Mark Galli has a powerful column at ChristianityToday. It is a challenge to think about the God we serve. It’s a caution about being too trite in our walk with God.

He quotes Annie Dillard:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets.

We have a dangerous gospel. We have a dangerous God. One day we may wake up to that fact. We may realize the true power right at our fingertips. Hopefully it won’t be about the time where we thought we were mixing a little PlayDough and it ends up being an explosive concoction.

I am planted in Exodus 33 right now where Moses is refusing to move Israel without God going with them. His declaration is this: “What would make us different from any other nation?”

Israel would shirk that attitude in a hurry. They would cry for a king generations later because “everyone else has one!”

It seems to me the church is in the same boat. I see a church in America that isn’t looking to be different. We aren’t crying out saying, “Lord, if your presence isn’t here, why even bother!” We seem to whining about how we want to look just like everyone else. We want to blend in better.

We can have the debate about “relevance.” It’s a good one to have. But I think when we work so hard for relevance we reach a point where we’ve lost the cry of Moses and we take up the whining of Israel. We just want to be like everyone else. We want everyone else to like us. We don’t want hard times. We don’t want to be “persecuted” for our beliefs.

We have a dangerous God. If we ask for his glory, he just may give it to us. What then?