His faith is skin-deep.  As long as life treats him well and his prayers are answered, he believes.  He seeks his soul to be soothed, so it is crucial to attend where the music will give him what he needs.  He looks for sermons to be short and lightly seasoned with the scriptures, but not on anything controversial, for he hates confrontation and believes this to be condemning.  ‘Live and let live – in all peace, who am I to judge?’ – is his motto.  God is about love, and we are all His children, so as long as we can just live together.

He reads a lot, but not from the bible.  The bible is not interesting enough and full of hard-to-understand things -if he were honest, so he looks for other’s take on what it says. All that matters to God is that he believes that His Son died for him on the cross anyway.  He prides himself on his faith because he tells everyone that Jesus loves them and does not condemn them and all they need to do is believe.  He is at peace in his faith and content in resting in the love of God.

This man walks in his own devised ‘faith’ where it pleases his flesh and has nothing to do with the condition of his soul.  The lie he is happy to walk in gives him what he wants, and because he is content with this, he believes this to be God’s peace.  He continues to fill the blackness of his unregenerate soul with sin because he remains in bondage and sees the chains that bind him not as something to want to be free from but what he needs and must have and do.  He continues to fight and argue with those around him because he is self-righteous.  They are wrong, and he that has been wronged, so he stands prideful and perfectly right in his own eyes.   He seeks to be soothed because of the stress of life that envelopes him and reaches for his substances and/or other ways of escape that bring him peace and comfort.   He will never let these go because they are what calms him, and he feels God understands this.  No one is perfect, and ‘by grace go I’ – he says and regards himself humble before God in recognizing that he is no saint, and God knows his heart means well at least.   He does not see that he is the same as yesterday, the day before and last year.  He has not grown in the inner man in becoming the new creation that new birth in Jesus Christ affords.  He does not see that he is far from the truth because the truth is not in him – and continues to live a lie.

I tell you this with certainty because I was once like this man and a surface Christian myself.

But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing,  whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them. 2 Cor 4: 3,4

The Gospel of Christ will never leave us in the same place it found us in – we will be transformed into new men and women to reveal the glory and life of Christ in us.  Do not settle for anything less then this!

See Also: A Story of the Sacred & Secret Room,   Jesus is Coming for His Bride, and this is what she looks like: