SuperChristian

When did doing what God has called us to do via His word become something that set us apart as some special tier of believer?

This morning I was checking my phone and saw five minutes worth of audio messages on Instagram from one of my dearest friends. In them he shared how he was being put on a pedestal at work (he works at a Christian organization) because he spends time in prayer and Scripture each day.

He was grieved.

Hearing it, I was grieved too.

This dear friend is devoted to Jesus. He is heavily committed to making disciples of Jesus and building the Kingdom of God where he lives. He fasts. He prays. He dives into Scripture. He tells others about Jesus. He disciples.

And because of this, other believers treat him like he’s special. And he doesn’t want to be. Like Paul, he knows that he’s the worst of sinners that Jesus came to save (1 Timothy 1:15). He longs for others to devote themselves to the things of Jesus.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re seeking to live for Jesus too.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re like me.

Your love for Jesus fades over time.

You drift away from Him.

And you look around to those who are intimately close to Jesus and see them as special or super.

However, there are not such things as SuperChristians. These men and women around us have simply held fast to Jesus, as the Bible has taught them to do.

In the book of Hebrews, we are called to hold fast to our Savior over and over again. The book of Hebrews is considered by some to be the most overlooked and neglected book of the New Testament (see Adrio Konig’s {what a name. geez.} book on Hebrews: Christ Above All).

Consider this provocative but weirdly enough encouraging verse:

Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it. – Hebrews 2:1

None of us drift toward Jesus.

That’s not a thing.

All of us drift away from Him.

And this one verse tells us how not to.

Pay attention to what you’ve heard.

Those of you who are followers of Jesus, you’ve heard the gospel. You’ve heard the call to get to work for the Kingdom of God where you live. Are you paying attention to that message? Are you digging into its implications on your life each and every day?

If, like me, sometimes the answer is no, there’s likely one of four things causing you to drift (Michael Kruger’s book Hebrews for You talks about these).

1. Busyness

I will share first the one that seems the most harmless. What does a schedule full of activities have to do with growing or not growing in our faith? The answer is, a whole lot.

The most dangerous thing in the world to my spiritual growth is my busyness. In this current season of my life, I am working super long days. I’m commuting an hour both ways for work, and due to the nature of student ministry, it has lead to 12-14 hour days over and over again. And unfortunately I’ve fallen hook, line, and sinker into every pitfall of the enemy. Drifting from my Savior day by day. It was only in this study of Hebrews I’m on that I was reoriented. And I can praise God that I started my day today in His word and presence.

2. Suffering

Our suffering causes us to drift. In the face of real and raw pain due to living in a fallen world, we find ourselves pushing God away. It is our knee-jerk response. I don’t know what it is that you are facing at this moment in regard to suffering. I know that we all have our fair share. My prayer for you is that you would cling to Jesus. I don’t have all the answers to all the questions I have regarding my own pains, but I am seeking to cling to Jesus all the same.

3. Opposition

Christians in America in 2022 are facing perhaps for the first time in our lives exactly what the church has historically faced throughout all of time. Opposition. Here’s what happens when we face opposition to the ways of Jesus. We do what is prevalent in our church culture today: we take an us vs. them mentality. We fight. We petition. We vote. We try all we can to take the lead in society.

Or we drift from Jesus because it’s hard.

There’s a better way fyi. Us FOR them. The church should enter into the world with goodness, kindness, and beauty. But that’s for another time.

4. Sin

Lastly, sin. My sin will separate me from intimacy with Jesus. My lustful thoughts. My anger. My fear. My pride. My desire to get the glory. These things will keep me from remaining close to my Lord and Savior.

Brother or sister in Christ, fight the drift. It takes intentionality and focus. It takes us waking up to the fact that we’re further from intimacy with Jesus than we thought we’d be.

Let’s go back to the friend I spoke about at the beginning of this post. I can promise you his heart isn’t that more people were like him in that they read Scripture, prayed, fasted, made disciples and all of this on a daily basis. His heart is that more people experience intimacy with God through these things.

There’s no such thing as SuperChristians.

We’re all the worst of sinners and we’re all in danger of drifting.

But my prayer is that more people would become like my friend. They would encounter God by pursuing God and making much of God.

Cause in the words of Syndrome, “if everyone is super, than nobody is”.

