The temptations in your life
are no different from what others experience.
And God is faithful.
He will not allow the temptation
to be more than you can stand.
When you are tempted,
he will show you a way out
so that you can endure.
1 Corinthians 10:13
Is it really possible for a Christian to become overexposed to spiritual things? Yes, if having blessings from God in such abundance makes us hardened to them. It can happen when we become the benefactors of a great number of God’s blessings. Our business goes well. Our health is good. Our children are fine. Our marriage is strong. Our church is good. The music is great. Our pastor is solid. Our home is lovely. Our ministry is bearing fruit. Our cars are new.
A believer who wades through God’s favour and God’s blessing and God’s bounty day after day, week after week, year after year can begin to court the dangers of erosion. How? Things get to be predictable. They become routine. You grow cynical. And before you know it, you can be lusting while you’re singing a gospel song. You can be thanking God for His forgiveness of your sins while you harbour bitterness toward your brother or sister in Christ. What you’re doing is just another religious duty. A. W. Tozer writes,
Familiarity may breed contempt even at the very altar of God. How frightful a thing it is for the preacher when he becomes accustomed to his work, when his sense of wonder departs, when he gets used to the unusual, when he loses his solemn fear in the presence of the High and Holy One; when, to put it bluntly, he gets a little bored with God and heavenly things.1
What’s true in the pulpit is true in the pew. Something has drifted far off course if, when you worship, there isn’t a sense of awe and respect for your heavenly Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s what concerned Jesus so much about the first-century Ephesian church—their perfunctory, ho-hum, business-as-usual attitude about life and ministry. Jesus has that same concern for us in the twenty-first century.
1. A. W. Tozer, God Tells the Man Who Cares (Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications, 1992), 92.
Taken from The Church Awakening by Charles R. Swindoll. Copyright © 2010 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Faith Words, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
