One of the great convictions of my spiritual life is that if God is real, then I can’t play games with Him. Converting is a serious thing. Getting born again is a serious thing. Receiving the gift of Baptism is a serious thing. He’s real. You can’t play games with Him.

The core of my conversion to Christ was the epiphany that God is indeed real, and therefore, since He is real, I must follow Him, trust Him, obey Him, and not play games with Him as though He were a myth up in the sky.

Let me ask you: do Christians play games with God as though He were merely a nice fluffy idea in the sky?
Sure they do.
Church people do.

I’ve taught a lot of Church membership classes, there must be a chapter in there I keep missing that everybody else has read, and, from what I gather, it goes like this:

“As a Church member, yea, as a Christian, you are entitled to disappear 3-27x a year, and the rest of the Church has to guess what’s wrong. If they don’t, you get to hold a grudge against them.”

Sounds fun. Like hide ‘N seek, but what I don’t understand is how do you decide who’s it? This has always mystified me when Church people get mad at other Church people for not doing this or that, because they all look like Church people,

but one group of people thinks the other group of Church people is responsible for doing the thing, and they get to watch and critique them doing the thing.

Can you imagine any of these games being played in the Bible?

Imagine, Timothy and Titus are hanging out, and Tim asks Titus, “Hey… have you seen ‘ol St. Paul around lately”

“Well, no… now that you mentioned it… I haven’t seen St. Paul in Church for weeks”

“That’s weird, he’s so much older and wiser and told us all about Jesus and His Church.”

And it turns out that St. Paul is moping around at home saying, “I have a thorn in my flesh and nobody guessed I have a thorn in my flesh… they were it.”

No, Paul wrote a letter to everybody saying, I have a thorn in my flesh and I asked God 3x to remove it and He said NO, my power is made perfect in weakness.

And everybody is going to know about it.

The Church should absolutely reach out to people when they’re having a hard time. No doubt.

The Lord Jesus tells us this parable about lost sheep in Matthew 18, it goes like this,

Matthew 18
12“What do you think? If any man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go and search for the one that is straying?

13“If it turns out that he finds it, truly I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine which have not gone astray.
14“So it is not the will of your Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones perish.

I absolutely believe this. We have to go after people when they wander off. But I was talking to a Pastor friend about this passage in light of the games some church folk play, and he said,

“Well, you know it’s a metaphor, right?”
I’m like, “What do you mean?”
“Well, you know it’s an analogy.”
I’m like, “What do you mean?”
I’m a little dense and all.
He says, “It’s a parable!”
I’m not getting it.
“People aren’t literal sheep… they’re people”

People are more intelligent than sheep. When the Bible says we are sheep it means that we are meant to be together in community, that Christ’s community, the Church, needs structure, and shepherding...but people are still people.

And I don’t own them!
If your sheep gets out: you haul them back home, if I do that to you it’s kidnapping!

Jesus died for our sins so that we could be made new, forgiven and dwell in the Father’s House in Heaven, and until then, Christ left the Church here for Christians to do Christian work. That’s His plan.

And if something happens and you need somebody to come looking for you because you’ve lost all perspective, then we will. And, if you come to your senses and come on home, we’ll be waiting for you like the prodigal son’s father was waiting.

But I didn’t sign up to be a stalker. I don’t want anything to do with that. Grown Christian adults playing games and choosing not to obey God is not a case of a lost sheep.

That’s just something to weep over. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, I would have gathered you up, but you would not have it. (Matthew 23)