Today is Big Word day on TBC, and our word is consternation.  It means “feelings of dismay, typically at something unexpected.”  Something like, I don’t know, LeBron James coming up short on his personal quest to win a championship by playing on a team stacked so deep with talent that experts said there was almost no way they couldn’t win.  But they didn’t.  It was unexpected, too, the way they lost 3 straight games with LeBron playing the Invisible Man at the end of each of them.

Here, then, are my thoughts as I experience “LeBronsternation…”

There is something so innate within us that it is rarely ever recognized.  It slips into our speech so easily that it is imperceptible, and even when it is blatant, we stop short of calling it what it is because we don’t really see the danger in it.  Perhaps if it was a four-letter word, we’d be more apt to shine the light of truth on it, but since it has more than four, we don’t.  It is powerful enough to bring kingdoms to their knees and, yet, it never happens overnight.  Like a vine, it grows slowly, quietly, until it is finally in place to pull the noose around the neck of the unsuspecting.  It was at the center of the greatest failed coup in the history of the world, and it will be at the center of future coups for generations to come.  Relentless, calculating, and cold, it works behind the scenes whispering self-help mantras to anyone who will listen.  It’s pride.

Pride filled the imagination of a beautiful angel who wanted to take his talents to the throne of God, and led to the destruction of that devil and those angels who sided with him.  The consequences of that prideful action have been far-reaching, and today you and I are left navigating this life like men in a river watching for the sudden strike of a constrictor.  Pride searches for us and tells us stories of what could be if people would only see how great we know we are, and if we’re not careful, it will get us in its grip and squeeze the life from us.

I thought a lot about this last night as I watched the Dallas Mavericks defeat the Miami Heat for the NBA championship.  I recalled The Decision, a prime-time special paid for by LeBron James in order to announce where he would be playing basketball this season.  I replayed the words that have been burned into the hearts of every Cleveland Cavalier fan forever: “I’m taking my talents to South Beach.”

This is what the LORD says: “Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 9:23-24)

Pride.  It causes us to boast in what we feel are our strengths.  The wise about their wisdom, the strong about their strength, the rich about their wealth.  LeBron about his mad ball skills.  It makes us feel like we’re the piece that’s been missing.  “If only I was the boss…the teacher…the President.”  We see it as ambition, and applaud people for having upward mobility and career goals.  We wish we had the nerve to say what they say and do what they do, and yet somewhere deep inside all of us, we know that we can’t quite picture Jesus saying and doing the same things we’re hearing from and seeing in them.

Am I the only one having a hard time picturing Jesus’ response to our need for a Savior being, “I’m taking my talents to Bethlehem?”

The longer I serve Jesus, the more I see in Him a Savior who boasted in His relationship with the Father.  He didn’t talk about how once He was resurrected He was going to win, not 1, not 2, not 3, not even 4, or 5 or 6 billion people to Him.  He just kept on loving God and loving the people around Him.  I want to boast in knowing that Savior, and in understanding that it isn’t about me and what I can do for people, but rather what He has done for people.

Pride blinds us to what could happen.  It causes us to believe that the best perceived end is the guaranteed end.  When James joined the Heat, he and Chris Bosh and Dwayne Wade had a big party, err, press conference, and announced with index fingers raised how they were going to be a dynasty.  Pride makes us count our chickens before they hatch, because pride convinces us that it’s not possible for us to do anything but have chickens, and not just any chickens, but the best chickens ever.

It’s sickening, really, especially in light of a Savior who came to seek, to serve, and to save.  His eyes looked outward.  Always. A total failure at self-promotion, He instead chose the route of self-demotion and as a result was made more upwardly mobile than anyone ever has or will be (you can read about His career path in Philippians 2:5-11).  He walked on the side of justice and kindness, and those of us who love Him might want to consider walking there with Him.

Walk that path with Jesus very long and you’ll begin to see there isn’t room on the road for pride, because there isn’t room in the presence of Jesus for our selfishness and ambition.  Sometimes I watch the premature celebrations in sports, or the over-hyped promotions in church programs, and think that pride must stand for Predicting Ridiculous Individual Deeds Enthusiastically.  Too harsh?  Maybe.  One thing is sure, though.  Not only does pride lead to a fall, but it almost always ensures that there’s no one there to catch us when the inevitable happens. It’s not that they don’t care.  They’re just too busy celebrating the victory of the guys who weren’t jerks.

