Thoughts, Part I: Complacency

Lately, I’ve had a few questions.

Primarily, why is it so difficult to live a life worthy of saying that we follow Christ?

Why is “radical” not the norm, if it’s just the bare minimum that Jesus asked us to give?

Why can we post to our Facebooks and Twitters how grateful we are for His sacrifice for us if we aren’t willing to show it by sacrificing our morning coffee to give $5 to the poor or to the world missions effort? 

He sacrificed His life for the salvation of millions of people who would never accept Him; we’re self-pleased for a week or more when we sacrifice an hour of our Saturday to volunteer at a homeless shelter.

Why is that?

Why is it that we know the overarching meaning and purpose of life and yet we refuse to live like it?

Why are we content to have our nine-to-five office jobs when we know that people will die today having never heard the name “Jesus”?

How can we know that and sit back and take it? How can we be so complacent?

I ask these questions not only of the church as a whole but of myself as well.

I ask myself, “how can I so easily gossip with my friends for hours but can’t manage a 30-second prayer to my Creator about the problem, when I know that’s all it’d take to solve it?”

I ask myself, “why do I spend so much time online when in all likelihood my neighbors need me to go talk to them about the love of Jesus?”

I don’t have any answers to these questions, but what I do know is that the Bible says that although we aren’t by any means saved by our works, if we are truly saved it will be evident in our lives. What does this say about us? How many of us, if observed by an outsider, would be called followers of Jesus? How many of us truly live like we understand the gravity of what Jesus has done for us?

I wonder if part of the problem lies in our misconception of God. If any of us truly, deeply understood the things He says about Himself in His Word, I think we would act a lot differently.

If we understood deep in our hearts that prayer is literally running into the throne room of the Creator of the universe to sit on His lap and talk to our Heavenly Father and listen to His perfect wisdom for us…it would be hard for us to get up from our prayer time, not hard to get around to it in the first place.

If we really grasped that Jesus died for us with full knowledge of every sin we would ever commit against Him, every time we would slander Him or ignore Him or turn from Him, and He still loved us enough to give His life for us, knowing that so many people would never accept Him…it would be difficult not to sing praises and shout thanks to Him at every moment; not difficult to sit through the entire worship service on Sunday morning.

What I’m saying is that to accept Jesus as our Savior, to truly give our lives to Him means just that: to give our lives to Him. That was the only stipulation of receiving salvation; we have to “leave everything and follow Him.” How many of us have done that? How many of us are willing to do it? What would our lives look like if we actually tried it? And the most important question: will we?