Do Not Grow Too Comfortable With God

What is it that causes covenant members to wander off from the faith? What will tempt you to determine it isn’t that important in your life to call upon the living God every day, to renew your covenant with the Father through Jesus Christ each Lord’s Day, to humbly confess your sins and to plead His promises for your life and for your family at all times?

The seductions of the world, the flesh, and the devil come in all shapes and sizes. The one thing that they all have in common is this: they always promise more than they can deliver. You want sex outside the covenant vows of marriage – it will ruin you. You want to find your satisfaction in riches – you will be pierced with many sorrows. You want to run with the cool crowd and so you will join them in words of filth and blasphemy – they will cast you off as soon as they are done with you.

But the seductions and the Tempter are far more subtle than even those. He will whisper, “obeying right now in this little way or in that little way doesn’t really matter – go ahead – you can always confess later.” He will tantalize you with trivial but tasty pleasures late into Saturday evening so that you are too exhausted to go to church on Sunday or too tired to pay attention or care if you do go. He will razzle and dazzle you with the smoke and mirrors of technology so that the simple singing of psalms seems boring and irrelevant. He will keep you satisfied with bumper-sticker one-liners for your theology so that deep, thoughtful and challenging theological studies will appear to be useless and unimportant.

Like the proverbial frog in the kettle, you may have grown accustomed to being quite distant from your heavenly Father – maybe this week – maybe for quite some time. If you are in this way, know this – I have prayed for you, if not by name, by category, and have asked the Lord of Hosts to shake your world that your conscience may not be hardened by such seductions. As the Psalmist warned and wrote – “Today, If you will hear His voice, “Do not harden your hearts, as in the rebellion.”

Never grow too comfortable with being in the presence of our God – for He is a consuming fire.