I’m On Top of the World – pt 2

Some thoughts from where I left off on my message this weekend…

To get the most out of the mountain, you’ve got to recognize that not everyone is in that same place.

While Moses is up on the mountain with God, the rest of the Israelites are left at the bottom. They encountered God initially at the base of the mountain with Moses, but when Moses goes up and has a significant encounter with God, they’re left alone at the bottom of the mountain.

So what do they do? They try to manufacture their own “God-experience”. And God deals with them for it.

In some ways, I feel for the Israelites. It’s not that what they did is ok, or justifiable. But I can see how they’d get there because they’re not having that same experience as Moses is.

For us, one of the worst things that we can do when we’re “on top of the world” is to expect that everyone else is there too. We can easily live with an insensitivity for where everyone else is at. We can become smug or condescending towards other people’s problems, or become overly optimistic about how everything will turn out great for everyone else.

If we forget that not everyone is having the same experience that we are, we can miss entering into the pain with people who are going through pain, and we can miss engaging the brokenness because we’re not feeling broken right now. If we’re not careful, we can easily slide into a place of arrogance and pride because our life is in a good place right now.

When we do that, we miss the beauty of experiencing the moment of being on top of the mountain.

(to be continued…)