Did you hear the recent news about the boy who was threatened with expulsion if he attended prom? It seems Tyler Frost, a senior at Heritage Christian School in Findlay, Ohio, was invited by a young lady who attends Findlay High School to accompany her to her prom. When the administration of Heritage Christian School found out about it, the fundamentalist Christian school forbid Tyler from attending, stating that he signed a code of conduct to attend the school which included a clause forbidding, among listening to rock-and-roll, dancing. There answer to the situation was to threaten young Tyler with expulsion and exclusion from graduation ceremonies if he attended the dance. Despite it all, Tyler said that he will attend and deal with the consequences.
Really? It’s stuff like this that gives us Christians a bad name. It’s no wonder why people who have had no connection with the church think that we are crazy. If you look at the image that the news media often portrays of Christians one would think that Christians are living sometime back in the medieval ages. I’ve seen articles about Christians who think the earth is flat, that dinosaurs are just some atheist propaganda, and that God is about to throw down balls of fire upon anyone who commits a narrowly defined list of sins. If all that I knew about Christians was what I learned on the news I’d think you guys were nuts. Certainly there are some attention grabbing whack jobs out there who are proposing to speak for everyone of faith, but I hope that most of us are not as crazy as the media portrays us. I certainly don’t think I am. If I am, I hope that one of you will tell me. But I can understand where the world gets its slanted understanding of what Christianity is – it gets it from us. Yes, it gets it from the crazy fringe, but it also gets a cock-eyed view of truth from those of us, all of us, who portray the church in some idyllic Stepford community that is all smiles and perfection. To those outside the church it seems like the church is filled with the spiritual equivalent of lollipops, rainbows, and unicorns. And it seems like there is no place in the church for someone who isn’t living the perfect life.
Like it or not, we all have a “church face.” Let me explain through an example. One Sunday I was standing out in the parking lot door welcoming people as they come in and I overheard a mother telling her two year old the rules of church. “Look, I know you don’t want to go and frankly, I’m not too keen about bringing you, but we’re going, so stop your fussing. We’re going to sit there quietly and not bother anyone and we’re going to smile and we’re going to enjoy it.” Next thing I know I see this same mother dragging her son in smiling and saying, “Morning preacher! Looking forward to worship!” Hey, I’ve been there. If you have kids, you’ve been there too. Trust me, there are some Sundays that even I don’t want to come. But on Sunday we put aside the troubles of the world, put on our best face, and come to church.
Now I don’t think this is too much of a problem. After all, who wants to come to a church where everyone is wearing the troubles of life on their shoulder? No one wants to come and see everyone around them with long faces and stretched to their limits. Church should be a source of joy for us and most of the time it is. Worship is an opportunity for us to be filled with the joy of Christ and to lay our lives, with all its troubles, at the feet of Christ. But church cannot be just about experiencing God on Sunday morning and then going back into the world.
I mentioned last week that I’m a church-a-holic. I love the church and all the good things that it can bring in my life. But I also realize that there is a danger of getting so connected and intimate with the church that I fail to really develop a faith that exists outside of the church. I realize that I can get so caught up in the church that I substitute my relationship with the church with my relationship with Christ. I can get so caught up in being a part of the church that I fail to be a part of Christ. If my faith is only about what I do at church then my faith is really no different than being a part of some other community group. Being a church-a-holic means that I’ve learned enough of the answers and know enough of the right words and actions to put on a great mask for those around me. It means that I can easily live the life for Christ on Sunday but live a life for myself Monday through Saturday. It means that I can smile and sing and tell others that Jesus is the greatest thing in life, all the while my soul is wilting from not being fed.
