DON'T CHUG TO A STOP

Jim Warner, author of Aspirations of Greatness, wrote, But when zeal turns to duty, and then to drudgery, we begin to question everything, floundering in the chop of nagging details or petty frustrations.  In the trough of these swells clear answers are rare and we become easily discouraged.  Fear and lethargy, triggered by an increasing fog of questioning and uncertainty, replace the decisiveness and direction  possible earlier in calmer waters and under clearer skies.

When I read these comments, it struck me as to the many who hang on by these threads; duty, drudgery, lethargy, and then fog.  Have you ever been to a tractor pull where all in competition start from the same light weight and then as they move forward the weights increase and eventually the tractor chugs to a stop?  The unit that traveled the farthest under the increasing load wins.

That's how we can feel.  The longer we live the heavier the burdens seem to mount.  We wonder if we are about to chug to a stop.

That's how we CAN feel; but such isn't necessary.

The Kingdom of God has so many delightful twists and turns.  One of my favorites is that we are actually to be newer today than yesterday.  This isn't Sunday School talk.  This is where-we-experience-life talk.  Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come. II Cor. 5:17

Of the many wonderful things Church is, growing newer day by day surely fascinates the tar out of me!  What delight!  What promise!  What reality!  What fantastic unexplanation?

I feel sympathetic to the masses who are engrossed in church who find no joy, no life, and no renewal to their personal existence.  Sighing, these seem to have misplaced the joy and somehow inherited duty and then drudgery and then lethargy only to eventually live in some sort of grayed church fog.

On the contrary, may we awaken to the reality of church.  We are not to live in some Preservation Movement; but rather from a perpetual New Birth.  There is nothing on earth as defying of what has been nor of what is than the Kingdom Life of what can become...in the very next moment.  May we arise to the very dream that Jesus has for us...that we might arise to live and really live...at every moment called NOW!