In His Name,

Nate Roach

Bored At Church

Every Sunday and Wednesday I look out in the youth room or in the sanctuary and I see a lot of stoic, tired faces. Maybe there’s small talk, but people seem at times to be in the room simply because the doors are open. When I ask one of the students to pray at youth, I’m often met with twenty seconds of silence until some brave soul raises their hand.

A lot of weeks, I don’t understand this stoicism, this exhaustion, this ‘it’s Sunday so we should be here’ mentality. What we are doing at the weekend and midweek services is the experience of encountering God together.

That should be the least boring experience known to man.

We get to commune with the God of all creation, the God who is at work in our world day after day.

*yawn*

How can we be bored at church? How can we look like we’re exhausted and are there out of obligation and duty? How can we have no excitement, no anticipation, no joy (I guess it’s down in our hearts)?

I go to sporting events, game nights, golf courses and movie premieres. At all of these places (and many more) I see followers of Jesus pumped, excited, and joyful. I see them worshipping. I see them cheering, not caring what others think around them. Heck, I see some aspects of worship before a tasty meal at a great restaurant.

So why is it that we’re bored in church?

It’s not an issue of not having the capacity to worship.

Most people would respond to such an outlook with statements about setting, vibes, culture, style, etc. The enemy of our souls has stolen the worship of multitudes of modern Christians by giving us a consumeristic viewpoint to the church.

When I look at Scripture, I see no caveat to deep worship.

God’s worthiness of our praise is not dependent upon earthly things.

The ability to worship is not an issue of style or setting or atmosphere. The ability to worship is an issue of awe.

I’m afraid too many of us have no awe of God, and so we are definitely bored at church. We don’t commune with God in prayer. We don’t look at the character and works of God as described for us in Scripture. We don’t thank God for what He’s done in our lives or in the lives of those around us. We’re distracted by earthly things and so we have no awe when we enter the worship settings in our local churches.

I’m afraid too many of us need a ‘feeling’ in our stomachs to worship.

Again, the enemy of God has done a great job of making worship about feelings. We want to feel something. When we don’t, when the music isn’t Elevation Worship or Hillsong, we fall back into a passive attendance, a bored experience.

How sly and cunning our enemy is. He takes a good thing (feelings of God’s presence) and makes them the end goal. He stifles our worship with an obsession with feeling.

We can fight back.

Here’s just a few things you can do to not be bored in church.

1. Pursue the Greatness of God

Those who get pumped at sporting events know the ins and outs of the teams they cheer for. Those who get pumped at playing video games will research and even watch other people play the same game. We worship what we pursue. Get into the Word of God. Get before God in prayer. Encounter Him in His greatness. When I’m communing with God during the week, I can’t help but give Him my all in worship on the weekend!

2. Pray Before Attending The Service

Our worship problem is often a prayerlessness problem. We don’t ask God to give us worshipping hearts and then we wonder why we’re easily distracted, bored, and turned off to the service. We don’t ask God to give us a new mentality, then we wonder why we’re so consumeristic and selfish when it comes to worship. We don’t ask God to stir our hearts, and then we wonder why we’re cold and dry. Do you pray as a family the night before church, before you leave on Sunday morning, or before you get out of the car in the parking lot? It’s no wonder we struggle to worship when we don’t actively pray for help to do so.

3. Practice a Posture of Worship

Posture can guide our hearts and minds in worship. When we raise our hands, close our eyes, get on our knees, etc., we tune ourselves into the presence of God. The Bible is chock full of examples where the people of God praise God in exuberant fashion. If you’re focused on what others think, you won’t worship. My prayer is that my daughter Gracie sees the same level of worship from me at church on Sunday as she sees at a football game on Friday night.

Let me close with this quote from Max Lucado. I enjoy him for devotional reading and he has a great chapter on this concept in his book Just Like Jesus.

Enter a church sanctuary and look at the faces. A few are giggly, a couple are cranky, but by and large we are content. Content to be there. Content to sit and look straight ahead and leave when the service is over. Content to enjoy an assembly with no surprises or turbulence. Content with a ‘nice’ service. And since a nice service is what we seek, a nice service is usually what we find. A few, however, seek more. A few come with childlike enthusiasm.

I want to be a man who comes to worship like a child.

I want to be a man who isn’t content with a nice, normal, typical, boring experience in the presence of God.

I want more.

And when I want more, God is able and willing to provide more.

