A Big Bowl of Ice Cream

One of my favorite treats is ice cream. I prefer Starbucks Java Chip. It is beyond delicious. Now I don’t have ice cream every day. Maybe a couple times a week at best. Everything in moderation, you know. But I recently had my cholesterol checked because high cholesterol runs in my family. And I’ll admit that I was a bit nervous due to my ice cream obsession and all. I went to the doctor. I had labs drawn. The labs came back. And believe it or not, all my numbers were great! Perhaps this is because I am more obsessive about exercise than ice cream. In any case, that night I had a big bowl of ice cream to celebrate. Who wouldn’t, right?

I went for a run the next day—probably to burn off the ice cream I had the night before—and while I was on my run I began to realize how this whole ice cream/cholesterol scenario often represents my spiritual life. Allow me to explain. If I had received a negative report from the doctor, if my cholesterol levels had been sky high, there is no way I would have had a bowl of ice cream that night. No, I probably would have gone out and bought enough steel cut oatmeal to last for the next couple years! I would have come up with a new game plan to change my eating habits and re-evaluated my exercise regiment. In short, I would have been brainstorming what I need to do to change in order stay healthy.

Here is my point. When things are going well, we tend to relax and perhaps get a bit complacent. We dive into the bowl of ice cream without giving it much thought. But when things are difficult, we are more willing to change. We avoid the ice cream and pursue healthy habits.

I think the same thing happens spiritually. When things are going well, our tendency is to relax and get spiritually complacent. When we get the job promotion, our kids are behaving well, or our marriage is in good shape, we tend to relax in our pursuit of God and depend on him less. Good and favorable circumstances in life tend to lead us toward spiritual complacency. Then, of course, when life throws us a curve ball—the finances aren’t adding up, the kids are acting out, the marriage blows up—we commit to pursuing God with renewed vigor. We decide to do our devotions every day, go to church every week, and tithe regularly. But this begs the question: Is such renewed commitment done out of genuine love for God or some sort of attempt to manipulate him into rearranging our life circumstances so that they are more favorable?

The problem with this pattern is that good life circumstances say very little about what is going on in our hearts. The job, the kids, and the marriage can all be going great even though there are sinful habits in my life that I have yet to address. And so positive life circumstances simply do not provide me with warrant to ignore those areas. The fact is that we are broken and sinful people. And we are just as broken and sinful in the good circumstances as in the bad. Even when life seems to be going great, there is still stuff under the surface that needs to be dealt with. This is why Jesus suggests that true spiritual change happens from the inside out. Measuring spiritual maturity by life circumstances will always be misleading.

The interesting thing is that you won’t detect an ounce of spiritual complacency in the life of Jesus. Jesus lived a life in constant pursuit of the will of God—a life utterly dependent on him and obedient to him. Even when things seemed to be going well, Jesus continued to pursue God with everything he had. In Matthew 14, for example, right after Jesus feeds five thousand people—an incredible miracle—he sends his disciples away so that he can go up on a mountainside to pray (Matt. 14:22-23). So after an act of ministry that would have made the highlight reel, what do we find Jesus doing? He doesn’t grow complacent. He doesn’t relax. He renews his commitment to God’s purposes and plans by spending time connecting with him.

I wonder what it would like for us to become people that didn’t grow spiritually complacent due to favorable life circumstances. And I wonder what it would be like for us to pursue God out of love for him rather than out of an attempt to secure his blessings. My guess is that our lives would look a bit different.