Of Rituals, Routines, Ruts and Revival

Like the leaves change
from season to season...

We human beings certainly love our comfortable habits, don’t we?  Once we've established the way we want to do things we cling to it and are resistant to change.  Our days are ordered a certain way, we've developed methods for accomplishing the tasks we need to complete that works for us, and we do not like to deviate from them.  

From setting up bedtime rituals to holiday traditions we re-enact year after year, we like our routines and find them safe and comforting and mayhem seems to ensue if we deviate.  So we don’t.  Deviate, I mean.  We don’t deviate if we can help it.  

Most times, we won’t even notice that our routines have become ruts we run ‘round and ‘round in like rats running a maze, head down and full steam ahead!  I am willing to go a little out on a limb here and say that we have probably all heard these discouraging words at some point, when we’ve tried to introduce something new to a committee or group.  “But this is the way we’ve always done it!”  I find it hard to believe I am the only one who finds those words maddening beyond endurance.

We have set up our morning routines, our daily routines and our religious rituals and heaven help the one who tries to mess with that!  What about, though, if the one who wants to mess with that is the very One who created Heaven?  Uh-oh!  Now we’ve got a dilemma, don’t we?  

God Who created the heavens and the earth is fixed and unchanging (Malachi 3:6), however, since He has determined we are in need of change He is unwilling to leave us in the state in which He finds us!  

Take a closer look at John 17: 11: Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as we are.

This was Jesus’ prayer for believers, for all those who confess Him as Lord and Savior.  That we would be “one” with God just as He is.  Jesus had a lively, intimate, full relationship with His Father that consumed Him and which directly affected His every thought, feeling and action.  Jesus went on to say that He always did what the Father instructed Him to do.  Can we say that about our relationship with God?  The only way we can even begin to make such a claim is if we have a willing heart to let Him change us, change our hearts desires and our actions by the leading of the Holy Spirit on a daily basis.

Can you just imagine for a moment how the Israelites might have felt when their prophet Isaiah brought them a word from God Himself declaring that the rituals and routines they had finally gotten down to the point they could do them without even thinking about them,  were to be completely changed? 

Isaiah 43:19 Behold I will do a new thing. Now it shall spring forth.

God noticed, as He notices everything, that the Israelites no longer had their hearts truly engaged with the rituals He had originally given them to remind them of Him.  The rituals had become routine, done by rote,  and they had begun to sink deep into unthinking ruts where performance had become everything.  Why they did what they did no longer mattered for the most part.

God decided it was time for REVIVAL!  God decided it was time to shake things up, do away with the comfortable and familiar, and give cause for people to once again actively engage with Him.  God still wants that today.  Look around at the behavior of the world in general, our news headlines, the activity in our own homes.  When was the last time you turned off the television, the iPods, the laptops and the cell phone and LISTENED for the voice of God? 

Can you hear the Lord calling out to His people?  “Engage with Me, I am the Lord your God.  Put your heart in My Hands and let Me do the leading.  Let Me show you the marvelous things I have planned for you.  The wonders and miracles you truly desire are yours if you will just turn to Me and say ‘yes’ to My ways for you.”

The last thing the Lord desires is that we follow a mindless routine – even if that routine includes all the things that would be considered the “right things” to do.  Reading the Bible every morning becomes part of our routine if we never really meditate on what the Lord is trying to tell us personally.  Prayer that has become a mindless repeating of the same phrases  or the same requests, over and over until they have no heartfelt meaning left at all. 

Getting up on Sunday mornings and dragging yourself to a building where you will engage in exactly the same rituals as the previous Sunday, and all the previous Sundays with no room, no hope, no chance of being surprised by an actual visitation of the Lord God Himself and the refreshing of His Holy Spirit.  We sing a few songs, hear a nice sermon all within our pre-determined time frame and according to our agenda, then we go home, untouched, unchanged, unmoved from where we were before we went to those church services.  

Our hearts are far from God, hardened by our rituals and routines and we most certainly are not reaching out and touching anyone else’s life in any meaningful way either!

IT IS TIME TO WAKE UP! 

God is not a God of dull ritual and boring routine.  He is anything but that!  He is dynamic and thriving and wondrous and alive and surprising and miraculous, but He is NOT BORING!  If invited by humble hearts of honest expectation, He would show up and there most surely would not be snoring from the pews and sleepy heads nodding. 

“If invited”, did you catch that?  Do you have to participate in a no holds barred loss of control behavior to experience a meeting  with God?  No.  But a meeting with God would most surely be out of the ordinary, outside of our “normal” activity.  For neither do we need to participate in dull ritual Sunday after Sunday.  Not if our hearts are expectant.  Not if our faith is in the God who is creative and vibrant and energetic and vital.  

Abram expected God to visit, and He did!  It changed Abram, his name, his life and his whole world!  Moses was startled out of his “exile” by a visitation in the form of a burning bush and it wrought change to the entire known world of his time.  Saul was blinded by his meeting with the Lord and was given true spiritual sight that changed not only his entire way of thinking, but his actions till they shook the world to its very core!

Would we, could we with the Psalmist say Examine me O Lord and prove me; try my mind and my heart? Psalm 26:2

What would the Lord find if we gave Him free access to our hearts and minds?  He already knows who and what we are, we are no surprise to Him.  But He – Oh He could be such a delightful surprise to us if we would but open our hearts to fully engage with Him.  

King David of Israel had anything but a dull life.  Sure, sometimes the excitement was caused by those jealous of him, uncomfortable with his relationship with God, but his life was never routine and lived in a rut.  King David was constantly revived and refreshed by a vital, passionate, total engagement with the God he loved. 

We are not all King David's, or Moses' or Sauls.  That isn't what God wants.  He created each of us specifically, to interact with Him, engage with Him and live the life He designed for us to live with its own excitement.  That’s how I want to live my life – with passion and excitement.  What about you?  Today, God is speaking to your heart.  “Come walk with Me,” He says “and see the new things I will show you!”