Serving God or Serving Self

A few years ago I had the opportunity to go and visit another church that had a service for young people. My guess is that the average age of people in the service was probably 21 years old. I was misinformed about the starting time of the service so I arrived late and sat in the back as the speaker began to teach from the Word of God. The teaching from God’s Word was Biblically centered and clear. The speaker was clearly prepared to teach from God’s Word but there was an attitude in the room that came across to me that I couldn’t escape. The room was filled with a few hundred young people who were giving a Sunday night to meet with God’s people and hopefully meet with God but there was something unnerving about the experience. Cell phones were constantly being checked, and some were ringing out loud. People were moving in and out of the room for apparent bathroom breaks. Aberrant conversations abounded as the Word was being taught and there was a general unrest amongst the group. As the speaker concluded, the music leader came onto the stage. At that time there was an attention shift. People became much more focused and even serious as we sang four songs that all called the believer to sold out commitment to Christ. We sang “Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe…sin had left a crimson stain He washed it white as snow.” The song rang out in that room but I’m afraid it hadn’t been practiced that night.

I’m afraid that what went on that night was a living contradiction. It was a generation of people displaying an inconsistency that we are culturally and naturally trained to display. We are a generation that fiercely opposes war but we love our American freedoms. We hate the idea of poverty but we give almost nothing to fight it. We’ve become “disenfranchised” with the idea of traditional church but our weak substitutes for the church are incredibly self serving. We can spot hypocrisy from a mile away but we don’t know God’s Word well enough to call it out in our own lives. And we love the idea of “sold-out commitment” but we can’t sit through a sermon where the speaker doesn’t do back flips and we can’t get ourselves out of bed every Sunday morning.

With what attention do we give God when we are confronted with Him, in a sense, face to face. God may my ideas of Christian commitment carry over into my everyday life. May Christ give me a longer attention span. May He give me the ability to commit to things that will ruin my selfish routine. When Christ calls me to “take up (my) cross daily and follow Me” I need to know that for me that will not mean missions trips around the world but consistent following after God in Coopersburg or wherever you find yourself.

-Mark Evans