Dying An Unintentional Spiritual Death
When I heard that Jesus died for my sins and I could know God personally, I couldn’t believe it was true. Me? Little, insignificant, unimportant, living in a nothing-special town, invisible in the mass of students in an average high school. I could know the God of the universe? Of course, I wanted it and practically ran up to the altar to repent of my sins, proclaim Jesus as Lord, and receive the Holy Spirit.
I felt my heart lift within me and was filled with joy and hope. I was brand new. Born again! It was fantastic!
I was ecstatic and chattered to my boyfriend all the way home. When I woke up the next day, it was still with me. I walked to school, gushing to my sister about what happened the night before. I told every one of my schoolmates and teachers.
This went on for months. I continued to go to youth group with my boyfriend and grow closer to God. But then, like what happens to most young relationships, we broke up. I was 13, couldn’t drive, and had no way to get to church.
A year or so later, I was walking home from my high school job at McDonald’s when I spotted a young man on a bike riding towards me. As he got closer, we recognized each other, and he stopped. It was Sam, Carol’s boyfriend, the older teen couple at youth group who had driven my boyfriend and I back and forth in their Volkswagon Bug.
It’d been a while since we’d seen each other, and Sam asked me, why I hadn’t been at youth group. “John and I broke up,” I told him, “And I don’t have a way to get there.” Sam was shocked and immediately responded, “Oh, man, we didn’t know that. We’ll pick you up!”
And they did. Week after week we drove the 20 minutes to church and back. Then they’d park in front of my house answering every question I threw at them. Over time, they taught me how to study the bible and spend time daily with the Lord. Month after month I continued growing in my faith.
Sam could’ve pretended he didn’t see me. He could’ve held back on asking why I hadn’t been back to youth group. He could’ve let me figure out on my own how I was going to get to church. Sam and Carol could’ve nudged me out of the car when we got to my house because they had to get up early the next day for school. But they didn’t. They took the time and taught me the way of Jesus.
God calls us to care for each other. Sometimes, we get too busy. Sometimes, we choose to do our own thing and live independently. We think we can maintain our own relationship with God. Flip on an internet sermon. Buy a bible study at the local Christian bookstore to do in our private quiet time without getting involved, formally in a church. It’s simpler, and more time efficient. And life is busy. We get so little downtime.
But, we forget how critical we are spiritually to one another. And for those of us, really good at connecting with God alone, this can be even more tempting.
Before I ran into Sam that day, as powerful as my conversion experience was, I was falling back into my old ways. I was forgetting about God. When you’ve been a Christian for a while, it’s easy to think that knowing how to grow in your faith and stay grounded in your relationship with the Lord is common sense. But to someone brand new in the faith, it’s like a foreign language.
I wasn’t strong enough to survive on my own. I was like a tiny baby, dependent on others to bring me bottles, change my diaper, wrap me in a blanket, and lay me somewhere safe to sleep until I grew strong enough to walk on my own.
I wanted to stay close to God but without other Christians to help me, I was dying an unintentional spiritual death.
Sometimes I wish, God would let me make the rules. I don’t like to see people suffer because of someone else’s wrongdoing or neglect. Every living thing left on its own will die; totally at the mercy of another to notice and to care.
Why didn’t God equip living things capable of surviving on their own? Everything from plants that need to be fertilized by a bee landing on their bud and transferring the pollen to another flower, to animals who can’t survive unless they are in a herd, to humans, where one is born artistic and brings dance or music to the world but couldn’t do a math problem if their life depended on it. Or another who farms; knowing how to read weather patterns and grow food but couldn’t teach a class how photosynthesis works no matter how hard they tried.
Every person is divinely insufficient and desperately in need of all the others. And just as we are physically dependent on each other to survive, so we are also spiritually dependent.
We can get so caught up in the Hollywood version of Matthew 28, “To go into all the world! Make disciples! Baptize! Teach!” Imagining big gospel crusades, we can get the wrong impression. With people coming forward to repent and receive Jesus, we applaud and exclaim, “Woo-Hoo, we did it, Lord. We obeyed what you commanded. They’re yours now, safely in your kingdom!”
But conversion is just the beginning.
Instead of only hearing the dramatic words of Matthew 28, we also need to hear the subtle words of Jesus’ parable in Matthew 13. One day, teaching those who had gathered, he said, “A farmer went out to plant seed, and some fell on the rocky soil where there was little depth of earth; the plants sprang up quickly, but the hot sun soon scorched them and they withered and died, for they had so little root.”
That was me, and every infant believer, until God sent Sam. He probably had no idea that he was on a divine mission when he pulled his bike out that day.
Unbeknownst to him, God was sending him with a watering can just in time.