Helps for Christians

Christian Faith Series, #3

     I began a service at my church one time by telling everyone they had to move to a different seat. If they sat in the front they needed to sit in the back. If they sat on the right side they had to move to the left. I wanted everyone to find a seat in an area in which they did not normally sit. There was a lot of commotion and some grumbling as they moved and a lot of people wondered why they had to leave their favorite seat. One family was so upset they left the service.

I used that object lesson as a basis of my sermon. How can we advance if we stay in the same place? People like to sit in their same spot each Sunday. Pastor’s kind of like it too because we then notice who is there or who is absent. Just as it was uncomfortable for some to move to a new seat, so change is also uncomfortable to most. Metaphorically speaking, if we sit in the same seat all our life we will not grow. Growth calls for change. It means we go into new areas of our faith, into new relationships, into unfamiliar situations, into the uncertainty of new methods and we venture out in faith into the unknown. W. P. Young said it well in his book The Shack, “Faith does not grow in the house of certainty.”

In this book I want to encourage you to move to a different seat and get a clearer perspective on your concerns, on your current situation and on problems you face at church and in life.

It is easy to get complacent in the Christian life. I would like to help you move on to continued growth with this book.