Psalm 84 – A meditation on the Father’s House

I was working in London a few weeks ago and looking around at the busyness of the city, I quickly decided that I prefer the countryside!

As I sat in my hotel room, I realised how terribly institutionalised the world has become. Everything is boxed up. You can go into a bank and ask a fairly simple question but you don’t get an answer because you need to phone the help-line in some other part of the world. When you do eventually get through to them the chances are that they don’t know the answer either!

You can walk into a shop and ask if they have something to solve a small practical problem that you have at home and they say, “Duh, it’s on the shelf.” Fortunately, we still have a good, old-fashioned iron-monger where we live, and they know how things work. It struck me how everything has become boxed in and institutionalised.

The sad thing is that the church has caught the same bug. What we call ‘the church’, what we go to on Sunday mornings, has become institutionalised. The institutionalisation of society, which has crept into the church leads to orphan thinking. It leads to orphan hearts where people can only do what is within the sphere of their box. They can’t climb out of their box and take initiative. They are not free; they are bound in their box.

Everybody has their box to protect themselves from the next person’s box. And everybody’s box is trying to climb to the top of the stack. This whole thing has created an orphan way of thinking and the church has fallen into the trap. It, too, has become orphan and institutionalised in a lot of its thinking and in the way that it is run.

As I was thinking about this I was listening to a Jason Upton CD, when I suddenly heard the words:

Open up and bring the real thing, Like only you can do. (Haylie – Between Earth and Sky – Jason Upton)

There is something that only God can do for us. He wants to open up our hearts to it and then we’ll receive it. And then He’ll do what it is we need him to do.