via flickr by spike55151
“Quick and easy” are two buzz words we all love to hear. All it takes is a trip to the local grocery store to see how products advertise “quick and easy.” Home cooked meals, that may take hours, have been replaced with frozen TV dinners and quick microwave dishes. With our busy schedules, this shift in meal preparation is not surprising, but the question is: Do we ever try to make our religion “quick and easy”?
Proverbs 13:4 states, “The soul of a lazy man desires and has nothing, but the soul of the diligent shall be rich.”
How true this proverb is for the church and world today. So many desire to be spiritually rich, but they want to have this close relationship with God “quick and easy”. In the church, people want to attend worship when they can. We fall to thinking attending worship should be enough. We want our sermons short and we don’t have time to read the Bible during the week. Prayer is something we do at dinnertime, before we eat those quickly prepared meals, but we don’t have time to pray outside of meals. Christian service is reduced to sending a card, because it is “quick and easy”. Then we wonder why we never have that relationship with God we desire. Maybe it is because we tried to get it “quick and easy” instead of “diligently”.
Christianity is like so many other things, we get out of it what we put into it. If we are lazy and seek spirituality “quick and easy” we will have that superficial relationship with God for years. But if we start seeking diligently to put Christ first through disciplined prayer, study, worship, and service then we will be “rich”. We will then discover that it really isn’t about the time, as much as it is a relationship with Jesus through all of life!
So instead of eating microwaved spiritual meals, try some home-cooked, labor-intensive, slow-cooked spiritual meals and your spirituality will take off!
