Day by day, moment by moment, I'm forced to choose whether I glorify God or not. And I know, I often fail to choose the first one.
Is there a moment when I'm not Christian?
For sure, there's no such a thing. But at lease there's a moment when I "pretend to be Christian". Of course God still loves me. He pours his love into me everyday and protect me from the evil one. My problem, however, is that I understand the truth with my own understanding rather than trusting in the LORD with all my heart.(Proverbs3:5) Now, my understanding of a lack of fullness of all my heart notifies me that I'm leaning on my own understanding. Where is my heart? And why can't I always make it to the full? At least, my own understanding is helpful to understand to admit that my heart is not full, thus my trust in the Lord is not enough too.
I'm sure that it's not my own understanding that brings me to the Lord, but the heart, not a mere heart, but the heart with fullness. And the way to get there is to trust, just trusting until it gets full is the only way. So I analyzed the trust. What on earth is happening to my trust?
When I pretend to be Christian, I find that the trust is stagnant, not vibrant nor active. It is calm as a dormant volcano. Nobody realizes it. Even myself either. I don't realize it. Something is very wrong here. I thought I trusted God. But now I feel like God is away, even abandoning me. God' grace diminishes. Gradually I behave badly as a Christian.
The very point that I should make here is that the objective I had trusted was not the Lord, but the comfortable feeling that I had received from God as a grace. I trusted that feeling, so as the feeling goes down, I grow anxious naturally. Sin was very cunning. It was waiting for the shift of my focus from the grace to my own feeling. It was aiming at a crack that occurs in my heart when I unconsciously looked away. I was ambushed.
Sin sneaks in whenever there is a space. As if water. You need to have a faith checkup from time to time. Otherwise, sin contaminates you like a cancer, which is slow and crucial when it turns out. Are you confident in your health of faith?
In order for this calamity to not happen in our lives, we must diagnose our trust in the Lord quite often. And we're supposed to do spiritual exercise too. Because if your trust is not active and doesn't produce some outcomes in a particular short period of time, it is definitely the sign of a stagnant trust. It's not seeing the grace, but seeing the comfortable feeling that you believe that you trust in the Lord. We're unsure if we really trust God because He's invisible. But as we trust with all our heart, making sure always to turn our heart toward God, it is God who gives us assurance. We must not take assurance from our comfortable feeling.
It's easy to utter that I trust in the Lord. But the trickiest part is not "trust", but "with all my heart". I'm often stuck in between. I don't want to think like unless there's no tangible problem, there's no problem. Open your eyes. This world is full of sin. Sin is out there. If you say there's no problem. It's your eyes that are covered with sin. Open the spiritual eyes. You'll see many problems around you.
Day by day, moment by moment, Christians are to turn to God. We have to choose to glorify God. If we choose neither because we were busy or absent-minded, it means we failed to glorify God. Choose deliberately. Sin easily takes control over you.
-Yuma
