The other day, I wanted to watch a movie that I happened to own, but it was on DVD. I dug through my boxes, found the DVD, and I went to my DVD player, which I had actually forgotten that I had, and I went to it and I had forgotten how to operate it. It was this weird moment, like, wait, oh, there’s the button. I pushed the button. This tray came out. I put the DVD in it and I pushed it back in. And then I get the screen on and I’m trying to figure out how to use the DVD player. And I’m thinking, what is going on? It’s not that long ago that DVDs were the normal standard.
I began to realize ever since Netflix, Hulu, and all these different platforms have come out, it completely disrupted an entire industry. The word disruption is really fascinating to me in that there are certain things that come along that disrupt things. I was in a gas station a few years ago and I was pumping my truck up with gas and I went in to pay for it and to buy something, and I’m standing in line. And the guy in front of me is having this little bit of an argument with the man behind the counter who happened to be a man from India. They’re having this discussion. They’re having an argument of some sort, the volume wasn’t raised yet, but it was starting to escalate a little bit. I’m sitting there holding my ice cream, and I’m like, what’s going on here?
Then something switched. The guy that was in front of me started using some racial slurs and started going after this guy about an accent and all this stuff. And I’m standing there and I thought, I got to do something, but I didn’t know what to do. So I just yelled out, “HEY!” and the whole gas station went quiet. Everybody looked at me and I’m looking at them like, I don’t know what to do. I just knew I had to stop what this was. Essentially, I needed to disrupt the momentum of the moment because it was escalating. And the man that was really upset grabbed the stuff and left the store. I apologized to the man behind the counter for what was said to him.
One thing I’m realizing is that you and I as Christians, as believers, have an assignment to disrupt anything that does not look like Heaven. Jesus did this so perfectly. He would step into situations and the religious system was trying to theologically corner Him. Then the legal system would try to corner him. He’s stuck in these scenarios. Jesus always seemed to step in and disrupt the momentum of a culture.
One of my favorite moments is the case of the adulterous woman. It’s one of my favorite stories in the Gospel. This woman is about to be murdered. She’s about to be stoned for committing an act of adultery and Jesus disrupted this momentum of wanting to stone her by asking a simple question. He didn’t do it out of anger. He didn’t do it out of bitterness or malice. He did it with poise. He did it with thoughtfulness and He did it with precision. He asked one question to the religious leaders. He said, “If you’ve not sinned, go ahead and throw the first stone.”
Well, none of them could throw the stone because all of them eventually recognized that they had areas in their lives that had deep, deep issues. They all left. At that moment, Jesus asked the woman, “Where are your accusers?” She said, “I don’t know, they’ve gone.” Jesus, the only one that had the legal right and Biblical right to stone this woman said, “I’m not going to stone you.” What did He do? He disrupted the momentum of the people that wanted to stone her.
I want to encourage you. One of the things that you and I can do in our daily life is we can look for opportunities to disrupt something that needs to be disrupted. We are called to disrupt a culture, not with anger, not with violence, but with thoughtfulness, poise, and precision. Let’s step into a new dimension, if you will, of disrupting anything that does not look like Heaven, and let’s see what Jesus does with us in those moments.