God of Man

God is a God of love and as such, He doesn't force Himself on anyone. He chooses you, but He wants you to freely choose Him in return. And if you don't, well...that's a choice He's going to let you live with. 

Perhaps nowhere is this more beautifully articulated than in the middle chapters of Luke. 

In Luke 7, Jesus accepts an invitation to dinner at the house of a Pharisee. This might sound surprising after all of the harsh words that Jesus had for the Pharisees in the Gospels - calling them even a brood of snakes, and calling them hypocrites. Then, one invites Him for dinner and He goes. 

While there, He does what we would expect Him to do - demonstrates grace, speaks truth, challenges the underlying assumptions, broadens the circle. He doesn't change who He is to come into the place to which He has been invited, but He embraces the invitation to come as He is. 

It becomes one of the most powerful scenes in the Gospels - Jesus in the house of  Pharisee, rebuking the religious elite in his own place because of the love of a sinful woman. 

But He was invited there. 

Just one chapter later, in Luke 8, Jesus is on His mission. He's crossed over to the other side of the region for a bit, and He encounters a man naked in a cemetery with the remnants of chains hanging off of him. Jesus recognizes immediately the demons at work and casts them out of the man, into a herd of pigs, which then rushes over the side of a cliff. 

The squealing noise alone would make the rest of the town come running. And come, they did. 

They came and found Jesus in the cemetery with a man they'd all deemed mad, who was now clothed and in his right mind and having a regular ol' conversation with this Jesus guy. And, Luke tells us, the crowds were afraid and told Jesus to leave. 

So He did. 

See, Jesus is happy to go where He is invited, but He's happy to leave somewhere that He's not welcome.

The same is true in our lives. If we invite Jesus to dinner, He will come. If we invite Him into our home, He will be there. If we make space for Him, He will fill it. 

But if we ask Him to leave, He will do that, too. If we get scared and want to send Him away, He will go. If we hear the squealing and come running and can't process what we're seeing and ask for some space, He will give it to us. 

We are seeking in earnest to be men of God, but we must also remember that God is a God of man...and He will not go where He is not welcome. 

Are you making Him welcome?