Coffee Shop Christianity

 “Coffee shop Christianity” is Christianity filled only with comfortable conversations that tiptoe around the more difficult aspects of the Gospel, skipping the parts that cannot be manipulated to sound desirable. When inquired about sin, it focuses just on grace, overlooking the ugliness of iniquity. When cries for help and justice are screamed, it turns up its music. When people who are in desperate need approach, it hits the gas pedal.

And while I’m peacefully sipping my latte, God’s heart is breaking over these things…

One of my dear friends is not a Christian.

Thousands of God’s children are starving and dying of thirst, both physically and spiritually.

Christians, the “body of Christ”, are living in fear and sin. My own life is far from being righteous.

My reaction? I’m ashamed to say I barely flinch.

Since when are any of these things not an emergency?

John Hyde echoed the same prayer I have been praying, “God break my heart for what breaks Yours!” when a friend interrupted him, “Why are you looking down at your poor self, brother? Of course your heart is cold and dead…. [If] you have asked for the broken heart of Jesus, His love, His burden for sin, His tears. Is He a liar? Has He not given you what you asked for? Then why look away from His heart to your own?” As I read this, the truth of it soaked into my mind - of course John Hyde's heart, along with our hearts, was incapable of feeling the deep feelings God’s was! Our human hearts are merely too human to experience this kind of gut-wrenching emotions God has on a daily basis. 

The truth that slaps us all in the face is that God’s heart will never be satisfied until every single one of His children are saved and all Christians are living in freedom from sin. The more I see God’s heart revealed the colder my human heart appears. I pictured my heart the way God revealed the Israelites to Ezekiel – as dead and unfeeling bones.

But then I hear God’s voice, “Can these bones live?”

In Ezekiel’s words, “Sovereign Lord, you ALONE know.”

God’s reply: “I will put breath in you and will come to LIFE. Then you will know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 37:3-6).

If the heart and breath our bodies use sustain us are of God and not man then without God we physically could not live. Friends what a blessing – that we would literally be nothing without Him!

This reality is so hard to grasp. It seems as if God must be living in anguish every moment of His life, there is so much sin and so many rejecting Him. This is a hard way to live – there is no easy way out! God’s feelings are intense. Just this week I was given two opportunities to feel a little bit of what God does and was overwhelmed by how cut to the core I felt over something that seemed so minor in the eyes of others.

When we ask the Holy Spirit to intercede to the Father on our behalf to receive His broken heart and He would breathe life into us, the Holy Spirit will purify us to a greater level. He will make us clean vessels for God’s prayers, tears, words and emotions to flow through. When our heart has been replaced with His, He can pray through us. When our breath has been replaced with His, He can breathe life into us and we can exhale life to others.

Let us not settle for “coffee shop Christianity”, but look at God’s heart instead our own. Is it too heavy a burden to live so full of anguish with God’s emotions running through us constantly? No, my friends, it is far from a life of sadness – it is a life of joy as well. Why is there joy? Because “the pure in heart…will see God!” (Matthew 5:8)