Life is a balancing act. We are forever desperately trying to avoid going ‘too far’. Unfortunately, you can be ‘too far’ in just about anything. It is extremely easy to fall into a ditch on one side or the other. It’s all too easy to have a blind commitment to something that, in the end, leads you down a dark road.
You can be too far Right or too far Left in the American political system. We’ve seen those deadly paths taken time and time again. Even now we stand as witnesses of the growing fault lines of a country split into people who have been swallowed up by one political agenda or another.
You can be too committed to sports or business. If you are naive enough to think that is not the case, just go pick up a biography about Tiger Woods or Steve Jobs. You will change your tune quickly enough. And lest you think you are immune to these dangers because you don’t play sports or own a business, let me remind you that even as a fan of sports or tech this trap lies ready to ensnare your soul. Just ask the man who drinks himself to sleep after his favorite football team loses or the family drowning in debt because they ‘needed’ to have all of the latest Apple gadgets.
Loyalty is a beautiful thing, but Scripture speaks rather clearly about the fact that you can indeed go too far in your devotion to your family. Jesus Himself said that “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters” (Lk. 14:26), then you cannot be His disciple.
It is even far too easy to be sinfully devoted to one of the most precious things a human being can possess: life itself. Life is good, truly good. Human beings are made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26-27), and as such have infinite value. You and I have infinite value. There is a reason that Christians cannot view suicide as a legitimate means of hastening the day of our entrance into the Kingdom. This physical life, though broken, has value. But our survival can become a crippling idol. We all know this deep down, which is why we have so many shows and books and movies wrestling with the question of how far a person should be willing to go to survive. After all, as the saying goes, is it really worth surviving if we forget to live? Or even more importantly for the Christian, should we deny our faith in order to save our lives? Though our modern American context has numbed us to this reality, it is nevertheless a question which the Church has had to face over and over again throughout its history, and still faces today in many other countries around the world.
There are plenty of causes worthy of our attention today. Plenty of things that you can, and should, go out and work for. But even the best causes can go too far. Because even the best causes can lead you to wrongfully forsake something else that is equally, if not more, important.
Except for one. The cause of Christ.
You can’t be too far Christian. You can’t be too devoted to Christ. You can’t give yourself away to Christ too much. You can’t be too devoted to following God’s laws and pursuing His glory. You can’t spend too much time wrestling with the Scriptures and crying out to the Lord in prayer. You can never be too committed to God’s Kingdom. All too often we are simply not committed enough. We are trepidatious when it comes to going all in on the things of God. We are afraid to volunteer our lives for a single cause. We fear missing out on something grand if we spend too much time laboring in the faith. That could not be farther from the truth.
In a world where we spend so much time trying to keep ourselves from going too far, we are woefully ignorant of the one thing in which we will realistically never be going far enough.
Run after Christ with every fibre of your being (Heb. 12:1-2). Beg God to wring you out for His glory. Pursue Him with an unquenchable zeal. If need be, forsake all else this temporary life has to offer (Lk. 9:57-62, 1 Jn. 1:15-17). Seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness first and above all (Matt. 6:33). You will not regret it.
Andrew Ridley“Prayed a single prayer today. I covenanted with the Father that He would do either of two things: either glorify Himself to the utmost in me or slay me. By His grace I shall not have His second best.” – Jim Elliot