Like many other people, I am fascinated with storms.  I remember back in the day when Hurricane Hugo was coming in from the coast and was forecast to cause extremely damaging winds in the middle of the state where I lived.  What I recall was being excited about the possibility of seeing trees bent sideways by the winds, and also being disappointed that I ended up sleeping right through it.  I did, though, get to experience the aftermath as I went without power and water for 11 days.  Yep, that wasn’t what I had in mind!

Ask most people what it is about storms that captivates them, and my guess is that all their varied answers could be boiled down to one word: power.  There is such massive strength in the winds of tornadoes, hurricanes, and gales that we will sit mesmerized for hours in front of videos shot by professional storm chasers just to get a few seconds of footage showing its fury. Storms are thrilling, amazing, and so hypnotizing that we forget what they can do.  We want to experience the power without really understanding it or respecting it.  We watch guys like Reed Timmer drive right into the path of the storms and come out with great footage, and suddenly we turn into a bunch of storm chasing yahoos holding $299 video cams we bought at Target.  Umm, not quite the same thing.

It reminds me of the 7 dudes who watched another guy who understood power when they didn’t.  Instead of trying to understand how the power worked, they just started mimicking what they’d seen.  It didn’t go well for them.  You can read all about it in Acts 19:13-16, but let’s just jump straight to the end and then we’ll see what we can learn from their mistake:

Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding. (v. 16)

Apparently, when dealing with power much greater than yourself, it pays to know as much as you can about it.  You and I, if we were to give storm chasing a shot, would quite possibly shoot the most intense video of the inner workings of a F5 tornado ever captured on film.  Of course, being that we’d be totally frozen by the immense power of the storm, we’d probably still be shooting the storm as it picked us up and destroyed us.  It’d be a pretty short-lived series on Discovery Channel.  I can see the promos now (feel free to read out loud in your best promo-guy voice:

Don’t miss the special 5 minute mini-mini-mini-short this Friday.  Actual footage of the inside of a F5 monster, captured by a man who is no longer with us, tragically wiped off the face of the earth in the shooting of the series.  Storm Erasers.  This Friday only.  Go to the bathroom and you’ll miss it.  Hold it and you won’t.

Sometimes I fear that our churches have grown full of people who chase after the next great thing.  Once, back when they first got saved from darkness into the wonderful light of Jesus, He was enough.  But over time, that started to feel like a F1 storm, and so the chase began.  Sometimes they’d stumble onto a F3 as they channel surfed among the 5 Christian networks out there on satellite, but eventually, that preacher or worship leader wasn’t able to move them the way he or she once had. Fortunately, through a flyer or an email, another storm cell would blip onto the radar and they’d rush off, frantically pulling into the parking lot just in ahead of the mother of all storms.

Doesn’t seem too far-fetched, does it?  In the American church we’ve just about elevated storm chasing to a new spiritual gift. Our ability to sniff our another exciting move of God rivals Lou Pearlman’s ability to sniff out boy bands.  But what happens when the storm speaks back?  What happens when we’re standing there trying to catch our breath from the mad rush our lives have become, and what seemed like a no-lose proposition moments earlier suddenly turns into a no-win situation?

What do we do when seeking the next big thing in the kingdom suddenly brings us face to face with the big voice of its King?  We’d better hope that, in that moment, we know Him and He knows us.  In the case of the storm chasers in Acts, they met the power (it wasn’t a good power, either) and found themselves empty-handed to deal with it.  Eventually, they had even less and ran away naked and bleeding.  But there’s another man in Scripture who found himself face to face with the power of God and wasn’t prepared for it.

Then the LORD answered Job out of the storm. He said, “Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.” (Job 38:1-2)

Change of underwear, please?

[Tweet “We play loosely with the things of God. We want His power without respecting His holiness.”]

Let’s just spit it out there: we play loosely with the things of God.  We want His power without respecting His holiness.  In some bizarre, sickening, twisted way, we try to rope His power and make it do what we want it to do.  I’m afraid the end of that is not unlike a child tethered to a bull in a rodeo.  Perhaps it’s time to step off the gas, pull the storm chasing caravan to the side of the road, and stop treating the power of God’s Spirit as something to study and instead as Someone to know.

When we do that, we will find there is no longer a need to chase the power of God as if He is elusive and Someone to try to catch up to.  Nope.  We’ll begin to live the lives of the disciples.  Men who didn’t chase power, because everywhere they went they took the power of God with them.

