Letters to Stagnant Christians #1

Posted at Churches Without Chests:

Dear Jake,

You’ve asked me to take a shot at explaining why spiritual growth is so minimal in your life. Having observed you for many years, I think I’m in a position to give a plausible answer.

You seem to live in a state that I call “over-the-next-hill commitment”. That is, your commitment to Christ is ever approaching, but never arrives. It is always on the horizon of your thinking, visible enough to console you, but never actually where you are. It’s always over the next hill – once the job slows down, once the kids are more settled, once the financial situation is stable. You speak frequently of what you plan to do, hope to do, seek to do for Christ, but seldom of what you are actually doing.

The busyness of life, the demands of work, the increasing family responsibilities forever push the promised commitment out by another few yards. Your problem is that you cannot see that your commitment to Christ is meant to happen within this busyness, not apart from it. Somewhere you have picked up the idea that busyness exempts you, in that moment, from commitment.

This is also why you do not change. You have adjusted your conscience to see no wrongdoing in perpetual postponement of serious service to Christ, when the postponement is due to some other good thing: family commitments, the urgency of solving problems at work, pressing home repairs or medical problems. You seem to think that you are alone in having these demands press home on you.

Continue here.