entitled?

Isn’t summer great? We get to spend all this time with friends and family, going from place to place, completely losing ourselves in all these petty pleasures that all pass away… and yet we enjoy summer year after year without hesitation! I’m not saying summer’s bad… but I find it slightly humorous that we somehow expect, or feel like we’re entitled to some sort of “freedom” from the world, or our families, or school, or work… and in thinking this way we lose sight of the truest of reasons for even our own existence.

It’s one thing to make “Christian” acknowledgements with our lips, but is that where it ends? We like to say or post on facebook that Christianity is “not a religion, it’s a relationship.” This is a good philosophy to contemplate on, but there is so much danger in thinking and operating in this way, because the trouble that potentially arises here is the fact that it’s so easy for us to become hypocritical with our mouths, and nothing else reaches any deeper. In Matthew 23:27 Jesus just clotheslines the Pharisees by calling them “whitewashed tombs” because they appear or sound so beautiful on the outside, but inside they’re full of death and uncleanness. Wow! I never want to come to a point in my life where Christ can call me a whitewashed tomb! The problem is that we’ve grown so used to the fact that church, or prayer, or tithing, or “being good” merits us any sort of righteousness at all! In Isaiah 64:6 we read that even our most righteous of acts are filthy in comparison to the holiness of God!

Church has done such a great job at enabling the “Christian mask.” We have all these things that we do or say or sing, that we as church members have become so accustomed to, that their meaning and depth just slip between the cracks. We’ve been taught songs that may be catchy or fun. We’ve said prayers that are easy to remember or repeat. We’ve held services every Sunday or every Wednesday. And all of these things are great things, but have the potential to become detrimental to the relationship we claim to have with Christ.

The biggest message of who Christ was and is – is that he came into this world in order to have a better relationship with us. I love Ephesians 2:12-13 which says:

“remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”

What a picture of the love of Christ! We battle so much within ourselves at trying to discover “true love” and we seek it out in pursuing success, or money, or that one guy or one girl, and we completely miss the point: that Christ came so that WE who we once far off may be brought nearer into a restored relationship with him. That relationship with him is something that requires more time and devotion than what we spend at church on a Sunday morning or Wednesday evening.

What drags us down, deeper, and deeper, and further and further away from Christ is the repetition of traditions that have no meaning to us beyond the surface. And so we grow up, go to church, get married, take the kids to church, and live this life of routine where every Sunday morning becomes “God time” and the rest of the week is our time to live, work, or play.

We’ve come into an age that is so dangerously close to devastation and all we can think about is our own entitlement. We feel as if we can sit in church on Sunday and carry our Bible with us and take notes and say a prayer a few times a week, maybe that’s enough to grant us the freedoms to make our own choices in our own life. We feel like all of our own deeds and accomplishments and “service to his church”  will somehow be sufficient enough for Christ to satisfy His desire for intimate relationship with us.

WRONG

Christ spent most of His ministry here on earth just nailing the Pharisees and rebuking their religious practices. Because it’s not about all the prayers we can say or the songs we can sing. It’s so much more than that. Having a relationship with God is not the summation of what we do and what we give.

But RATHER, what we do and what we give are the products of the relationship we have with Christ.