Losing Focus, Losing God, Finding Religion
Romans 14 serves as a great reminder of how easy it is to lose sight of what is really important (it’s not about food, it’s about faith).
It’s easy to take our eyes off of God for a brief moment only to realize that it is difficult to recapture Him in our line of site. And then, gazing across the chasm that has formed during that brief lapse, we find God’s figure fuzzy and distorted…out of focus.
It is here, looking in the general direction of a fuzzy God that we lose our bearings and become lost in religion.
This was the condition of the pharisees, men of great devotion who took their eyes off of God and got lost in religion. Then in their fuzzy thinking they created all kinds of rules and regulations (adding to the scripture) that made following God more difficult, completely disregarding the importance of faith. They forgot that it is faith, not works that make us righteous before God. And, that “whatever does not come from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23).
This is the place where most Christians get lost as well. It’s a quick process. One day you are following God, fellow-shipping with Him, and then after just a short time of slacking off you find that you can’t seem to reconnect with Him in the way that you once did. Then you figure, “well, I’ll keep going to church, being a good person, and giving money and eventually I’ll get back to where I used to be,” only to find that you drift farther and farther from relationship and deeper and deeper into religion. Before you know it your whole spiritual life consists of rules and propriety instead of a deep faith that can move mountains.
I think there is only one way to avoid this predicament. We must, at all costs, fix our eyes on Jesus and press on towards Him. We must hate everything, as it compares to our love for Jesus (Luke 14:26). We must be intentional in our thinking, our living, and our pursuit of God. We must stay focused.
March 12th, 2007 at 7:20 am
good thoughts adam.
March 13th, 2007 at 4:53 am
Thanks d10.