Why Being Like God Means Persistent Interrupting

In one of the simplest, yet most profound articles I’ve read in a while, Toby Sumpter writes:

God meddles with history. He messes with human lives, and He breaks into situations virtually unannounced. He interrupts Noah’s life, interrupts Abram in Ur, interrupts Moses in Egypt. We serve the interrupting God.

He doesn’t raise His hand to speak; He doesn’t wait patiently for a lull in the conversation. He just bursts in. And this bursting in, this interrupting characteristic is most gloriously obvious in the incarnation. And Jesus knows He’s interrupting; He knows He’s intervening in a major way. And He doesn’t apologize. He’s come to shake the world down. He’s come to undo the way things are done. And He realizes that this will mean broken families, upset markets, fractured communities, and political upheaval. He didn’t come to bring peace but the sword.

You need to read the whole article. Sumpter tries to help us see what it looks like to break into people’s lives, condemn the darkness and mercifully help set things right.

And you need to understand well why he says, “We cannot hold back, stand back and watch, or take shots at other Christians who faithfully plunge into the deep jungles of sin and hell.”

Sumpter holds nothing back to convince us that we need to

imitate Jesus even more faithfully, the center of which I would suggest is loving people,really loving people. This means knowing their names, eating with them, praying with them, crying with them, and dying for them. The Church is the womb of the new world, the mother of us all. And therefore we are called to be the family, the state, even the economy in utero, breathing through the contractions as they come faster and closer together, as the Lord Jesus shakes down those things which are not permanent, looking expectantly for this new creation, this New Jerusalem descending out of heaven.