"Sarge"
Director NCFP
2 posts
Mar 05, 2008
2:20 PM
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We live in a culture of convenience. We don’t like to be inconvenienced ever for anything any time. Whether it’s the convenience of getting our morning coffee from Starbucks via the drive-through lane so we don’t have to park and go inside to refusing to wait in line to be seated in a restaurant, we don’t like to be inconvenienced. Churches, like the rest of society, cater to our demand for convenience as well. It’s inconvenient to hold worship services in the summer because people like to use their weekends to go to their cabins or on vacation and it’s inconvenient to go to church, so we cancel or scale back worship. Convenience thinking pushes leaders to want everything to be easy for their people: easy worship, easy bible study, easy ministry, easy Christianity. I especially see this in how the church ministers to men. “Don’t expect too much from men,” “make it convenient for men because we can’t ask too much from them” are the mottos of Convenience Christianity. This forces me to ask, “When are men ever taught to sacrifice for a cause greater than the accumulation of money and things?” “When are men ever taught to sacrifice for something greater than themselves?” I am convinced that convenience is the ENEMY of sacrifice! It was not convenient for Jesus to die on the cross. It was a sacrifice. Writing of Jesus, the author of Hebrews declares, “because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Hebrews 10:14-emphasis mine). Had He wanted the convenient life, Jesus would have listened to the devil (Matthew 4:9), bowed down to him, and avoided the cross completely. The devil loves Convenience Christianity but hates sacrifice!
We cannot be holy and pure without sacrifice. It will never be convenient to live a life of purity. It will always be a sacrifice. In the purity ministry, men arrive at Purity Boot Camp at 6:00 a.m. Why so early? Because men do not need Purity Boot Camp to be convenient for them. Men need to sacrifice some sleep and pay a price for their purity. Why is it required of men that they hold one another accountable daily in the Purity Platoons? Men need to sacrifice their isolation and lack of accountability. Beloved, do the hard thing! Sacrifice builds character. Sacrifice produces spiritual depth and maturity. Sacrifice makes the prize valuable. Convenience is the ENEMY of sacrifice!
Last Edited on 7-Mar-2008 6:06 PM
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