Excuses, Excuses!

Remember the song that use to be on the radio all the time? "Excuses, Excuses, we hear them every day. And the devil he'll supply them, if the church you'll stay away. . . " Well, unfortunatly, we find pleanty of excuses not to serve God even when we are at church. One of them that I've found myself using pretty often is, "Things are harder now then they use to be back then. We have so many more temptations and not enough Godly influence." It sounds great, but is it in the Bible? What scripture can I find to back that up? I did  find a place where Cain slew his brother. That was awful! It's one thing to kill someone who is your enemy or someone you don't know personally, but killing your only brother is pretty crucial! And what about the King committing adultery? Sounds like something that would go on today, doesn't it? Then I came across a place in the Bible where Sodomy was being lived very openly . . . probably just as bad as it is in Callifornia.

Last week I started reading The Pursuit of God (a gift from my great friend Katie!). In the preface A. W. Tozer writes, "Current evangelicalism has laid the altar and divided the sacrifice into parts, but now seem satisfied to count the stones and rearrange the pieces with never a care that there is not a sign of fire upon the top of lofty Carmel . . . They minister constantly to believers who feel within their breasts a longing which their teaching simply does not satisfy." Remember, this was written in 1948, that's 62 years ago. How many of us have thought, "If I could have just lived 50 years ago I would be a better Christian"?

He went on to say, " . . . I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb. To great section of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us."

 This world was in a horrible state 62 years ago, yet Christians still lived on strong. I'm sure that if I were to look hard enough I could find even older references to the wicked state of this world, wickedness that we are somehow convinced to believe only exsists in the twenty first centry. But the truth of the matter is this: Christians have been living in an evil world ever sence Eve took the first bite out of the fruit which came from the Tree of Good and Evil. The atmosphere in which we live in does not give us any reason to serve God with less vigor then the great Christians who served before us. May we all strive to be the best Christian that ever lived, in a time when it is need just as bad as it ever was.