Are you sitting comfortably?

What would Jesus say if he turned up in our church this weekend? Sadly, I don't know how impressed he would be. We sit in a nice, comfortable, middle-class bubble, go to church, attend prayer meetings and avoid ever really being dependent on God.

This is something that I have been convicted of over last weekend when I read Psalm 63 in preparation for talking about quiet times and my relationship with God. The initial prayer of David "O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water."(Ps 63:1) I was struck by how that wasn't a prayer that I could echo from my heart. My perception of my need for God has never been in any way equivalent to the need for water in a desert. My relationship with God is something I love, I cherish and would never want to lose, but I don't think I could ever describe it as feeling as if it is the absolute life line, the one thing between me and death. 

And yet, that is what it is.

I have been so busy trying to rely upon my own strength, to set up my own path in life that I have forgotten to rely on God's strength.

This, I would suggest, is the danger of living in a comfortable church environment. 

It is a sadly neglected fact that there are literally millions of my Christian brothers and sisters who are living under the threat of daily persecution. They rely upon God because they have no one else. I like to pretend I rely on God while I lean back on my friends and family. 

If we sit in a comfortable Christianity then I think the church becomes irrelevant and entirely fails to do what it is called to do because if the church is working effectively then we are to expect persecution. As Jesus himself says, if they took him and killed him, what can we, his followers, expect? The Gospel is powerful and wherever it is preached it should be shaking things up because it is, at its very core, counter cultural. Jesus didn't come to say 'carry on living how you are, you're doing a great job. It would be nice if you came and said hi on Sunday every so often.' No, Jesus came to demand a radical change of heart from His people that would inspire them to go out and just do what he did and lavish love upon the poor and the broken in society. Churches in this country have sadly become, in far too many cases, middle class bubbles where we meet with our friends. All too rarely are they seen as places where a cross section of the community can forget the things which divide them and simply unite around the God who loved every person enough to die for them regardless of class, race, gender or whatever other human category we try to split people up into.

I am challenging myself to get to that point where I am holding nothing back, where I feel like I need Jesus as much as I need water. When I can truly understand what Jesus meant when he says "whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). 

I am doing this because I have become (in only the two years I have been a Christian) far too comfortable. I want my life to count for the kingdom so I am going to take a lesson from the persecuted church (which happens to be a place where the church is also always growing) and try to rely on God more and me less. I want my life to matter, to be exciting and make a difference. I don't want it to be dull but comfortable. I don't want to stay in my comfy pew. I want to take up my cross and follow my Lord and Saviour wherever He would have me go.