Growing spiritually

Growing in the Christian faith is often a challenging climb. It takes work. It demands a desire to know God and grow in your relationship with him. It often feels like an impossible climb, but reality is that true spiritual growth is rather easy. It simply takes some intentional actions on our part. The first warning of the book of Hebrews describes how easy it is to miss out on what God wants for you.

Heb. 2:1 "We must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away." You need to know that there are undercurrents of culture, life and the world around us that will slowly pull us away from our relationship with God....if we aren't paying attention. Hebrews warns that if we don't pay attention we will drift. As a young man growing up in Iowa I loved to canoe. We would take the canoe to the lake or to a river and simply float along. The currents would take us downstream quite easily, but if you have to get back to where you started it will be difficult. The currents that got you here are unrelenting...they will continue to pull you away from your starting point. My mental picture of this is that paying attention is the awareness of the currents around us and an intentional decision to row against those currents to pursue this walk with God. Living the Christian life is counter-cultural.

The words of Hebrews are haunting, "pay attention...so you don't drift away." If we aren't watching we will soon be carried along with the world around us and miss what God wants to do in our lives. When someone comes to see me with a problem in their life I often ask this question, "Are you reading your bible?" And, I can assure you that 100% of the time I watch as they hang their head and whisper softly, "no, but I know I should be...." Let me paint this picture more clearly for you. The boat you sail in and you are one. The river we all float in is this life. The currents are the pull of the world, the devil and our desire for other things. The oar we need to row against these currents is God's word. If you aren't in God's word then you are like the poor man in a canon heading towards the waterfall without a paddle. Doom is coming and he has no way to avert it. So, as I'm getting ready to teach through this passage tomorrow I'm thinking about these words, "pay attention so that you don't drift away..."