Musing 43

One of the reasons why books about sanctification resonate deeply with me is because of growing up in the Bible Belt where I was surrounded by counterfeit Christianity and I wanted to know what real Christianity looked like. The first couple years of my walk, I basically only learned head knowledge from the church library. And because it was a PCUSA church, there was much where the voice of the Shepherd was not heard. Though there were a few good books there, most of them did not give examples of what it meant to follow Christ.

Sure, i learned that I should be patient and faithful, but what does that mean when everyone around me seems to be a Christian, but is just as faithless to their word as the non-Christian? My teenage mind knew there was a disconnect, but because my own home life was very much a Sunday only Christianity, I didn’t have a frame of reference to compare.

It wasn’t until I left home and found a good local church that I started seeing what the gospel looked like in day to day life. And it became so clear to me how different, and sweet, life is among a people who truly love God and who all hear the Shepherd’s voice. No longer is there a “let’s go to church, it matters the most!” only to ignore it every other day of the week. No more was sin treated as something minor, but as the major problem that Scripture treated it as.

And so over my life, I’ve read tons of books on what it looks like to follow Jesus. And my heart breaks for my fellow men and women in the Bible Belt because so many of them are content with where they’re at because they look around and see the same things I did growing up, but are content with it. And so they risk damnation because they do not dig in and ask the hard questions. “is this a sin?” “is it ok that we don’t really look different from the world?” “is the cross I’m supposed to carry this light?”

I pray that as we see signs of revival starting to spark, that such revival would confront the facade we have built and destroy it to replace a dead formalism with a living faith.