Are We Looking For God In All The Wrong Places?

If you thought this blog would be about how we shouldn't be in ungodly places you are right...and wrong.  Of course, we're not supposed to be in some places and situations but that's not what I'm getting at with the idea of looking for God in all the wrong places.

Last week when reviewing a workbook on kingdom ministry, I came across an interesting statement. It said, "...of the sixty-nine divine interventions in the book of Acts, sixty-eight of them happened in the marketplace."  I confess I have not gone through the book of Acts to verify these figures, but the basic point is beyond doubt.  God shows up in so many places except the "religious" ones in Acts.  The streets of Jerusalem, in the houses of believers, at the stoning of Stephen, a desert road, jails, ships, Roman centurion's houses...just to name a few.

Where do we look for God to show up?  It is easy to get excited in gatherings of believers when we sense the presence of God.  But if Acts is any indicator, maybe we aren't seeing God showing up because we don't look for him in certain places like the marketplace.

The marketplace can be challenging for those Jesus followers trying to be faithful in their conversations and ethics.  Just the frantic pace of most workplaces tends to numb our senses to anything except doing the next task, taking the next order or making that last phone call.  But in the book of Acts, sixty-eight times out of sixty-nine....

Let me ask a series of "what if" questions:

• What if God is showing up and we miss him because we aren't looking for him except on Sundays?
• What if we started expecting God to show up when we entered the marketplace?
• What if we developed "eyes to see" and "ears to hear" for those times God is ready to move through a co-workers challenging project or problem at home?
• What if God is not showing up in our religious gatherings because he knows if he does, we will want to build tabernacles and camp in our religious clubs leaving the marketplaces out?

A familiar verse to most of us is John 3:16.  "For God so loved the world..."  Wait, God so loved the world?  Before we read about God sending his son or anything about eternal life we need to get this down, God so loves the world.  God's focus is on the world before he focuses on the church, not that the church is unimportant.  Christ loved the church and died for the church.  We need to see God's focus on the church is because his ultimate focus is on loving, reaching and redeeming the world.

God's people have always struggled with God's priorities and agenda.  The story of Jonah is all over this.  All through the story, people are turning to God.  Pagan sailors, foreign kings, ungodly gentiles and even the animals repent.  The only one God has trouble with is his own prophet.  Jonah does not want to go to Nineveh.  He only goes after spending three days and three nights in the belly of a great fish.  (I always said after being in the belly of a great fish I would probably hear the call to be a missionary too.)  In the end of the story, God puts the question to Jonah like this:

"And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left--and also many animals?" Jonah 4:11 NIV

Shouldn't God have concern for our marketplace?  Try going to work with the expectation of walking into situations where God is already present and ready to show up.  Expect God to do the most surprising things through you in the lives of your coworkers.

Let's start looking for God in all the wrong places and expecting him to show up.