Have You Become Spiritually Complacent?

I’d like to share a thought with you from a wonderful sister I had the pleasure of meeting some time ago.  It has to do with spiritual complacency.  Janice Pender writes the following in her devotional book Deeper Roots:

“Spiritual complacency is a sin: it is a careless and lazy attitude towards the word of God and the things of God.  Oh sure, we can go to church, listen to the Bible being taught, and lift up the name of Jesus in song, but what is really going on in our hearts? Are we truly hearing His words with a desire to do them?”

She compares the blank stares and slothful responses parents sometimes get from their children when told to do something with our responses or lack thereof when God speaks to us.

I wonder today if we have become spiritually complacent in our response to God’s word.  I wonder if we see God’s word as a suggestion we can follow when it’s convenient or in line with what we want to do. Or do we view it as absolute truth that is to be followed despite or personal feelings?  I challenge and encourage us this week to honestly evaluate our responses to the messages we hear week in and week out.  I challenge and encourage us to ask for forgiveness for those times we have been spiritually complacent.  I challenge and encourage us to give God our very best, because after all, He gave His very best for us....His only son Jesus Christ!

“But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror;  for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was.  But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does.” (James 1:22-25 NASB)