More or Less

he Christian life. Much can be said and written about the Christian life. We have thousands of books dedicated to “Christian Living.” These books all seek to help us live out our faith within this world. And it is easy to understand why there are so many of these books. Living out your faith can be tricky and frankly hard. And there are so many believers out there that have had no one walk along side them and tell them how it all works.
Many times when the Christian, whether new or mature, seeks to revitalize their Christian walk, they start to add stuff. They start to make commitments to do more spiritual disciplines, to read their bibles more, to pray more, to fell more connected, to be in an accountability group and so on. It is always more. We start to heap on ourselves these things, these disciplines, these tasks. These are not bad, in fact I think all Christians should be engaged more in many of these. We can be lazy and to an extent we need to be disciplined in our pursuit of the Lord. But there is a side, I believe, to this thinking of adding more and more that needs to be addressed.
When we add more and more to what the Christian life should be, do we not in a way start to lose focus on what is central? When we make it all about disciplines and reading and memory and study, we can easily lose sight of Christ. The Cross, which is central and over and under and hemming in all of the Christian life can be lost. Is this not Paul’s message “we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the Gentiles.” We can’t lose sight of the Cross. That in the midst of the Christian living that we seek, the Cross must remain central. That the person of the Cross must reign supreme even in the midst of disciplines and all the stuff we add to our lives.
So if you struggle sometimes like I do with thinking that you have to do more and more to revitalize your spiritual life, that you have to add memory verses and daily readings and books upon books (all of which are good) and this starts to weigh on you. Maybe you should ask yourself what is starting to become central to your “Christian life.?” Maybe when we struggle with thinking that it is always more, could it not in fact be less that we need?

Strip away the excess. Get back to the center.