When the Comfort Goes

"Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ." (Philippians 1:27)

We live in a culture unashamedly committed to comfort. Get better things. Build a bigger house. Book the next vacation before this one has ended. Maximize the safety and minimize the friction. From every direction the same dream is pressed on us, a life without friction, and it seeps so quietly into faith that we seldom say it out loud. So say it out loud and test it. Does following Christ lead to your ultimate comfort in this life? Is being a Christian a promise of an easier road?

If we are honest, that is close to what many of us signed up for, whether we would admit it or not, and it is the unnamed assumption beneath a hundred small disappointments with God. Here is the part that should sober every one of us. A person can have a good family and good standing, a nice house and a healthy retirement, real knowledge of the Bible and genuine belief in Jesus. A person can come on Sunday when it is convenient, feel the hair rise on the back of the neck during a song, take the sacrament, serve on a team, do every good thing the faith offers, and still not have a life centered on Christ. The mind knows. The heart has never recognized.

And the only way any of us ever finds out which one we are is when the comfort goes. Comfort insulates the question. Loss exposes it. When the house, the health, the standing, the ease are stripped back, what remains standing is what was actually at the center all along. So do not wait for the stripping to find out. Ask now, while it is easy, whether you are following Christ or following comfort, and move him to the center on purpose, before loss does it for you.