Cubicle Christianity

I just returned from Alaska and it was beautiful.  I found myself on multiple occasions marveling at God’s glorious creation, and I kept thinking to myself how much fun God must have had as he created the world and how awful it is that we have destroyed and abused it since.  As I stood in a back road carved through a magnificent forest with the brisk chill air on my cheeks staring up at the snow capped mountains, it was impossible not to sense God there and know that there is no way something that breathtaking could have come together by chance. 
We truly serve an amazing God! 

When I returned to the office later that day I was still in awe.  I went to check my email and saw a story about a man in Honolulu Hawaii who dropped a 2 ½ year old boy (not his child) off an overpass down 30 feet to the highway below.  Then the report says he walked away as if unfazed. I was horrified.  How could someone do such a thing?  How could this guy, created in the image of God, the same God who I was just marveling over His creation, have so much hatred and destroy the life of a child?   

It was as I lay in bed that night that I realized the magnitude and importance of what God has called us, as His children, His apprentices, His disciples, His followers, to be in this world.  We are called to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ and in doing so, battle and overcome sin.  But I realized something else about sin.

Sin is not just something that we do, it is something that we are. 

We compartmentalize our life, much like the cubicles that we live in, going from our church cubicle to our work cubicle, to our materialism cubicle, to our family cubicle, to our pride cubicle, to our lust cubicle, and on and on.  And all the while we view sin as just a mistake or slip up, something wrong that we did are are doing.  What we fail to see is how it consumes us and becomes a part of who we are.  And through us sin corrupts others, it corrupts the world, it corrupts us.  And we become oblivious to its consequences.  And the next thing you know cars are screeching to a halt in the middle of a highway as an innocent young child lies dead because of a sin corrupted man 30 feet above. 

And yet as Christians we are washed of the corruption of sin, we are freed from sin’s hold, yet often we slip back into cubicle mode.  We live our lives for Christ when we are in that church or Jesus cubicle and if we aren’t careful we soon find ourselves spending little time there.  And as C.H. Spurgeon said, “We do little; very little…the love of Christ doth not constrain us as it should.”  Why? 
Is it because we don’t understand the magnitude of sin? 
Is it because we don’t understand the magnitude of Christ sacrifice and grace? 
Is it because we love ourselves, we love our sins? 
Or is it because we do not love Jesus, rather we are simply thankful and are merely trying to pay Him back? 

I want to feel as the apostles, martyrs and holy men of old did, I want embrace Jesus Christ and hold Him close, allowing Him to fully penetrate my heart, to take His rightful spot on the throne of my heart.  I want the Scriptures, the Word of God, to engrave themselves on people’s hearts and free them of sin’s hold.  No matter what it takes, no gift too great, no suffering too overbearing, sacrificing everything that I desire that is not of Him.  I want to follow Christ and tell others about Him to set them free from sin.  I want out of Cubicle Christianity.