As a cordless Christian (living in the false security of my own talents, strength, even spiritual gifts), I gave life the ol' college try all week as the pressures of the world volleyed me off its walls like a racquetball. Then, praise God, it was 5:00 P.M. Friday; I had made it through another workweek. I saw Sunday as the opportunity to plug into my "spiritual base station." (I even spoke of church attendance as "getting my battery recharged to face another week.") Then I repeated the cycle. Folks, do you see that this approach is very little different from that of the pre-cross Jew? He depended on himself, calling upon God in times of need, and often feeling like his calls were being forwarded to God's voice mail. This approach to life pretty much parallels the way I lived for the first 13 years of my Christian life. Oh, I was at the church every time the doors were open, and Jesus was definitely the focal point of my life, but He was not my LIFE. If God had somehow removed the power of my own flesh (what I called my life), I would have collapsed like a punctured balloon because that was my only source. I hadn't the faintest idea that Christ was to live His life through me while I rested in His sufficiency instead of in the power of my own personality.
As time rolls by for the Christian who lives that way, the joy of the Lord he knew early on is often supplanted by wearisome religious duty. He rests in the knowledge that he's going to heaven when he dies, but he knows nothing of resting in Christ on earth as he lives. "While a promise remains of entering [God's] rest, [he seems] to have come short of it" (Hebrews 4:1). For most of us, that describes the only approach we've known since we got saved. I'm certainly not saying that the world is to be our Disneyland, but I am saying there is much more to the Christian life than what many believers experience. Regardless of my opinion, the important thing to recognize is that God says there is more to the Christian life than the cordless variety offers. He calls it abundant life.
