Month: April 2014

In our Western culture, it seems that being comfortable is of utmost importance to us. Just watch TV commercials. Many of them are working to convince us that we need some kind of product in order to make our lives a bit more “comfortable” or “easy.”

This is particularly true when it comes to commercials about technology. I find the new Samsung Galaxy commercial especially interesting. The bottom line of the commercial is that Samsung’s tablet can do what no one else’s can. Need to do two things at once? Samsung makes it happen. Need more pixels? Samsung has it! Need better apps? Samsung has them. Apparently, Samsung makes life much easier and enjoyable.

Now, I’m not against Samsung or any technology for that matter. I enjoy technology and use it daily if not hourly. I’m glad for what it provides and the many ways it makes it easier to be productive.

And I’m also not against comfort per se. I enjoy and am thankful for the conveniences that I have. However, I do think that we need to be careful not to make personal ease our chief end. I realize this can be somewhat difficult for us as our culture does a pretty good job of discipling us in pursuing that which brings the most comfort.

The reason comfort can be a danger is that, according to Ajith Fernando in his book Jesus-Driven Ministry, it can have an effect upon Biblical wholeness. He writes:

We are seeing more and more people today who are moving to churches “where they feel more comfortable.” When did comfort become such a high value in ministry and church life? Was it when we left the path of biblical Christianity? The gospel is too radical and the needs of the world too urgent for us to ever be comfortable! But many Christians today have come to think that a major goal of the church is to entertain people and supply them with services that they want, such as a good youth program or music program. In such an environment, we are going to see people moving to churches where they are comfortable. The result will be that churches are going to miss out on some vital sources of enrichment through discomfort. They will become unhealthy by missing out on biblical wholeness. Biblical churches always are uncomfortable places because they are always looking for biblical wholeness.

No doubt these are some fairly stern words. In reading them it might help to know that Fernando has a different ministry context than those of us in the West. Fernando has worked with Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka for over 35 years and as a result, has witnessed and experienced much discomfort during his ministry.

Sacrifice is a key component in the Christian life. It is the way of the cross. Following Christ and staying committed to one another in a local church is not always comfortable or easy. At times it can be quite a struggle.

But according to Fernando, if we are going to develop “Biblical wholeness,” which I will have to say leads to ultimate joy, then the sacrifice of personal comfort will have to be part of the journey.

What is the most urgent need in the church of the Western world today?

Improved evangelism programs?

More missional awareness?

Revived worship?

Growing social ministries (feeding homeless, etc…)?

Stronger age-group ministries (children, youth, etc…)?

No doubt, all of these are important and many would say they are urgent needs. But according to D. A. Carson, the church in the West has a greater need.  What is it? Carson writes:

We need to know God! We think rather little of what he is like, what he expects of us, what he seeks in us. We are not captured by his holiness and his love; his thoughts and words capture too little of our imagination, too little of our discourse, too few of our priorities.

David Wells, research professor at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, appears to agree with Carson’s assessment. He writes that God is now weightless.

It is one of the defining marks our Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life. Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in Gods existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgments no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. It is a condition we have assigned him after having nudged him out to the periphery of our secularized lives.

Wells writes further that because God rests lightly upon us, we will eventually find him uninteresting. “A  God with whom we are on such easy terms and whose reality is little different from our own–a God who is merely there to satisfy our needs–has no real authority to compel and will soon begin to bore us.”

If Wells and Carson are correct, then we must seek to become churches who long to know God. Our desire must be as that of the Apostle Paul when he wrote: I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death (Phil 3:10).

For Paul, “to know Christ was the overarching and unfolding ambition of [his] life–a longing for an ever-deepening, ever-widening, personal knowledge of the Son.” It was his “passion to know [Christ] that energized [his] dogged devotion and his epic quest to take the gospel to the ends of the earth” (see Kent Hughes commentary on Philippians).

Could it be therefore, that the more we as the people of God know Christ the more all other needs in today’s church are met? Could it be that the compulsion to go deeper into the world with missions and evangelism springs from our intimacy with Christ?

Perhaps the prayer we need to pray for ourselves and for the church today needs to be based on Paul’s prayer for the church in Ephesus:

I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe (Eph 1:17-19).