Or, would their faith just be their father's faith, warmed over? I wondered, would they encounter God on the high plane of their own new story. Or would they just "phone it in," merely going through the motions of the faith habit that they learned in our home.
I don’t want my children to be on auto pilot when it comes to their relationship with the Living Christ. I want them to tussle with Him in the throes of wrestling their way to their own spiritual maturity. I want them to hunger after God and God’s highest. I want them to spend themselves on the effort of their own personal discovery process.
I want them to truly invest, and then invest some more, as growth requires it. I want them to lay it all on the line out of love. In short, I want them to be people of godly intensity. And, for that matter, I wish that same intensity for the whole of the Church. That is just the right way of things.
This early concern for my children came from a simple observation. What I saw is what I have come to call, "Second Generation Creep." That term pretty well describes what I have noticed: that sometimes, children who grow up in Christian homes develop a kind of "Rote Religion." That is, their experience with God has not the intensity of mom and dad’s experience. Rather, their experience morphs into something more shallow and mechanical.
And it is true that this generational creep also seems to sometimes touch the Church as a whole, both on the local and the larger scale. When we get "all grown up" as a church, we sometimes just find our rut and get in it.
We do what we’ve always done. We stop being bold to win the world. We stop being fresh in our approach to God and to ministry.
Nevertheless, the words of the first admonition remain simple. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength."
In one sense, these words are the First Words. And as we occasionally revisit them in our heart, these words, can save us. They can save us from the quagmire of an "Automated Religion" which merely takes us through the motions of faith.
When allowed to envelope the heart, these first words can awaken us to fresh levels of relationship with God. They can infuse us with new devotion. They can animate us with curiosity and heightened interest. They can move us to a heightened investment.
No one ever really finds God in the fog of Ho Hum. We only ever truly come to know Him in the clarity of our All in.
