Here's another little thing we do in church. We divide our life up into natural and spiritual. How we've got an amazing ability to do that; this is this compartment, that's the God bit, so Sunday's the God bit. The rest of the week, well I've got to go out there - so we come in on Sunday, and we say: oh, oh! Thank You Lord for Your wonderful love! And on the way home we're cursing someone who cut us off. [Laughter] What's all that about? When we come in, oh praise the Lord! All I have, I surrender all! Then during the week we're trying to rip everyone off, and we're just as sharky in business as anyone else - no difference, see? Or we come and we say: oh Lord, I love You, and then we go home and berate the husband for his weakness, [laughter] and we're convinced we're doing God a favour. It doesn't work. It doesn't work, and so that's dividing your life up.
Listen, God wants to come to every part of our life. You say: well listen, if you're going to survive in the business world, you've got to be tough. Is that right? How are you doing then? You see, one thing that's happening in the world now, is the world's getting a great lesson on how greed and corruption actually doesn't work, inherently doesn't work! But integrity, and service, it does. Think about that. See the principles of God work. The problem is, we've got to learn how to live in a world culture, and be able to represent God's values in there, without being religious; and one of the values of the kingdom is service, excellent service, see? Think about this, so when we divide our life up, and we keep God for Sunday, but the rest of the week it's kind of we've just got to get on as usual; listen, that's one of the clever coverings we make for the fact to hide, we are not authentic, and we are irrelevant.
For the church to have impact, it must actually break through these mentalities, put off these coverings, and find ways to actually connect into and touch the community we live in. That's what the Good Samaritan did. He had the oil and the wine, yeah you can have the oil and the wine, but if you can't talk to people, they're not going to want your oil and wine. You've got to find ways to bridge into their world, and enter their world, find ways of serving them and help them. Man, I was impressed this last week. They had these t-shirts - you ever seen that thing iPhone and it's got an 'i' with a big dot on it, phone afterwards or they've got 'i' and it's information. They had 'i' serve. Well that's good, wasn't it aye? In case you didn't understand what that meant, on the back they had 'can I help you?' [Laughter] Okay, because we don't always get it, do we aye?
Okay, here's another thing people do in churches - we hide our emotions, hide our emotions. I get really excited, I cry in church, I cry when I'm in the presence of the Lord, I get excited when I'm in the presence of Lord, want to dance when I'm in the presence of the Lord! [Laughter] And if I can't dance, I feel a bit - that wasn't a very good service, didn't sort of get happy and expressive. So part of the problem is, we don't understand that our emotions and feelings, they are part of how God has designed you. He's made you to be a feeling person, made you to be an emotional person. You were created in the image of God, who has feelings. He gets angry, He is loving, He has compassion, He has mercy, He has joy, He dances, He's got all of these emotions, and He gives them to us as well. So we need to know what to do with the emotions, how can you love the Lord with all your soul, if you don't include your emotions?