Most of us have a mindset.
We did not deliberately choose to have this mindset, as if we picked it off shelf and tried it on.
Rather we grew into this mindset as a part of our environment.
“Comfort is good. Pain is bad.”
“More money is good. Less money is bad.”
“I deserve a pain free existence.”
When we find discomfort, loss and pain we turn away from it toward comfort.
But is this a Christian mindset?
“This mind-set gives a trajectory to life that is almost universal – namely, away from stress and toward comfort and safety and relief. Then within that very natural trajectory people begin to think of ministry and find ways of serving God inside the boundaries set by the aims of self-protection. Then churches grow up in this mindset, and it never occurs to anyone in such a community of believers that choosing discomfort, stress, and danger might be the right thing – even the normal, biblical thing – to do.”
“Being a Christian should mean that our trajectory is toward need, regardless of danger and discomfort and stress.”
This quote came from John Piper’s book called The Roots of Endurance. The book is a biography of John Newton, Charles Simeon and William Wilberforce.
Health, Finances, Housing, Transportation for the material.
Freedom from pain, personal comfort, personal convenience for the immaterial.
We think we have a right to these things.
Each of us has a limit line (I know I do!) that we think we are entitled to this.
What every happened to a Christian being the one who says.
“Jesus. All I want is you.”
We think of our own comfort.
We are hinged on a trajectory toward convenience and lifestyle lines.
Why don’t we intentionally move away from comfort?
Why don’t we intentionally make ourselves more poor?
I mean it!
I am earnest about this.
From my own heart. Amy and I both.
What does it mean to say Thy Kingdom come? Thy will be done?
I do not know that God’s will is my physical health. I do not know that God’s will is my financial prosperity.
But I know that God’s will is the progress of the gospel, and that God’s will is that I share in the sufferings of Christ my God.
And I know that God’s will is to be glorified by the weakness of my jar