Under the Overpass

For all of you faithful blog readers out there... welcome back. I am encouraged because I made a mistake on my post the other day and someone called me to correct it. That means that someone actually read it. So what I am going to do is I am going to put a mistake in this post and see if anyone can find it and that will let me know who is reading this post.

I just finished reading a book called Under the Overpass (www.undertheoverpass.com) and it was about a college student named Mike and his friend Sam who felt convicted to live as homeless people for five months. They wanted to view things from a different, less-privileged perspective.

I learned a lot of valuable lessons from this book and I will remember a lot of the anecdotes as long as I live. There are a few things that I wanted to touch on for my blogger nation out there.

These two guys lived on the streets and played worship songs on their guitars for money to get food and they did everything that normal homeless people would do. But on Sundays, being the good Christian boys that they are, they went to church.

The book has a lot of interesting stories to tell of how people treated them when they walked in on Sunday morning. They went to a mega church in Phoenix, Arizona where security followed one of them into the bathroom and asked him in a very rude and threatening way if he was disrupting the service. They were forced off of a grassy knoll they were sleeping on on a church campus because the man was afraid of what people would think when they showed up for their "Outreach Breakfast." Come to find out the man who kicked them off the grass was head of community outreach at his church. They asked a Pastor at a small church whether the church could provide them a meal, to which the Pastor answered, "We don't do that here, we worship God here."

But then Sam and Mike went to an afternoon service on the beaches of San Fransisco, California. People were handing out bag lunches to the homeless while a young guy led worship. After that a 17 year old got up to bring a message to the crowd that gathered.

When the service was over the worship leader and the preacher boy came over to Mike and Sam and they talked like they had been friends forever. The ministers offered the two homeless guys more lunches and asked about their lives (now understand Mike and Joe never let people know that they were Christians with an address and money and a good family) and the two told them that they were trying to get bus fare to go to San Diego.

These two preacher boys then felt led by the spirit to invite Mike and Sam to their church for night service and offered to let them come back to their apartment to shower and eat and hang out. When these two showed up at the church they were treated like royalty and the worship leader took them to his car and opened the trunk... it was full of food. Then the 17 year old man of God gave Mike and Sam an envelope filled with the exact amount of bus fare needed to get to San Diego.

It was amazing to me that in all the stories Sam and Mike told about Christians it took two young guys on a beach to live out the gospel in their lives. What would you have done?

I am convinced that if Jesus were alive in this day and age that he wouldn't be as we picture Him. We picture Him as a white guy with luxurious brown hair and blue eyes. He drives an SUV, lives in the suburbs and is a member of the PTA.

From what we know of Jesus' background, He would look like a Middle Eastern man and would be talking radical talk. This means that Jesus would be targeted by Homeland Security and He would make people nervous if He got on an airplane, and quite frankly... most people would think of Him as a possible terrorist.

From what we know of who Jesus was He wouldn't live in a 4 bedroom overlooking the lake with a pool and a big backyard. From what we know of who Jesus was, my bet is that He would come to Earth as a homeless man. How would He be treated?

I am not saying that the answer to the Christian life is to give money to the poor because that is not the case. In fact, you should never give money to the poor because 9 times out of ten you are feeding a heroine addiction or providing an alcoholic with the very thing that put him on the streets. You should only give homeless people love, support, work, food, and gift cards.

My whole point is this: do we really want to reach the world with the gospel or just the people that are like us? If Mike and Sam walked into NorthRidge Church how would they be treated?

When I was in high school I witnessed to this homeless man, took him to McDonalds and brought him to night church. He felt led to come forward and profess his salvation, which in most Southern Baptist churches means to join the church. I didn't hear the conversation at the alter, but this man came back to the pew dejected because he was told he couldn't join the church without an address. That's all well and good, but his salvation was never rejoiced over within the congregation. Why was that? If that man made $50,000 and thus would supply the church with $5,000 a year you better believe we would have rejoiced. But the Bible says that the angels rejoice when any sinner comes to Christ.

My question then is... why are we so stubborn?