Comfortably Numb

A lot of times we can miss out on God's best for us by being unwilling to work on ourselves. Unwilling to give up those things that separate us from where we need to be in God's will. We know what scripture says about our personal struggles, but we shrug our shoulders and say,
"This is me. If I could change it I would, but I can't."
How dare we rob that kind of power from God to work in our lives! When we say we are unchangeable, we are saying that God is powerless to change us! That He who created us can't bring us out of our struggles and into the light. We take Christ's sacrifice and make it meaningless.
My father has a friend who was once a Pastor. After years of struggling with living a lie, he left his wife to pursue a homosexual relationship with another man. This was devastating to his wife, children and the people who were once under his ministerial care...me included. Today, he has what he thought he wanted for so long but lacks the peace of God and is constantly yearning for acceptance for his choices from anyone who will listen because he is living in a constant state of sin, outside of God's will and God's best for his life. He's been told continuously that he's still loved, that he's still God's child but what he longs for is someone to ease him of his guilt by telling him it's ok for him to act on his homosexual urges when according to scripture, it just isn't. He knows, deep down, that he's outside of the will of God when he was created to be inside of it and the fine line he walks between submitting to temptation and wanting to grow deeper in Christ is causing him impeccable strain.
I worked with a woman once who had 7 children. She worked hard to provide for them, sent them to church, raised them according to Christian values but when I mentioned something about going to heaven one day over lunch she looked at me and said, "You can't know you're going to heaven. Nobody can be sure of that."
She went through the motions of church. She walked her kids through the motions of church...yet she lived every day without the eternal security that a relationship with Christ brings. She had head knowledge and a vision of what Christianity should look like and she acted it out like a play, but her life lacked the crucial element...Christ himself!
When we remain in our brokenness without delving deeper into God's word and will for our lives, we become numb and complacent....and for most of us, numb is much more comfortable then the burning of the refiners fire. In fact, when we ignore the conviction of the holy spirit for long enough, the conviction goes away...not because it's suddenly ok to live as we had been living, but because His presence has left us. Not our salvation, but His presence. That's a scary place to be.
We somehow convince ourselves that faith and words is enough. It's true that true faith in Christ is salvation...but faith without works is a dead and sorry faith...where we selfishly hoard what we have without letting the light of Christ shine through our example. There's believing in Jesus, but then there is truly LOVING God and living for Him. It's easy to accept a message about a man taking our blame and dying for our sins in our place...it's a very different thing to give our lives over in sacrifice to God and say, "Your will, not my own be done. Take my desires, my future, my passion, my will, my job, my kids, my spouse, myself."
The bible tells us that we can know whether we are in the midst of believers by their fruits of the spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faith and self control...these are testaments to God's working in you and I. It allows us to judge one another and discern God's presence.
We are all human and we screw up (i know i do daily) but when we are making an effort each day to live according to God's word and purpose, it shows through the fruit of our lives. We love according to Corinthians 13. We have the joy of God in our hearts (this is different from happiness....joy is contentment...no matter what the circumstances, we have joy in knowing it's all for Jesus). We're at peace with our creator and each other. We're patient in situations when we should be off our heads with anger. We're kind to people (this is different from being friendly...sometimes being kind means being honest...and sometimes honesty is not well received). We're gentle when we're correcting or guiding each other. We're good to each other by helping each other out, giving of our time, money or belongings to help someone else. We can control ourselves and our urges when the Holy Spirit is truly given permission (by our choice) to have control over our lives.
My prayer is this: That modern Christianity will awaken from it's state of numbness and be willing to endure whatever pain it takes to become like Christ in a world that needs him desperately. To delve into His word and love Him not just because it's trendy in the bible belt to go to church and hit the Golden Corral afterwards. That we will enter Christian community in an effort to sharpen each other and become better, not wallow in our brokenness. Let's rightfully bare the name of Christ because we LOVE him. The bible says we are His friends if we DO WHAT HE SAYS. How can we know what he says? Read your bible.
God is more than what we limit him to when we refuse to take up our cross and follow him. When we refuse to do the hard work, we stunt our growth and we leave Jesus behind the door, knocking.
I believe that we are all children of God...after all, he created us ALL. But if you're struggling with something...even if it's a big something...God can overcome it within you.
A popular Christian vocalist was on Oprah once discussing his life altering, once-secret addiction to porn. At the end of the interview Oprah said something to the effect of, "You can't pray that away" to which he replied, "I did."
Was it easy? no. He struggled for years. His marriage struggled, his career struggled and he cried out to God time and time again for deliverance...but through the power of Prayer, he is healed. Take that Oprah.
I don't know if any of this makes sense...It's late and I'm overwhelmed right now by a culture that I don't like my son having to grow up in. Where there's pre-marital and homosexual sex on public TV stations at 3 in the afternoon...where teenagers are learning how to raise their hands in church and be completely vile and inappropriate at school because the most important thing is to be cool and trendy...where 4 year olds at daycare are dropping curse words cause their parents don't have the common sense to shield them from it, regardless of whether they believe in Christ or not...where teenagers are so confused about who they are and who God is (by what they see us doing and not doing in His name) that they feel hopeless and are hurting themselves and each other at rates higher than ever before.
My plea: If you are comfortably numb and satisfied with mediocrity, if you're what the bible calls, "luke warm" by customizing your Christianity...taking the parts you like but excluding the parts you don't...please awaken from your sleep and be the woman or man that God has called you to be. Reshape the Christian faith so that people will start to take us seriously again and so that our kids can model what we're doing in the name of Jesus.