Lukewarm Water

It’s week five and I still can’t believe I’m in Australia. The last few weeks have been beyond amazing. Through lectures and bonding with different people here, it’s already been an experience I am sure to never forget.

As we “speak” J I am sitting in a coffee shop in Byron Bay—a small beach hippie town just an hour south of the Gold Coast—drinking possibly the best loose leaf chai tea I have ever tasted in my whole life. I couldn’t even tell you how many times I’ve asked myself when my life got so coolJ

I’ve learned through this journey of self-discovery that you’re living the life you were meant to live when you wake up nearly every day and ask yourself when you’re life became so amazing. I am sure now that this is where God has been trying to get me to for this exact purpose. Along with that though, I have also realized why it was that I was so resistant to God’s calling. If I leave once, I will leave again and I will start this unstoppable habit—separating myself time and time again from friends and family—the dearest people in my life. But what I’ve also come to realize is that I have too easily made those closest to me idols in my life. I think we can easily fall into idolatry with our friends and family members because it doesn’t feel like idolatry. It’s been such a hard lesson for me, but has just begun stretching me in unfamiliar, uncomfortable but much needed ways.

The past few lectures have been life changing and life challenging. We had a week on hearing God’s voice, which I’ll flush out in my next blog and also the Character and Nature of God. The Character and Nature of God really spurred my heart. I believe it has brought me to the most pivotal point in my Christian walk.

God’s really been convicting me for the last two years of being a “lukewarm” Christian. I’ve been a good person, subjecting myself to the easier parts of God’s will for my life. I’m nice to people, I go to church, I tithe. Yeah, I’m a Christian. But last week when our speaker was talking about God being a good God, I started to be really challenged. He started off by saying that God doesn’t want bad things happening to good people. It’s the age old question, isn’t it? Why do bad things happen to good people? I wondered if God didn’t want that to happen, why did they? If I believed that God is a good God, then there must be reason behind martyrs and people dying for the sake of the gospel.

In the long run, it began to put my faith into question. Our leader asked us what it meant to be a true disciple: the willingness to lay it all down to Christ. You see, I feel as though our world has sugar coated Christianity. We don’t realize that following Jesus is more than calling yourself a Christian. The harsh reality is that that won’t give you access to Heaven. Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:21 that many will come to Him on the day of the judgment saying Lord, Lord, I did all of these things and Jesus says, “I did not know you, depart from me.” Then again we see in James 2:14-17 “What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warm and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.”

So then I’m left with this, the question I’ve been wrestling with for three days now; do I really truly and honestly believe that God is 1) real and 2) sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins? Because I’m sick of living in this half way lukewarm Christianity, “So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth,” (Revelation 3:16). I’m coming to the place where I need to either jump completely in or completely out. If tomorrow someone threw me in jail and told me I had to change my faith or I would be executed, I think I would change my faith, because I have this looming fear that if I were to say, “I believe Jesus Christ is my personal Lord and Savior” I would die and nothing would happen. I have this strong desire to meet with God in such a tangible way so that I would be able to say without a shadow of a doubt that God is all that He says He is, and to live according to all He says to live by in the bible.

It’s a pretty scary place to be because I know that in the end my life will be changed. I know what the end outcome will be; because in the craziest most nonsensical way I have faith that God will come through for me on this. In some extravagant way I trust that God will completely reveal Himself to me so that I can say in earnest, “Whatever you ask of me God, I will do, whether it be an underground missionary in Afghanistan or planting churches in the heart of Africa, I will go where you ask me to go and do what you want me to do.”

Until then, I’m sitting in a pot of lukewarm water.

Oy vay.