In His Name,

Nate Roach

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God’s Pursuit In Prayer

The strain on my mind and heart feels near-constant sometimes as I struggle and yearn to maintain my relationship with the Lord. There are days, weeks, entire seasons of my life where it’s a battle, a struggle, a fight to pursue the spiritual disciplines that I know will yield spiritual growth in my life. It can be exhausting to feel the pressure of pursuing God in my daily life. That’s weird to type out, but it’s no less true. 

In the quiet moments before sleep, my mind runs a recap of my day, and I feel the internal self- scrutinizing begin, as I question how well I pursued the things of God.

I wake up with the sun, strain to pursue God in the midst of earthly things, and run through the same self-scrutiny at the end of the day.

In the midst of these seasons, I wrestle with feeling like this shouldn’t be the case. Jesus proclaims that His yoke is easy, and His burden is light (Matthew 11:30). Yet in every church service and small group setting, I’d be reminded of the importance of my relationship with God. I’d be reminded of the priority it should hold in my life, the priority the pursuit of spiritual disciplines should hold in my personal life. This would push me right back into the weight of feeling responsible for maintaining my relationship with God.

Maybe you’ve experienced the same feelings and struggles.

Maybe you feel an immense pressure and weight to make sure you do everything you can to maintain your relationship with God.

What shatters this weight, what sets us free to have renewed joy and energy for our days, free from the shackles of feeling wholly responsible for our own spiritual growth, is when we remind ourselves that God is a pursuing God.

Consider the following verses.

There is no one who understands; there is no one who seeks God. – Romans 3:11

No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day. – John 6:44

See! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. – Revelation 3:20

I know that I’ve stripped all three of these verses from their contextual passages, but it is widely attested and widely circulated in theological circles that all of these have implications regarding God’s pursuing grace. Most often, these verses are used in the context of salvation, of people coming to know the Lord. In this context, we see that God does the first pursuing in the onset of our relationship with Him. It is His grace that draws us to Him.

Look next at the words of Paul to the church at Galatia:

You foolish Galatians! Who has cast a spell on you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? I only want to learn this from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by the Spirit, are you now finishing by the flesh? – Galatians 3:1-3

Paul was combating in Galatia the doctrine of false teachers who were saying that newly converted Christians had to follow all of the Jewish laws and regulations. In essence, new believers were being told they had to adapt to Jewish culture, and become culturally Jewish in order to be right before God.

So Paul is calling the Galatian churches foolish for straying into this false doctrine. The point he is making in these verses is that God draws us to Himself when we first enter into a relationship with Him, and our continued growth in spiritual things is dependent upon His grace as well. We didn’t start our walk with Him via grace, only to be dependent upon our own flesh for the rest of our walk with Him.

HOW FREEING THIS IS.

I am incapable of pursuing God in my own strength, in my own sinful flesh. No one seeks God without God first drawing them closer to Himself.

I forget this truth, and God graciously reminds me of it time and time again. When God brings renewed vigor and understanding of this truth, it changes how I view prayer.

Prayer is easily my least practiced spiritual discipline. This is a hard admittance to make, but it is true. I can go hours in studying the Word and memorizing Scripture, but it takes all of my effort to get into my prayer closet and have personal times of prayer with the Lord. I too often begrudgingly meet my quota of prayer time because it feels like my way of maintaining the relationship.

Yet when I meditate upon the fact that God is the one pursuing me, drawing me into communion with Him, this changes prayer 100%. It is not burdensome any longer (I don’t say this as if prayer should ever be burdensome, this is merely just a confession). It is a precious and wonderful gift of God’s grace, as He draws me into deeper intimacy with Him!

Hallelujah!

What a wonderful gift! Any time I feel prompted to pray, that is God present grace. God is not distant, He is here, drawing me into communication with Him.

There is so much here, so much of God’s character that is worthy of praise.

He knows that I need Him. He knows that prayer changes my outlook, attitude, heart, mindset, and passion for Him.

Because He knows I need Him, He draws me, calls me, prompts me to pray.

Since no human heart naturally seeks God or can come to God without his drawing, no one even thinks about praying unless God is prompting or leading us to pray by his Holy Spirit… – Timothy Keller

Be encouraged.

Whenever you feel led to pray, study God’s Word, or worship with other believers, God’s grace is drawing you into deeper intimacy with Him.

In His Name,
Nathan Roach

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