Shelf
Weird confession time. I have a lot of stuff in my garage. My problem is that every time that I'm about to throw something away, I hear the voice of my father screaming out from my childhood and saying, "Now somebody could get some use out of that."
And while I admit that it is a great feeling to wade into my garage, step over that old piece of lawn furniture, and grab hold of exactly the thing that I happen to need at the time, usually that voice turns out not to be right.
Usually, I'm just a guy with a meaningless collection of worn out roller blade wheels sitting on a shelf somewhere beside a meaningless collection of orphaned nuts and bolts sitting beside a meaningless collection of something else.
Apparently, the gap between the things that a person might get some use out of and the things that a person actually gets some use out of is wide. Like Grand Canyon wide.
But regardless, I think that lots of us are tempted to keep piles of things that we don't really care about just in case we might need them some day.
Maybe you have a garage that looks like mine, or maybe you have an old pile of shoes in your closet, or an old car sitting out behind your house somewhere. The idea that drives all of those realities is exactly the same:
Some stuff is not important enough to do anything with, but you hate to get rid of it entirely just in case you ever need it.
When it comes to rusty bolts and old shoes, I think that’s probably OK. But there are some things in life that should never, under any circumstances, be put on that shelf.
One of those things is our connection with God.
If we're being honest, for many of us our connection with God is kind of like those roller blade wheels in my garage. It’s something that we picked up along the way somewhere, and now we're just kind of stuck with it. On the one hand, we're pretty sure that it could come in handy sometime, so we hate to throw it away. But on the other hand, we don't really care about it. So it just sits there on a shelf with a bunch of other stuff that we sort of value but don't actually care about, taking up space in our lives.
But when it comes to our connection with God, that doesn't really work. And we know that because people have tried it before, and God has responded.
In the Book of Revelation, Chapter 3, Jesus is speaking from Heaven to this church in a middle-of-nowhere town called Laodicea, and this is what He says to them:
“I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”
Jesus is saying to these people, “Hey, you put me on the shelf, man. And it’s not working.”
As it turns out, handing your life to Jesus is a great plan. But it’s a terrible back-up plan. Jesus does not play second fiddle to anybody, and He is most certainly not content to sit on a shelf in some dusty back corner of our hearts.
So today, if you are in search of some wood from an old piano, you should check out my garage. But if you are in search of real life that matters and changes things and changes you, it’s time to take Jesus off the shelf.
