Excuses

Have you ever sat in church listening to a preacher go on about the great faith of the saints of scripture and thought to yourself, "Yeah, but those are Bible characters, the super heroes of faith, I can't be like them spiritually?"  Maybe it's just me, but at times I read about what some of these great men of our faith did, and I think to myself, "that will never happen with me because there is no way I can have the faith that they did."  I read something the other day that completely convicted me of this line of thinking.  Listen to what John Owen has to say about this line of thought:

"So when we are spiritually minded, we shall abound in spiritual thoughts.  Occasional thoughts of spiritual things do not prove we are spiritually minded.  A spiritually minded person abounds in spiritual thoughts.  (And you will say, how do we know that we about in spiritual thoughts?) Read Psalm 119 and examine yourself by that pattern.  Can you truly speak the same words as David, if not with the same degree of zeal, yet with the same sincerity of grace?  You will say, 'But that was David.  We cannot be like him!'  But as far as I know, we must be like him if we mean to come to that place where he is now.  It will ruin our souls if, when we read in Scripture how the saints of God express their experience of faith, love and delight in God and their constant thoughts of God, we excuse ourselves by saying that we were never meant to be like them.  But these were our 'examples' and were written for 'our admonition, on whom the ends of the age have come' (1 Cor 10:11).  If we do not have the same delight in God as they had, the same spiritual mindedness as they, then we can have no evidence that we please God as they did or shall go to that place where they have gone.  The holy men of God, who obtained this testimony, that they pleased God, did not walk before God in a corrupt, earthly manner.  THeir obedience was not half-hearted.  They meditated continually on the law; they thought of God at every moment and their minds were free from other things; they delighted in God and 'followed hard after him'."

 I think often times we fall short of this because when we read scripture, our goal is to be like the men of scripture, not to be like Christ.  We say and think, "I wish I were as Paul, or David, or Samuel, or John."  But this is, at its heart, idolatry.  We are saying we wish we were as other men, rather than pursuing Christ-likeness.  I realize I sound like a repetitive drone, but run hard after Christ.  Desire Him above all else.  Yesterday I did an exercise with one of my classes.  We broke down the day into activities to see how much time they were spending on each one.  Xbox and facebook ruled the day, with several hours allotted to BOTH.  Time spent meditating on the manifold beauty and perfection of Christ through prayer, scripture, and silence: 0-20 minutes.  My challenge to you is to do the same inventory.  How much time a day do you spend on trivial matters such as TV, recreation, movies, video games, social media, etc.  And when you are done with that self-evaluation, try this: for a month, do not spend more time on any of those other things in a day than you do in prayer (dedicated prayer, not prayer in the car), scripture, and meditation on Christ and his glory.