Are You Sick?

I hate being sick. Whenever I get a sense that I might be coming down with something I do whatever I can to deny it and tell myself that I am fine. The problem is that the symptoms that we have as a result of being sick is purposed to tell us that something is wrong. 

Many summers ago I had just returned from our youth praise band tour and I felt like a cold was beginning. I didn’t have time for a cold. I had seminary work, youth ministry work, and family life to attend to. So instead of taking care of myself I went on with my life as if everything was normal. The night I returned, I went with Michelle, my wife, and our kids out to eat and I could not eat a thing. Michelle looked at me and said that there was something seriously wrong. She knows me too well, if I am not eating then something major is wrong. Before we could get home from the restaurant I had a fever of 104 and could not even tell her my own name. I ended up in the hospital that night only to discover that I has contracted encephalitis from a mosquito bite and my brain was swelling. I always knew I had a big brain but this was not healthy. I would spend the next week in the hospital. I could not be with my family, I could not do my seminary work, and I could not run the youth ministry. The disease specialist told me that if I hadn’t come to the hospital that night and just ignored it, I might have never woken up.

 The same thing goes for our spiritual lives. Many of us know that there is something wrong with our spirit and rather than examining ourselves we often choose to ignore it. We think that we are in a funk and we will just grow out of it, but the reality is that most of us won’t. We are on a course to spiritual death. You may know of a friend that used to be very involved in their faith and today they are not involved at all. They had at some time let themselves believe that they would just grow out of their funk or that they would get involved again when they were less busy. The reality was that when they did get a moment they were so spiritually ill that they could not recognize the route they were on. 

Join us this Sunday (September 20th) for our online traditional service at 8:30 AM and our outdoor contemporary service at 10:45 AM as we examine our spiritual health and see how we can get better.

In God’s grip,

Rev. Chuck Church