Once in a while, God breaks through in a group of people’s lives and what we call a “revival” breaks out. Such is the case currently in a Christian university chapel in Asbury, Kentucky. While much is being said about this revival, there is nothing new about God stirring the hearts of his people. In fact, we see several times in both the Old and New Testaments where spiritual awakening occurs. Interestingly, what I would argue is a common thread in each case is the instruction the Holy Spirit gives those who are enjoying their “mountaintop” moment in God’s presence: “Get off the mountain and move on,” God told the Israelites. “As they were coming down the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus gave them orders.” After the spiritual awakening on Mount Zion in Acts 2, Acts 8 tells us, “So a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, that all except the apostles were scattered … and they preached the word wherever they went.” A mountaintop experience is wonderful and necessary from time to time, and there is nothing wrong with longing for extended and life-altering times in God’s glorious presence, but we are not to fixate on the experience. We must resist the urge to set up camp there so we can live forever in the warm afterglow. We should never rate the rest of our Christian experience against our revival, but rather we should see that mountaintop moment for what it really is: faith fuel for the assignment ahead. Of course, a spiritual awakening is a little bit of heaven on earth, yet God’s presence remains a down-to-earth deal that calls us to so get off our high and “go give ‘em heaven.” A lost world is waiting for fired-up believers!
The Journey// Focus: Deuteronomy 1:6-8
When we were at Mount Sinai, the Lord our God said to us, “You have stayed at this mountain long enough. It is time to break camp and move on. Go to the hill country of the Amorites and to all the neighboring regions—the Jordan Valley, the hill country, the western foothills, the Negev, and the coastal plain. Go to the land of the Canaanites and to Lebanon, and all the way to the great Euphrates River. Look, I am giving all this land to you! Go in and occupy it, for it is the land the Lord swore to give to your ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to all their descendants.”
“Get off the mountain and move on,” God told the Israelites. “As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave orders” to Peter, James and John on the way back down the Mount of Transfiguration. On Mount Zion, the book of Acts tells us, “So a great persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, that all except the apostles were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria….And those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.”
We love a mountaintop experience—what we might call a spiritual high— an experience so wonderful that we never want to lose the emotional euphoria of its warm afterglow. We never want to lose those fuzzy feelings we had at the moment of salvation, or an ecstatic encounter with the Holy Spirit, or when we cried our eyes out at the altar during summer youth camp, or at a revival meeting when God’s presence seemed so thick you could slice it
The problem with those kinds of experiences is that we tend to fixate on them, and then rate the rest of our Christian walk against them. Unfortunately, nothing can quite live up to the warm fuzzies of a mountaintop high.
We love to stay on the mountaintop with Moses as God delivers the Ten Commandments. We never want to leave that moment with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. We don’t want to get out from under the flow of the Spirit in Jerusalem to go into the rest of the world. After all, it is so spiritual…and it feels so good! Going back down the mountain is a drag. This down-to-earth business of Christianity is way overrated.
But obeying God always means we have to “get off the mountain to go possess the land.” We have to leave the sanctuary, the worship service, the warm incubator of our small group Bible study and get back into the game of extending the Kingdom on God’s behalf.
Moses had been on the Mountain Sinai for forty days talking with God. The top of the mountain was covered with special effects not even Hollywood could replicate. Peels of thunder so loud and flashes of lightning so bright no one else dared to wander up Sinai. In fact, the people had been warned that even touching the mountain as their leader communed with their God would bring instant death. Talk about the third rail.
Who wouldn’t want to stay in that holy moment? I sure would! I would want to can that spiritual experience and pull it back out of the can everyone once in a while—okay, a lot—to whiff the fumes of that intoxicating spiritual high all over again.
Here’s the deal: God never intends for us to fixate on the mountaintop experience. We have not been called to park our spiritual fannies in a spiritual high. Those amazing moments are meant for fuel to empower us for some spiritual assignment: to possess the land, to minister to the people, to take the Gospel from Jerusalem to Judea, Samaria, and to the “uttermost part of the earth.”
I am not down on mountaintop experiences. They are wonderful, and necessary from time to time. Just don’t fixate on them. Resist the urge to set up camp there so you can live forever in their warm afterglow. Don’t rate the rest of your Christian experience against them. Simply see them for what they are: Fuel for the assignment ahead.
Then get off the mountain and back in the game. Authentic faith is a down-to-earth deal. So bring a little of that heavenly high with you, get back down there, and go give ‘em heaven!
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