Daily devotion – Churchless worshippers
How far do you and will you travel each weekend for your children’s sporting activities each year? How much money and time do you put into your favourite hobby or passion?
Do you ever complain to the sporting body that the distance is too far, so your child won’t be involved in the sport he or she loves and that you are just as zealous to see them do well in?
When the fees come through for playing a certain sport, or a certain larger amount for an extra school excursion or trip, do you advise the school or club that you are only going to pay a small amount but yet still want the full benefit of the special trip?
If you child does not want to go to school, do you abide by their decision even if they are primary age?
Today, at the beginning of the third millennium, and living in the Last Days of Bible prophecy, we have a phenomenon unthinkable in any other century. Churchless Christians!
Many professed Christians are nomadic hitchhikers without accountability, without discipline, living apart from the regular benefits of the ordinances, and, perhaps most revealing, without responsibility.
If you don’t join, you don’t have to attend, serve, or give. You can be on the perpetual take and it never costs! If your family is being served by, say, three Churches, who will ever know where your money goes?
Christian consumerism – is pretending to be a Christian without paying – that is the ultimate.
There is a price that will be paid, and the price might be higher than you ever dreamed.
A Church prayer meeting’s attendance will give you a real guide to the actual size of a congregation. Today’s ecclesiastical shoppers attend one Church for preaching, send their children to a second Church for its youth program, and go to a third Church’s small group.
Their basic motto is to ask, “What’s in it for me?”
I call it spectator Christianity and it is predicated on relationless Christianity.
Jesus said, “I in them and you in Me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that You sent Me…” John 17:23.
Following Jesus Christ costs. It costs your time, your service, your passion, your finances….actually it costs you your life!
Romans 12:1 I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. 2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
3 For I say, through the grace given to me, to everyone who is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, as God has dealt to each one a measure of faith. 4 For as we have many members in one body, but all the members do not have the same function, 5 so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another. 6 Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, let us prophesy in proportion to our faith; 7 or ministry, let us use it in our ministering; he who teaches, in teaching; 8 he who exhorts, in exhortation; he who gives, with liberality; he who leads, with diligence; he who shows mercy, with cheerfulness.
It’s time for the Church to grow up, to show up, to pray up and to reveal a life that has been transformed by the presence of the Holy Spirit in every part of one’s being and living.
Where does that leave you today?