There is a tendency to get defensive and territorial when we see others begin to move into our space. We’re all prone to it.
- When that person sits next to you on the plane at the last minute when you thought you had the row to yourself.
- When you’re standing in line and someone walks up, you scoot closer to the person in front of you.
- When you scoot your bag a little closer to yourself when someone else walks up or sits down next to you.
We all learned to be like this on the playground when we were little. If we didn’t hold on to that ball, someone else was going to come and take it. If we don’t protect it, we’ll lose it. Scarcity causes us to see life as a pie. There’s only so much of it to go around, so we’ve got to fight to hold on to what little slice we currently have.
Unfortunately, the lessons we learn on the playground aren’t all good. I’ve seen over and over through the years that many churches and church leaders look at people like part of that pie. If they let someone or something new in, it may threaten to take a little bit of that pie. Pie they worked very hard to acquire.
So we fight over pie. Churches and pastors look at each other with suspicion and derision instead of working together to reach the lost around us.
Stop it.
I think pie is the wrong metaphor. Instead, let people have their pie and you go somewhere else with the firehose of the Holy Spirit and put out the dumpster fire that is the wretched, miserable, demonically oppressed lives of the lost around you. They’re dying for freedom from the horrible bondage of sin and too many Christians are worried about pie.
Our culture has stopped calling us Christians and they use the term “Evangelical” now. Evangelicalism was a movement started by Billy Graham to describe a group of Christians who took their faith so seriously that they shared it. Nothing could be further from reality because in America today there’s almost no evangelism. No sharing the gospel. And no freedom for the lost and oppressed. Just pie.
It’s time to find a people who care enough about the gospel to buck the trend and give up the pie. Let them have it. The heck with the pie.
Find the lost, the hurting, the broken. Find those in bondage and tell them of the freedom they can have through Jesus. Put out the fires in their lives with the wonderful quenching shower of the Holy Spirit that lives inside of you.
And then go out to eat for some pie, because that’s where it belongs; in your belly, not in your theology.
I am a writer, author and purveyor of ink on paper. I also preach, teach and create Excel spreadsheets.