Friends, there is a danger to getting so intimately connected with the church that we fail to connect with Christ. I wish this wasn’t the case, but far too often we can go through the motions of faith and fail to really connect with Christ. It happens to all of us. I’ll admit it has happened to me – that I have had times where I have stood in front of a crowd to tell them of the importance of connecting to God in a deep, intimate way all the while knowing my soul was longing to connect to Christ and I wasn’t doing anything about it. I’ve had friends in the ministry who have found themselves so disconnected with the gospel that they spend seasons of their life going through the motions or, even worse, falling into a life crippling pit of sin. As much as we would like to think that our participation in worship or Sunday school or bible study will keep us from falling into dark times these things alone will not keep us from sin. There is a danger of knowing so much about how the church is supposed to work that we just act out faith instead of living out faith. We can just smile and go about life, all the while slowly falling away from Christ.
So what is a church-a-holic to do? First, we have to rid ourselves of our “Smile or God will smite you” attitude. Read through the Psalms and you’ll see David, one described as “a man after God’s own heart” and you’ll read verse after verse of a life lived honestly before God. He gets angry. He gets depressed. He sings for joy and then just verses later curses his failures. If we want to really grow in faith we have to realize that God is big enough to deal with our lives. There is nothing that we are going to do that will disqualify us from His loving grace. He loves us and will always love us. He isn’t looking for perfect people, but for people who will love Him back. The first step for us to take towards a growing faith is to live a life honestly before God. Life doesn’t have to be perfect to be filled with God. Look at the life of Christ – the very Son of God – and His life was far from filled with joy and peace. Life is hard and until we are ready to admit that to God and seek His help in life then we will never have God’s presence in our life in the intimate way that He longs to be known.
But we must do more than just live life honestly before God, we must also seek to live a life in closer intimacy with God. How do we do this? We must seek God. Now I know everyone here has heard enough about having a daily time with God to almost be sick of hearing it. “Yes, I know that I’m supposed to have a daily time with God, but frankly, I just don’t do it.” Well, you know what? Do it. There’s just not much more that I can say. We have to look at faith and our souls in the same way that we look at our physical health. The way to good physical health is through a balanced, controlled diet and regular exercise. If we fail at one or the other we end up out of shape. It’s easy to see. But what’s harder to see is that this is just as true for our souls. We don’t see it, but it’s just as true. When we feed our souls a regular, balanced spiritual diet and exercise our faith regularly, then we have healthy souls. When we do not, our souls suffer. And there really is no other way around it than to have a regular, consistent time with Christ and an active life of faith.
I know it’s hard, so let me offer a couple of things that I have learned that help me. First, realize that what may work for someone else may not work for you. Some people really connect to God through reading the writings of early church fathers. Some grow through a daily journal. What I’ve discovered is that for me there are a variety of things that help me connect to Christ in an intimate way. I may spend a season working through a devotional book and then turn to a time of journal writing. Having variety in how I spend time with God daily helps me to not get in a rut and keeps my time with God fresh. Second, know when something isn’t working. For me, when I see myself snapping at my family or having a bad attitude towards friends I know that my time with God just isn’t touching me as it should. That’s the time that I usually try something new to experience God in an new way. Third, try using SOAP. Ok, I hope you’re using soap at least in a physical sense, but I also hope that the acronym SOAP will help you grow closer to Christ. It’s real simple – Scripture, Observation, Action, Prayer. Read scripture, maybe using a daily reading plan. Pick out one observation that you have about the text. Reflect on what that scripture means and how God is using it to call you to a specific action. Record that action as a goal for the day. Finally, write a prayer lifting up your life and particularly that action. SOAP – Scripture, Observation, Action, and Prayer.
But a healthy soul needs more than just to be fed well, it must be exercised. If we just take in from God and do not live out faith we will find that our faith becomes weak. A strong faith is built from a life of action. Do you ever wonder how the great saints of God stand for faith amid insurmountable opposition? They can stand because they have built up their strength by exercising their faith. When we take our faith and put it into action we get to see that God is at work. Our service to God helps is to see that God is faithful and gives us the assurance that when life brings us trouble that God is with us. Serving God helps us to know that God is there in the small things and will be with us in the larger things. Just as our physical bodies grow stronger when we exercise, so too our souls go stronger when we exercise our faith. If you want to see your faith grow you have to begin using your faith.