[Tweet “We don’t have to chase power when we carry God’s power everywhere we go.”]

Storm chasers chase storms that are in front of them.  The people of God are destined to leave storms behind them as the power of God moves through them to change the atmosphere wherever they are.  In fact, it was this kind of “power wake” that originally sparked the naked storm chasing we read about earlier.  And it wasn’t just for Paul.  Mark 16:17-18 promises that the plan of God is for His people to know Him and follow Him so closely that they would leave evidence of His power everywhere they go.

Storm chasing is all about us, and it’s time to stop, because nothing could be further from the plan of God than for us to spend our time seeking more ways to soak up more of His power and presence at the expense of those around us who have none.

[Tweet “What could happen if the church stopped chasing storms, and started creating them?”]

Instead, what could happen if the American church suddenly respected God’s power and holiness and walked with an eye toward how He wants to reach the world through us by spilling His power out of us?  I want to find out.  I want to stop chasing storms, and start creating them.

There’s a fine line between thrilling and spilling, and that fine line was crystal clear yesterday as the B99 and I were pulled along behind a boat driven by a maniacal driver.  Sydney, our precious 8 year-old who was apparently born without this keen danger gene, sat in my lap screaming, “This is AWESOME!!” at the top of her lungs while I struggled to 1) keep her in the tube, and 2) keep the skin on my face.  Crazy how 20 mph feels like 20 Gs when you’re helplessly dangling about on a piece of inflated rubber that’s tethered to powerful watercraft. With all apologies to Lady GaGa, we felt like we were right on the Edge of Gory (I know it’s Edge of Glory, but we were being hurled towards imminent death, right?  Gory makes sense now, yes?).

And I couldn’t stop smiling.

We have all been raised to avoid words like “reckless,” “danger,” and “breakneck.”  Even the fact that some of you think I may be getting ready to spin those words in a positive way has you holding your breath.  Face it, most of us don’t see any value in pushing the envelope and exploring the outer limits of what we know.  Sure, we’re intrigued by the unknown, but often not enough to do what it might take to see it.  So we settle.  We become experts of the known, recipients of the usual, and masters of the ordinary.

But what about the new, the unusual, the extraordinary?  The only way to those is through failure, and most of us don’t want to risk that.  We play it safe, our cards held tightly to our chest as we place safe bet after safe bet in hopes that we’ll wear out our opponent by sheer monotony.

The eyes of the LORD search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. (2 Chronicles 16:9 – NLT – emphasis added)

There are some things that we may want, but we will never get unless we’re willing to go all in.  Sure, we all want strength from God – especially in the tougher times of life – but we’re never going to get the strength from God until we’ve done something first.  We have to go to the edge.

Granted, Lady GaGa sings Edge of Glory about stuff that is anything but godly, but isn’t it amazing how the lyrics to the song show an understanding of this truth more than most of the people sitting in a pew weekly at 11?

It’s hard to feel the rush
To push the dangerous…

I’m on the edge of glory
And I’m hanging on a moment of truth
I’m on the edge of glory
And I’m hanging on a moment with you
I’m on the edge
The edge
The edge
The edge
The edge
The edge
The edge
I’m on the edge of glory
And I’m hanging on a moment with you
I’m on the edge with you

It seems that almost everyone else gets the “no risk, no reward” principle except the people who – if the word of God is true – really aren’t even risking anything more than their own comforts or preferences.  Lady GaGa sings about it, professional athletes train by it, and entrepreneurs build fortunes on it.  They all recognize that there is an uncomfortable element to moving toward the edge – “it’s hard to feel the rush, to push the dangerous” – and yet they are willing to feel that breathlessness in order to find new levels of “breathability.”

God is all about risks.  He called Peter out of a solid boat onto stormy water, David away from safe sheep to fight a brutal giant, and Jesus from a heavenly throne to an earthly cross.  Would He be expecting anything less from you and me?  He calls each of us to the edge of glory, not so we can fall over it into love with some other person, but so that we can find the exhilaration that only comes on the other side of the risk, in a place where He waits to strengthen the hearts that are all in for Him and His glory.

Could we fail?  Probably.  Is failure painful?  Undeniably.  Is it the end? Most definitely not.

The kingdom of God is advanced through unbelievable risks taken by believing people in a believable God.  Want a money-back guarantee?  Buy a Snuggie.  Want to change this culture for Christ?  Get in, hold on, and hurl yourself to the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge, the edge.

His glory is on the other side.