Many Christians feel lost spiritually. They look at their relationship with God and it’s become stagnant. They don’t feel like they’re growing, and it feels like they’re just drifting with no direction.
On the other hand, there are other Christians who stay on track with God, and God is taking them places! They feel joy! They feel God’s overwhelming presence in their friendships, in their family and in their career. I believe all of us can experience God like that!
So, my big question today is: how can a Christian stay on track? That’s what our Bible passage is about today.
Our passage today tells us that if we want to stay on track spiritually, we need to make every effort to build character. It’s what matters the most! We should build character when we are alone, and we should build character with others.
Let’s be honest. We all know Christians who are the least loving, or most judgmental, or even the ones making the most harmful decisions in life. We look at them asking, why isn’t it working? Or maybe for yourself even, you’ve been going to church for years, serving, reading your bible, part of a small group, baptized, all of that and you still find that you’re perpetually unsatisfied in your everyday life. Stuck in the same cycle of brokenness. You don’t look any more like Jesus than you did on the first day of following him. You don’t have a sense of the abundant life Jesus promises.
It’s easy to start thinking, “is this all a hoax? Is it even real?” Across the Western World, people are leaving the Christian faith because they’ve tried it and it doesn’t deliver the way they expect it to. One stat shows that the western churches decline by 10-15% every year. Another stat reveals that Post covid, the average church only has 85% of their original attendance. What’s going on? I think these people leaving have come to the conclusion… this whole Christian thing doesn’t work.
And so that is what I want to focus on today.
“Why isn’t it working?”
Now this is a huge question with probably hundreds of different angles and factors to consider but we’re going to look at it through our bible passage today.
Now because this is such a deep and rich passage, we’re actually going to split this into two weeks. This week, I get to privilege of doing the theoretical big picture stuff and then next week, Pastor David will dive into the details of the practical stuff and the list of virtues.
Through our passage, we get a glimpse, a diagnosis of why this whole Christian thing isn’t working for so many people.
Life is unpredictable. We might have some clues for what’s coming up next, but there’s no way to know for sure. That’s a challenge for me, because I’m trying to raise my three young kids and I think a lot about the future and the kind of world that my kids will grow up in. It looks like they’re going to grow up in a very different world than the one I grew up in. For sure, my kids will have some advantages. They’ll probably be better adjusted socially than I was, and their technology will be a lot better than what I had. However, my kids will also have more temptations, and a lot of ways to go wrong. With the way things are going, it feels our world is getting more unpredictable than ever.
We start a new series on the 2nd book of Peter in the New Testament. My big question today is: how can we navigate our unpredictable world?
The answer I want to show you today is, we need to follow God’s words in the Bible. We need to follow God’s words because they are TRUE, and we need to follow God’s words because they are WISE. That’s what our Bible passage is about.
