Under Arrest

I find it slightly ironic that this blog title comes on a day that I attended the ribbon cutting for the new prison here in town, but it actually doesn't have anything to do with incarceration. I'm also grateful that I was allowed to leave of my own volition-not that I was overly concerned, but you still never know what might happen when touring with Mike Waers.

I was reading this morning in a book by A.W. Tozer (one of my favorite authors and pastors) and he used the phrase "arrested development" to describe the faith of people within the church. His premise for this statement was that people tend to progress to a certain point and then just stop growing. They cease to develop and become stuck without moving any further.

I think that this unfortunately describes far too many Christians. There may have been some excitement about our faith in the beginning, but now it has become just simply part of who we are and what we do. There is a stagnation in how we worship God that reflects the lack of new frontiers and a hesitance to stretch ourselves into new territories. If we aren't willing to aggressively address this lack of forward growth we will cease to be effective in leading our families and reaching our community.

God is able to do more than we could possibly think or imagine and there are things that He hasn't begun to reveal to us yet. If we suffer from arrested development of our faith the fault doesn't lie with Him. It will require an intentional act on our part to grow beyond where we are now by working to shake up our patterns of spiritual discipline and taking bold (and sometimes risky) steps of trust in God's ability to draw us closer to Him.