Imagine: you’ve made a choice that will change the course of your life forever. What lies behind is a life you can’t go back to or be content in, so you have chosen to leave it. If caught, you would be severely punished, and yet the future you venture towards is vastly uncertain and unknown.

In many ways, this analogy applies to the Christian walk: being saved by grace and living righteously will require us to step on to a different path. Becoming sanctified by the Lord will mean leaving our old lifestyles, haunts, and routines in order to make new ones that glorify God. In doing so, we may find that those we once called friends no longer understand us and shun us. We may find things that once gave us comfort, don’t anymore.

Back in the early 2000s, our scope of who could be accessed for Biblical teaching was limited. You had your pastor at your local church, maybe a few tele-evangelists, and whatever books you could get your hands on if you had a Christian bookstore around. It was probably more simple to sift through sources and try other teachers if the Gospel wasn’t being preached.

Compare that to now, and the information, teachers, and material at our fingertips is so endless, you could never possibly get through it all. With the internet, you can access this past Sunday’s sermon from any given church that has a video camera, a microphone, and a YouTube channel– and that includes megachurches right on down to the tiny, country church in America’s smallest town.

People love praise. They love to receive accolades and pats on the back. It’s just a part of humanity. The people of the Church are no exception. 

There are many who serve the Lord because it puts them on a platform for people to see them. They are addicted to people coming up to them and saying, “Worship was awesome today!” or, “What a great message, pastor!” Of course, it’s not the reason that all serve, but unfortunately, with the way the modern church is– curated, broadcasted, and elevated– it’s easy for even the most well-intentioned of God’s people to fall into a dependence on approval from others in the Church. 

I remember being 20 years old at a Friday night worship service. It was an all-are-welcome event, so we brought the youth up from the church basement to be a part of it. In the middle of a song, I felt a little tap on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see my Pastor, David Knapp, standing next to me. With a little smile on his face, he leaned down so I could hear him and said, “Do you think the youth band has a song they’d like to share?” At this point, we had a small youth band comprised of a handful of teens who were mostly self-taught in their instruments. Still, I nodded and he said, “I’ll let the team on the altar know that the youth are going to lead after the next song.”