It’s time to take God out of the box. We don’t do ourselves any favors by keeping Him there. He isn’t limited by what we don’t see. We are limited by what we don’t believe. Lately, my faith has been tested. I’ve been introduced to the prophetic, interceded with the tongue speakers, and covered the feet of the spiritually slain. I don’t get it. I haven’t experienced it, but to deny it is God, well, that just crams Him back into the box I’ve rebelliously fashioned. God is beyond our understanding, He works outside of our comprehension, and He moves outside of our line of sight. For that we should be grateful!

Let me introduce you to Gloria. Gloria doesn’t put God in a box, mostly because He’s never fit in one and secondly, because how she came to know Him. Do you ever question if God loves sinners? Gloria doesn’t have to. See, Gloria was introduced to God, to the Spirit of Almighty God, high as a kite and drunk. And it all started with a question, “How you gonna come to me like this?!” See, she’d just gotten a call, from a Christian couple that wanted to help her out financially, but first they wanted to pray with her. So Gloria, not wanting to show up looking like she was three sheets to the wind, “prettied up” and met up with them, and obediently she prayed. But, something happened while she prayed. A song welled up from her chest and broke through her drunken haze and resounded in the air. She admits that she didn’t know what it was, or where it came from at first, only that it was, but as she continued to sing, a high like she had never experienced before hit her. Euphoric, we’d say. “Like that first hit of crack,” she explained. “You know, when you take that first hit, it feels so good. It takes you to this place you ain’t neva been, but what you don’t know when you get it is, you ain’t eva gonna get it again. It’s what makes crack addicts addicts. They still looking for that first high. But it ain’t comin’.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I hadn’t had that first hit, and up until that moment, I’d never talked with someone who admittedly had. She confessed that she found it strange, but she instinctively knew it was the Spirit of God. She left her friends place amazed and encouraged, because crazy as it seemed she had met God.

I know, our God in a box wouldn’t meet a junkie in the midst of her high. He would wait, until she was sobered up or reaching out and singing “Just as I am” in church right before an alter call. You won’t convince Gloria of that. Her testimony continued, “So when I got home after that prayer and that crazy moment of high with Jesus, I came down and said, ‘God, if that’s You, You gonna do that again?” She was skeptical, but she sat in her room, completely dark, and started talking to God and sure enough, the Spirit hit her hard, just as intensely as before, just as beautifully, just as amazingly. She shook her head in the that part of the retelling of her story as she obviously felt that thrill all over again, “And I realized then, that wasn’t like any high you gonna find on earth…that God ain’t about giving one time hits and it’s over. That high was available to me at any time I asked, because my Jesus loves me.”

It’s taken me a few days to process this testimony. It has taken me some time to wrap my arms around this God, so different from the One that I’ve grown up with, so different from the box labeled “Acceptable experience”, so different from the stories I’ve heard in the past. But as always, the proof of God is the life that is changed. Oh my beautiful Saviour, is Gloria a life changed! He might have met her as a sinner but He saved her to be more, and she hasn’t disappointed Him. See, my story of being saved at six and journeying through life and experiencing God at every turn might be enough to soften someone’s heart for Jesus, But a crack addict, a junkie, a soul desperate for the next fix, they need Gloria’s story. They need to hear that when we sing “Just as I am” we really mean wherever and whenever that might be. They need to know that God doesn’t wait for them to put on some respectable clothes and clean up, He wants to clothe them with grace and mercy, a wardrobe that withstands the test of time. They need to know that God isn’t sitting in a box somewhere waiting for some pious, religious person to deign to release Him on the masses. He is real and reaching and calling to them “Come.” He isn’t limited by our boxes, but we limit the True Life He gives when we relegate Him to one.

It’s time to open the box, for His sake, for Gloria’s sake, but most of all for YOUR sake.