Wrecking Ball: The Divine Interruption

By Jay T. Harvey

Wrecking Ball: The Divine Interruption offers a unique perspective on why so many Christians are frustrated, burned out, and left scratching their heads. The basic premise is built around the story found in Genesis 11 which describes the Tower of Babel. By all accounts, the people in the story were united and doing some good work while building that tower. The problem was, God didnt ask them to build a tower.

How much of what we are doing as the Church did God really ask us to do? This could be the main reason why so many of our plans in the church are short-lived. Its not the enemy that we are battling, its God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490875781

Jay T. Harvey

Jay Harvey is the senior pastor at Pendleton Christian Church in Pendleton, Indiana. Before answering the call to pastor, Jay was a sought-after speaker on several topics, including grace, God’s love, and the authentic Christian life. Jay’s audiences are always affected in a profound way because of his ability to reveal God to people in their everyday life. Jay loves to share the characteristics of a loving God in a tangible way, and he often does so through his own story of brokenness and redemption.

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Copyright © 2015 Jason T. Harvey.

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Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® and NIV® are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc. Use of either trademark for the offering of goods or services requires the prior written consent of Biblica US, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-7579-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-7580-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-7578-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015905496

WestBow Press rev. date: 04/17/2015

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1    If You Build It; He Will Come

Chapter 2    Small Kings; Tiny Kingdoms

Chapter 3    Church You-Nity

Chapter 4    All Passion – No Purpose

Chapter 5    Sitting In The Sacred

Chapter 6    Cleaning Up The Debris

Chapter 7    The Tower & The Translator

For: Dallas, Delaney, and Danner.

Always remember that if your plans sometimes don’t succeed, God could be conducting a remodeling project on your life. He would rather have you dependent on Him, than yourself. When you think of yourselves too highly, the Lord will come in and rearrange things so that you will seek Him once again.

PREFACE

O FTEN TIMES WHAT STARTS OUT as ambition or drive with a good intention ends up becoming selfish and destructive. Make no mistake, God has given us drive and ambition but it must come under his authority to be useful and fulfilling.

We live in a world that screams at us from the moment we wake up until we collapse in a heap at night that we are missing out on something. It’s a constant and annoying voice telling us we need to be more, or do more. With the explosion of technology and platform of the internet, we try to make something profound happen every day of our life, and then share with the world. It’s the constant and annoying bug zapper monotone hum that we have learned to live with. We think we have it under control, but one honest look around our lives or culture will prove otherwise.

As I have grown over the years in my faith, I have learned there is a way to turn off the annoying voice. I have found a great contentment in increasing measure and it is not connected to how I feel or what others think of me. The comfort and contentment of which I speak did not come easily, but rather through a deep understanding of God’s love. I found it through reading the Bible and through times of experiencing set-backs in my faith. As you will discover, each time I started to do something for God that God did not ask me to do, the Divine Interruption found in God’s grace came and kept my ambition in check.

(Oh, by the way… I couldn’t be more thankful that God knocked down everything I tried to build in my own strength.)

This book was written to help Christians re-capture the freedom in allowing God to build the Church, and grow their faith. It is time to break free from a mindset that has dominated the church culture for far too long which says; work hard and stay busy or your faith will fail. Followers of Christ are free to stop, and free to re-calibrate. Christians need to be reminded they are free to ask questions about why something isn’t going right, without feeling guilty or trying to justify their failed work.

Christians in general are struggling with their identity because it is so easy to get caught up in the branding of what’s hot and what’s not. Leaders in the church can get caught up as well and begin to add stuff for their congregations in an already fruitless lifestyle of following Christ. God’s consistency in caring enough to wait you out, or bring to a halt your ideas of how Christianity is to look and sound, is the most important loving act we seem to overlook.

This book is designed to help you understand and know that God may have wrecked your plans in order to save you and give you a peace that surpasses all understanding.

If you are a follower of Christ, this book is for you. If you are a leader in your Church, this book is for you. If you are someone who loves God but is wondering why Church is such a struggle, this book is definitely for you.

Come let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

Genesis 11: 4 (NIV)

Come let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.

Genesis 11: 7 (NIV)

CHAPTER 1

IF YOU BUILD IT; HE WILL COME

I CAN REMEMBER THE DAY LIKE it was yesterday. I was sitting on the living room floor of my home and my wife was sitting in a chair 5 feet away from me. It was 2007 and my wife and I had already had the same conversation in 2002, 03, 04, 05, and 06. Different locations and different hair styles for my wife, but the same old beating drum of my voice, mumbling something like, I know God is calling me to full time ministry.

I had already quit one full time job back in 2002 to become a Development Director for a student ministry. I quickly found out Development Director translates into; The Friendly Beggar. Even though I was in ministry, it felt more like I was God’s holy shake down guy. I was eating lunch at the same restaurant every day, but with different people. It was like I was the Godfather of the local Chili’s and they always had my booth on stand-by. I would sit there imagining myself saying something like, you’re either gunna give to da ministry or you’re going to wake up with a horse head in your bed. Of course it would have only been a cardboard horse head leftover from vacation bible school, but you get the point.

After one year, God graciously set me free to go back to the safety of my