"Spiritual Homework"

        In his book, Rising to the Call, Os Guinness quotes Oswald Chambers on pages 39-40: “The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him.”  Chambers is saying that we Christians can become so caught up in our efforts to serve Christ that we forget to grow our relationships with Him.  Like Martha in Luke 38-42, we focus more on doing our work right and forget to sit at His feet.  We become trapped in the performance cycle, following our routines and repeating our lines over and over and over again until they no longer have any meaning.  Instead of coming to our Lord and Savior to learn, grow, and rest, we continue on our own strength until we crash and burn.  Though we remember Whom we are serving and acknowledge His presence, our services to Him have turned into “spiritual homework”, something we have to do rather than something we want to do in response to His goodness.
        We Christian college students provide excellent examples of this concept.  Though our desire is to follow the example of Jesus and honor Him in everything we do, we have the wrong approach.  We forget that Jesus took time to rest and pray and seek the will of His Father.  Instead, we think that we are to be always doing something productive, so we join as many missions as possible and all but completely give up on proper rest and nutrition and, most unfortunately, our personal time with God in order to complete homework.  After all God is honored by hard work and evangelism, right?  Yes, but there is a balance.  Our personal quiet time with Jesus enhances our service to Him.  As we grow in understanding of Christ’s immeasurable love for us, our desire to serve Christ will become a response to His love instead of a “Christian requirement”.