The other day Mike Focht gave me this article by A.W. Tozer. It’s a great exhortation to keep in mind the things that are truly important. One of the greatest distractions in the Christian life is to get focused on things that matter less than the big, central truths of the Gospel. This can happen in “spiritual” ways (we get all excited about weird, peripheral things in the bible) or “normal” ways (we get sidetracked by thoughts and life-patterns that have little to do with Christ’s call of discipleship.)
Let’s be people who make Monday nights (and our church at large) a place where the most important things are the things that we are the most excited about, that we talk about most, that we stand for, that we sing about, that we promote with our words and our lives.
Here’s some of what Tozer has to say about all this:
Life as we know it in our painfully intricate civilization can be deadly unless we learn to distinguish the things that matter from those that do not. It is never the major things that destroy us, but invariably the multitude of trifling things which are mistakenly thought to be of major importance. These are so many that, unless we get out from under them, they will crush us body and soul…
In the Christian life also we find this pattern repeated: a few important things and a world of burdensome but unimportant ones. The Spirit-taught Christian must look past the multiplicity of incidental things and find the few that really matter. And let it be repeated for our encouragement, they are few in number and surprisingly easy to identify. The Scriptures make perfectly clear what they are: the fact of God, the Person and work of Christ, faith and obedience, hope and love. These along with a few more constitute the essence of the truth which we must know and love. Christ summed up the moral law as love to God and man. Salvation He made to rest upon faith in God and in the One whom He had sent. Paul simplified the wonders of the spiritual life in the words, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
The temptation to forget the few spiritual essentials and to go wandering off after unimportant things is very strong, especially to Christians of a certain curious type of mind…
To read the whole thing, click here.