The routine of the Christian life

I periodically read a blog by “Pastor Brad,” who provides me with some great insights about the Christian Life.  He recently published a sermon that contained the following:

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A lot of us begin our Christian lives with that kind of burning desire, don’t we? Our hearts are thrilled with this new life and we are fully aware that our wonderful new life exists because of Jesus. We can’t get enough Scripture or Christian fellowship or prayer in the early days. Gradually, though, so many of us slip into the routine of the Christian life and the burning desire to get to know Jesus at deeper levels subsides. As I have said before, the more we know about the Lord the easier it is to live without Him. We know what to say and what not to say, how to act, how to play our role, and we just settle in.

This is by no means Pastor Brad’s ideal for the Christian life; just his observation of what often happens to us.  The real problem is that what seems, at worse, like complacency, is actually an attack on our lives.  It is not, of course, an attack on our physical lives or comfort.  We would never tolerate that!  In fact, the state that Pastor Brad describes is an attack of our own flesh on our spirit with the purpose of making itself more comfortable.

Once the flesh has made itself comfortable we can settle down.  Then, it is so easy to lose sight of the fact that the real “us”  does not reside in the flesh, but in the  spirit.  It is easy to forget that the flesh, which obsesses us with its needs, is at war against the real “us.”

Don’t you often wonder why scripture dwells so much on the trouble that Christians are expected to have in this world?  I do!  When I read such passages honestly I tend to respond, “What in the world does this mean?  I don’t have a lot of trouble, pain, sorrow, sadness, tribulation… “  Even worse, I rationalize by thinking, “God must be blessing me by sparing me from all of the troubles the Christian life is supposed to bring in this world.”  Or, “I must really be spiritual, I have overcome all of those bad things that happen to some Christians in life.”

Occasionally, despite my spiritual lethergy, the Holy Spirit wakes up my world-soaked brain long enough to remind me of the theme of this journal; Satan’s war against me is not a war against my flesh, it is a war against my mind.   When my renewing mind starts to work for my dead flesh; when it starts to rationalize why it is o.k. to  be comfortable at the expense of the lost, when I lose track of the difference between “niceness” and love, when my mind falls into the “routine” of the Christian life… Satan has won the war.

I believe I speak fairly for Pastor Brad, and I know I speak vehemently for myself:  When the Christian life becomes “routine” we are in serious danger of something far more menacing than physical death.  Matthew 18: 8, 9.