No Compromise

          We are living in times of uncertainty—people are losing jobs, our food chain seems to have been compromised, and many are feeling the crunch of life and also the gnawing fear that all is not well in America, and perhaps we are heading toward some kind of cataclysmic meltdown. We turn to God when life gets hard, but you should know that how we turn to Him is of ultimate, eternal importance.
          If God were the sea, then this is our endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to the Sea and simply splash around—careful not to swim or dive or not get out of our depth—carefully holding on to the lifeline which connects us with our mortal life.
          Our temptation is to look for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We approve of an income tax in principle. We make our returns truthfully. But we dread a rise in the tax. We are very careful to pay no more than is necessary.
          The lie consists in the suggestion that our best protection is to guard our monies, our habitual indulgences, and our ambitions, and to even ask God to protect them. But that is simply false. Our real protection is to be sought somewhere else: it is in our relationship to Jesus.
          Swimming lessons are better than a lifeline to the shore; that lifeline is really a death line. It is not so much of our time and so much of our attention that God demands; it is not even all our time and all our attention; it is ourselves. For each of us John the Baptist’s words are true: “He must increase and I decrease.” He will be infinitely merciful to our repeated failures; there is no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise.
          What matters, what Heaven desires and Hell fears, is precisely that further step—to plunge even deeper into the waters beyond our control, to abandon ourselves utterly, completely and absolutely to God.
-Pastor Dino Griffin