God Is Calling Us Back To Simplicity

I have been Yahweh your God ever since the land of Egypt.
I will make you live in tents again, as in the festival days.

-Hosea 12:9

I believe that God wants to bring his people back to a simpler lifestyle.  We have gone down a complicated path, while God has been on the simple one.  We have been living in a busy, over-booked, stressed-out, complicated, burned out life; while Jesus has been beckoning all of us to his life of rest and peace.

God's square one or our doorway to walking with God is his deliverance of us.  He delivers us from sin, death, the ways of the world, and the demons that are loose here.  God becomes and remains our savior and deliverer, for our entire lives, until we transition out of our earthly existence.

Salvation is no just an event, but a process and an ongoing relationship with our God who saves.  The one who saves us keeps us saved and keeps saving us.  If we turn away from God, or treat God's salvation as an event and not an ongoing processional relationship; we get in trouble.

God saved me.  I have a story and a testimony of how God changed me and brought me up and out, and how he delivered me.  But I also have an ongoing story of how God is saving me now, today.

The story of God saving us is the story, the main story line in our lives.  All the other stories are sub-plots.  If we make the side stories into the main story, we are in trouble.

The minute that we are set free, our souls look for, desire to, and seek to attach to something or someone else.  We come into the life of worshiping God.  We were designed by God for relationship with him.

Worship is something we do in our whole lives,  every day, all day long.  When we get saved and delivered, we enter into a saving and delivering relationship, where we worship our savior and deliverer.  We may sing to God much of the time, but worship is not just a worship time of singing, whether with a crowd, or alone.

Worship is a life daily and hourly lifted up and offered to God.  Worship with others is wonderful and is an aspect of what believers enjoy doing, when they gather together.  But the heart or center, the locomotive of worship is our relationship with God, all the time, through all the times.

When we do gather together, each of us is supposed to have been and come from relationship with God, of which continual worship is a major part of.  We come together from worshiping God, from intimacy with God, from walking with God, from learning from God, from partnering with God and being his hands and feet in the world.

When we gather, when we meet others; we come from being with God, and bring the fruit of God to share with others.  This is the way that we were designed to live, with God, and for others.  If we do not put God first, every day and all of the time, then our lives quickly become chaotic, unmanageable, unsatisfying, and filled with idolatry.

We easily fall into idolatry and bondage again, because we were designed to worship. And if we do not continually worship God and cultivate a relationship where we see and experience God as our savior and deliverer for life, continually; then we automatically fall into bondage and need deliverance again.  Many Christians are bound and live in bondage, even mistakenly making friends with their captors.

What God has always done is to call his people back to himself, and that is what God is doing today.  God can not be compartmentalized.  He wants to dwell in the whole lives of each of his people.

God is going to bring people back into a simpler life of loving him and loving others.  It will be like camping or living in tents, in that we will live simpler lives, next to one another, without impenetrable barriers.  Our lives will be more for the sake of others than for our own selfishness or self-indulgence.

When the barriers come down and we stop living as isolated units, imprisoned in a chaotic life of activities to try to make our lives better, forgetting God, living in a spiritual schizophrenia, where we continually forget who we are and who loves us and wants to wear our life like a glove: then we can live in him and rest.  This will result in higher and deeper kingdom lives, true joy and peace that passes all understanding.

We are going to rediscover community, community life, or life together.  That does not mean everyone needs to sell everything they own and move into communes.  But some will do that.

We need to have the gracious heart of God that allows for some people to do things extreme while others go lite.  Neither is wrong.  Being in Christ, and then you working that out, with love from others, is what the call is to.  And the call of God is to worship him and not fall into idolatry and its bondage.

We make a mistake when we think that everyone needs to or has to do the life the way I am trying to do it.  God wants our hearts and then everything else follows naturally and freely and through our choices; and we are all different, yet have similarities.

Hear the call to the gifted life of simplicity, living in freedom, joy, and love where in him there is abundance.  

Live in worship of your savior and deliverer.  

Give away the fruit of his life through you, that contains his life for others.  

Be delivered again from complication through the baptism of God's love.