Mountaintop Junkies

May 3

(Luke 9:37 NIV) "The next day, when they came down from the mountain, a large crowd met him."

(Exodus 32:15-20 NIV) "Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. {16} The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. {17} When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, "There is the sound of war in the camp." {18} Moses replied: "It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear." {19} When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. {20} And he took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it."

We all need mountaintop experiences to recharge our batteries, but we cannot stay there. We were not meant to live there. We all need to recharge our batteries, but if we stay hooked to the charger all the time, we can’t go anywhere. Mountaintop experiences serve a much bigger purpose than our personal edification. They send us back down the mountain with new power and momentum. Our mission is at the base of the mountain, not the top. Many Christians today are “mountaintop junkies”. They go from camp meeting to camp meeting seeking the newest spiritual high -- fawning over the latest Bible teacher/author. They are addicted to the mountaintop and have become useless disciples. Don’t go there. Go up that mountaintop occasionally, but get back down into the battle as soon as possible. That’s what Jesus did, and that’s what we should do. -- Friar Tuck’s Word of the Day