Growth

Friends in Christ,

  Talk of the fiscal cliff seems to be dominating the news.  It looms larger and larger each passing day, and none of our elected 'leaders' seem that interested in compromising one single inch in order to avoid fiscal calamity.  Tax rates and budget cuts that will affect real people seem to be little more than bargaining chips cast on the table in hopes of one party 'winning', neglecting the fact that the people seem to continue to lose.

  The sad thing is, this is all our own making.  The fiscal cliff didn't invent until Congress invented it a few years back, devising something that would be such a threat that it would drive the parties to find a common ground between their battle-hardened positions.  As humanity tends to do often, we selected gratification in the moment and chose to push punishment a little farther down the road.  Congress ignored future pain and selected present satisfaction.

  Humans have been doing this since the beginning of time--rather than accept the difficult now, knowing that it will lead to growth and eventually help build us into the people we want to be, we choose to take the easy road today, knowing in the back of our heads that we'll suffer in the future, but we weigh the present with more gravity than the future.

  Our spiritual lives aren't any different.  We consider engaging with the spiritual disciplines, making the hard choices now, but we opt for entertainment today, often engaging with things of little or no spiritual substance. It's easier.  But those choices have consequences--and we won't grow into the Christians we want to be, that God wants us to be, unless we choose to do some of the hard work now.  It's not going to be easy to make time to pray and study Scripture, but to develop your prayer life and know Scripture well in the future, that's what it takes now.

  I'm not master or expert at this.  I often choose the easy way out, opting for entertainment.  Not all entertainment is bad, but to continue to elevate it over spiritual disciplines time after time stunts our growth as Christians.  It manages to block part of what God wants to do in and through us.

  So let's make the hard choices and choose to study, choose to discipline ourselves and live like Christ now, trusting that God will do a work in us that will grow into the future.  The effects of our present choices are magnified in our future.  So let us praise God now, do the work of discipleship now, and entrust our future to God, knowing he will continue to grow us up as Christians.

In Christ,
Keith