"Do not throw away this confident trust in the Lord, no matter what happens. Remember the great reward it brings you! Patient endurance is what you need now, so you will continue to do God's will. Then you will receive all that he has promised." - Hebrews 10:35-36 NLT
"Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up..." - Galatians 6:9
As a college student, I'm more than accustomed to skipping a class, especially at 8 in the morning, if I don't feel up to going to it. I think the idea of an emotional health day, as ridiculous as some may call it, is one of the most ingenious phrases a man ever coined. When we feel like we've had enough of something, we give up and either take a break for a bit or move on to something else. It's like we have this constant desire for a change. No matter how much we like structure and schedules and habits, no one likes monotony. Especially if it involves effort.
I learned in a class last week about a "bliss point", the optimal point in any task where we get the most reward from the least effort. And no matter what the ratio is, we would rather put in less effort to get less reward than more effort to get more reward, and stay as close to our bliss point as possible.
We do this with Christianity. We get to the point where we're tired of doing the same thing time after time, tired of the effort that we put into it to receive what we perceive as minimal reward. We get this mindset that it's okay to take a day off from our faith...we don't have to work as hard today because we deserve some time to just settle. We don't overcome this obstacle with stronger faith and more prayer and an increase in Bible reading, but we rationalize that we won't lose our faith by taking the day off from trying so hard. Jesus will still love us, right?
Yes, He will.
He may not like the fact that we're giving up so easily, as seen in the above Bible verses. But He'll still love us. We're still Christians.
I know it's hard to continually put all of ourselves into something, even something that gives back, like our faith in Christ. And there are always going to be days when we don't want to keep going: we just want to take a break, a day off, or we just want to receive the reward without putting in so much effort. But we can keep going. We can handle it. We've been promised not only the continual presence and love of our God, but a great inheritance to be received. And we'll get it. We're assured of it.
"The permanence of God's character guarantees the fulfillment of his promises." - Arthur W. Pink
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1 comment:
I think a lot of it has to do with the supposed behavioral nature of the faith that we think we're a part of. Of course we can take a break from certain behaviors. But if we were thinking of ourselves as branches, can we take a break from growing? From bearing fruit? From being the kind of people that abide in Christ? It's a lot harder to take a break from our identity than it is from the way that we act, sometimes.
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