Have You Lost Your Excitement for Jesus?

I have recently returned to a place spiritually that I don’t feel like I’ve been at for a number of years. The sad thing is that the whole time I have been serving God! But what was missing was an excitement for the things of God, a desire to study the Bible, a real passion to know Him better.

It is easy to drift as Christians. Charles Stanley and plenty of others say that if you’re not going forwards, you’re going backwards – there is no standing still. And as in my case, you may be committed to God, serving God, reading your Bible and praying, yet still not have the fire that you once had.

What causes the drift?

Being too busy: In my case I think it was mainly busyness. It is always interesting to me that one of the thorns that choked the plant in the parable of the sower was ‘cares’. Cares are things that we care for, that we worry about, that we spend time on. So the more things we have to care about, the more at risk we are of being choked in our Christian life.

It is not a bad thing to have many things to do –  it is good to be hardworking and diligent. But it is easy to take on more things than God is really wanting us to do, or let them take over our mind and time to such an extent that they dull our passion for God.

I plunged into full-time ministry, then marriage, and then children, and have never been so busy! These things are all good things, and I was called to do them – but I let them take over and get in front of my relationship with God at times.

Worldliness: this is another thing that can make us less excited for God.

The more we love the things of this world, the more our love of God will dwindle. This might mean material things, fleshly lusts, entertainment, love of money and so on. Again that doesn’t mean we don’t try and make money, or don’t ever watch another film, but we need to keep a light hold on the things of this world and be careful that they don’t dull our love for God.

I still remember reading Isobel Kuhn’s biography where she explained how as a new Christian she found that she suddenly didn’t feel an acute awareness of God’s presence anymore after reading a romantic novel, and the Bible became dry.

She asked God why, and it seemed to her that He answered, ‘When a child fills its stomach with ice-cream and soda-water, why does it lose its appetite for meat and potatoes?’ So she gave up reading novels, and says that she was richly repaid for it.

Have you left your first love? Or is the love still there, but maybe you’re not as excited about Jesus as you used to be some time ago? You can get it back! And I can testify that it is so much more rewarding to be excited about Jesus than anything else in this world!

Everything else will fail us at some point or other, but God never fails. And the journey only gets more exciting… ‘the path of the just is like the shining sun, shining ever brighter unto the perfect day’.

Do you have any experience of drifting as a Christian? What caused it in your life? In my next post I hope to talk about some ways we can rekindle the fire.