Dead Man Blogging

1 Timothy 4:15 Take pains with these things; be absorbed in them, so that your progress will be evident to all.

In context, “these things” refers to prayer, sound teaching, disciplining yourself for godliness, setting an example in “speech, conduct, love, faith, and purity”, and developing and exercising your spiritual gift.

Take pains with them. Be absorbed. Be obsessed. This is a worthy goal. Verse 16 says “Pay close attention to yourself and your teaching”.

If we took the military and athletic metaphors for Christianity seriously, we’d have a better picture of what this should look like. Train for something, do it, review, fix deficiencies, repeat. For a Christian, this would look like prayer, spending time in the Word, mediatation, corporate worship, study, practicing spiritual disciplines, purging your life of impurities, exercising your spiritual gifts, honestly reviewing how you’re doing and working to improve.

Now I’ve gone and gotten myself convicted. I’m not obsessed with my spiritual life. I’m not obsessed with training myself to be godly. I do it because I should. I mostly worry about the daily affairs of life. My spiritual walk is more than just a casual or incidental concern, but only just a little more.

I prayed the other night that God would help me live as a man with a calling and show me what that even meant. How “coincidental” that I should have accidentally opened to this passage the next day!

A lot of guys I know are doing the Atkins diet. They are somewhat obsessed. It takes lots of discipline to avoid things they want to eat. But instead of eating the things they are not supposed to eat, they eat more of the things they are allowed to eat. They don’t (usually) “flirt” with cheating. They know the rules and stick to them. Cheating will just be self-defeating. They encourage each other and keep each other accountable. They measure their progress. They don’t just _want_ to lose weight and assume that somehow they’ll automatically do the right things. They take definite, sacrificial steps to attain their goal because they know it will be worth it. Why, one of them even showed up at our small group the other day with his own, Atkins-approved meal!

Look there, I’ve spiritualized the Atkins diet! I don’t usually argue from analogy, and I don’t like to spiritualize everything like that, but I do think these guys are a good example of what an obsession looks like. If I were half as committed to my spiritual walk as these guys are to their diets, I’d be a far better man.

I was talking to a guy at Bible study this morning and he got to talking about how Christians must not separate themselves from the wicked because you know, that’s how we live out the Great Commission and all that.

I didn’t argue with him, because both he and I would pretty much be dealing with hypothetical situations instead of reality. Aside from teaching my theology class, I’m not making a difference in the lives of anyone outside my immediate family, and even that is hit-and-miss.

Here’s a mission field for me where I _definitely_ have a responsibility:

Wife and kids: 3 people (4 in May)
Siblings, in-laws, parents: 11 (13 by July; I’m around 6 on a regular basis)
My grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins: 11 (I see about half of them regularly)
Co-workers: 18 (I know 12 of them fairly well and interact with them regularly)
Neighbors: 5 families, say 10 people minimum (I know none of them)

That’s quite a mission field! Some of those folks are Christians, of course. If I exclude them, and also exclude some situations that would be inappropriate (such as avoiding overly close relationships with women co-workers), I still have quite a large number. There are twenty people, easily, within my sphere of influence that need some type of discipling or something. Easily twenty people that need to see my good works and glorify God because of it. Twenty people to receive the light that my life should show (Matthew 5:15)

When I’m actually making a difference in the lives of people God has put me around, then maybe I’ll venture an opinion about who _else_ I should be actively involved with. But I’m not going to argue hypotheticals.