June 18, 2026
Thursday, June 18
At some point, many of us became caught up in the wonder of the Gospel. Can you remember when you first gave your life to Jesus? Can you remember the excitement you felt; the anticipation of the future? We were going to ruthlessly conquer the sin in our lives. We were going to win all of our friends and loved ones to Christ. We were ready to sign up for the mission field, tithe with radical generosity, love our enemies, stand up to bullies, be the best people in the world.
Some of you still possess a vibrant faith. You may be less naively idealistic these days, but your commitment to Christ hasn’t dimmed. Sadly, there are others—perhaps some reading this devotional—who can’t say the same. Like the vineyard in Proverbs 24:30-34, something that was once beautiful has become a mockery. A tragedy. A cautionary tale.
How does this happen? For some Christians, it happens when we settle for “good enough.” We reach a point in our spiritual growth where we just stop trying. Ironically, this often happens when we start fitting in with the people in our church. We’ve eliminated the most scandalous sins: We learned to avoid foul language and extramarital sex, and started obeying all the laws aside from the speed limit, and we figured that as long as we looked sufficiently “Christian,” we had done enough.
Others of us have hit a season in life where we put God on the backburner. We know He should be our top priority, and we have every intention of living that way someday. But for now, we have to finish school, get established in our career, or raise these kids.
The danger of putting a pause on our passion for Christ is not that He will get fed up and reject us. The danger is that we’ll go through life thinking everything’s fine. Spiritual poverty will sneak up on us like a bandit. We’ll wake up one day, and the joy will be gone. We’ll find ourselves caught in some previously unthinkable moral compromise. We’ll destroy an important relationship. We’ll drive some seeking person away from faith in Christ. We’ll split our church. And the danger is not just in the awful things that happen because we’ve become spiritual sluggards, it’s the wonderful things that we don’t get to experience. So what can we do?
Here’s a word of testimony from the apostle Paul, found in 1 Corinthians 15:9-10: 9 For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.
Paul could never get over the words that Jesus spoke to him on the road to Damascus: “Paul, why are you persecuting me?” Not “why are you persecuting them,” but “me.” No matter how reprehensible someone else’s sin had been, Paul had attacked and wounded Jesus personally. But once he was saved, Paul went to work. And in his mind at least, he worked harder than any other apostle to become righteous. As we saw last week from Romans 7, he still had plenty of work to do. You don’t become like Jesus by simply drifting along. It takes serious work. In fact, it has to be the thing you work at the hardest.
“Lord Jesus, is my relationship with you the thing that I am working hardest at? If it’s not, please show me how to make that right. Un-pause my passion for you, in your holy name, amen.”
Senior Pastor
First Baptist Conroe
More from Pastor Jeff at his website: jeffbergerwriting.com
