May 2005
"Summer – Not a Time to Forget God"
Finally, good weather is upon us and the activities of warmer days and longer evenings have begun to occupy our time. Summer is such a wonderful season with its wide array of things to see and do. Soon school will be finished for another year and the kids will be looking forward to summer vacation and the adventures that will soon unfold. All this excitement has a flip side. In summer it is so easy to become so busy that we don’t have time for God – maybe not intentionally, but we are prone to neglect God just the same.
Hebrews 2:1 tells us that "we must pay more careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away" (NIV). It is so easy to turn our focus on the things that we "want" to do, those things that entice us, so that we lose sight of what we "need" to do – what is really important. We all know that relationships need to be nurtured if they are going to remain healthy. Our relationship with God is no exception. Our goal as Christians is to be moving ever closer in our relationship with our Creator and our God and to our Savior, Jesus Christ. We need to be consciously striving to follow ever closer to the example that Jesus Christ has given us as our teacher, our Lord and our Master.
Yet it seems we are so easily distracted from our goal. John Wesley once said that we are always in movement; we are either moving closer in our relationship with God and Christ or we’re moving farther away; we are never stationary – our relationship never stays just the same. Living an authentic Christian life in our society today is much like swimming up stream; against the current of popular thought and life style. And it seems the current is flowing faster all the time. If we stop swimming, even for a moment, the current takes over. Even though we feel like we’re motionless in the water, the current carries us back down stream; ever farther away from our goal.
So it is with choices we make; a Sunday here; a devotional time there – going fishing, playing golf, sleeping in or falling prey to any other distraction that takes us away from the spiritual disciplines that are essential for our Christian health. Whatever the reason we give ourselves to not be in worship or in prayer or in fellowship with other believers always seems to makes sense to us at the time. Our choices are easy to justify in our own mind. We may feel secure in our relationship with God, yet every time we choose to follow our own wants and desires – those things that take our focus off of God – our relationship suffers and we slip farther away from the one relationship that’s more important than life itself.
Summertime is full of activities that can distract us and turn our attention away from our relationship with God. That doesn’t mean that these are all necessarily bad, it means that we must be careful not to let them draw our attention away from the "goal of our faith which is the salvation of our souls" (1 Peter 1:9). Have fun this summer, but at the same time, never forget who and whose you are.
Grace and Peace, The Rev. Rob Hughes
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