God's Favorite House Part 2: The Cost Of Intimacy Series

God’s favorite house!!!

Part 2

The Cost of Intimacy

INTRO:

Over and Over I have tried to bring us to a newness of God. I have tried to bring us to an overwhelming experience, the likes of which we have heard about in such stories as, the great Asuzu street revival. The great revivals in Toronto, Missouri, and Pensacola.

I have compel us to regain the “old anointing” to recapture the essence of God and His power. What happened to the anointing? Where did it go? Why did it go? How do we get it back? Why did it leave?

I don’t know about you but I am sick of the same old church services, I am sick of the same old songs, I am sick of the same old way of worshiping God.

Please don’t think I am sacrilegious, but I need something new, something different. There has got to be more. Are we sure we are not stopping on the doorstep of God’s house and walking off the porch thinking there is nothing else?

I am sick of quote “good church services”. Good just isn’t enough any more. God is more than Good.

If I ask you to try something that I told you would be very good, but there was something better on the stove and if you would just wait, you wouldn’t have to settle for second best you could have absolutely the best there was and ever would be. What would be the answer?

Would you simply say naaaa that’s ok, I will take the “good” that is ok with me it is what we have had for many many years.

Or would you say I am very hungry and that looks good but I am going to wait for the best.

I know this may sound extreme, I know it is different than what Grandma and grandpa did and taught but, God is doing something different and He wants us to be apart of it.

He wants you… and me… and us…

Listen to what God says through His prophet Isaiah.

Isa 43:18 Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.

Isa 43:19 Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.

Shall we know it????????

I know it sounds extreme but I want God to show up with His shekinah Glory.

We as a church forget that God wants to share with us He wants to share with us. He wants to play with us. He wants to be with us.

I am afraid church that we have got so caught up in the appetizers that we are not remembering that there is a main course and that main course is God.

Everything else other than God is simply a warm up an appetizer.

Do we want God?

Church get ready cause He is on His way.

I. The Cost of Intimacy

It is no longer acceptable to come a good church, to good services, to good preaching, to good music.

It is no longer acceptable to come to an almost service.

When we proclaim that God has shown up, when He starts to move we feel His glory and power for only a brief moment and then we are satisfied.

We draw back…

Song 5:2 I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.

Song 5:3 I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?

Song 5:4 My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

Is Jesus knocking on our church doors trying to get in and we are standing on the inside saying “…I have already laid down for the night I have already washed my feet, do you want me to get up again and get myself dirty?…”

The latch is on our side…

The doors lock from the inside…

And God is looking for a person, a church, and a city that will open to Him that will not try and count the cost of intimacy with Him.

Comfortable…

Caught up in our programs, our tradition, our status.

We refuse to open the door because it is not convenient

The cost of intimacy seems to high

We have been burnt in the past and we set around and say I am not going to be burnt again.

WE HAVE LOST OUR VISION.

And to loose ones vision is to perish.