, I found myself most each week leaving this sanctuary with red eyes and cheeks stained with tears as I walked out the doors of this church.  I think it was partly due to hormones but mostly due to a deeply convicted heart.  I hadn't been to church in a number of years at that time and I think the Lord was working immensely on me.  But as the years went by, my tears slowed to a trickle and then eventually stopped.  Although I was happy I wasn't Googling, "How not to cry in church" anymore, it bothered me that I wasn't as moved as I once had been. 

And I wondered why.

I discovered I had quit asking myself the hard questions.  I was seeing church as a "dessert-only" church...where I was focusing only on the easy-to-understand and "feel-good" scriptures.  I had stopped reading and studying the hard-to-read scriptures, the ones that made me squirm and reminded us our lives are going to get crazy hard in this world before they get blissfully easy upon our arrival in Heaven.  I found I had replaced my meat & potato scriptures, the protein verses, with dessert-only verses. 

And I liked it.

But friends, we need protein.  And although I am a lover of desserts and could eat pumpkin pie every day...all day, I need my protein in order to survive.  And so do you. 

We are living in a time in our country when a line is being drawn in the sand and we are quickly being forced to show our cards.  Do we choose God over our child...our spouse...our parent...our car...our house?  Now think real hard before answering this next question: 

If you were forced to make a choice between denying God to save your child from death

OR proclaiming God and knowing your child's life would end,

what would YOU do? 

Wow.  See, the hard scriptures, the meat & potatoes, tell us that God isn't a 2nd place God and the conclusion to our life story isn't pretty if the answer to the question above is anything but choosing or proclaiming Him....even in the impossibly difficult times.....especially in the impossibly difficult times.   God's dessert words are necessary....they remind us we are citizens of Heaven and we are loved deeper than we have the ability to understand.  But it's the meat & potatoes words of God that give us hope and let us truly appreciate the sweetness of God's dessert words.