Working for it

I've been reading through a book that a friend gave me for Christmas, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. It's a fantastic book so far, filled with real-life struggle and application. I love to read. I admittedly don't do it as much as I look back and would like. Things always seem to come up- really important things I'm sure. 

My lack of reading and general building-up of the mind over the last few years got me thinking how much I've become like the culture -- quite feelings based. Judaism was quite rules-based. They had several feasts in Jerusalem with required attendance each year. 

They sacrificed, they followed the letter of the law, even the lengthy rules priests added on through the years. Muslims have set prayer times during the day and many wear certain clothing. Mormons require service years. The list is infinitely long but the examples hold that religions require certain things of you, lifestyle things, hard things. Things that take up time and will-power.

But somehow in our world, we've gotten the idea that Christianity is about freedom and how we feel. God wants us to be happy, right? He wants us to want to pray and read the Bible. He wants us to want to go to church. And those are all basically true. They are truths, but we use them as excuses. 

Paul Scherer once said, "The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel." In the book I mentioned at first, Peterson rightly says that we live in the "age of sensation" where "we think that if we don't feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it." The reality is, God says more clearly that "we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting." Worship is an act, not always a feeling.

Don't hear me say we should swing the other way and become legalistic. I believe in God's great sovereignty and our incredible lostness without His calling and direction. But I also believe He's called us to work and He can will us to do it but He'd also like to see some initiative. He'd like to see us use our freedom authentically, not wasting about with things that feel good for a short while but actually put us back into bondage. As C.S. Lewis once said, "We are far too easily pleased."