The Cost of Getting Off the Sidelines

I've been wrestling with some pretty weighty things lately. Here's what I wrote in my journal today. Is anyone else feeling like this, or is it just me?

Right now I’m reading Garrison’s Church Planting Movements book. The movements of God’s Spirit in the world are amazing. God truly is doing something in the world that we have never seen before. He is beginning to reap a harvest that we can’t even imagine. But, for the most part I feel like I’m sitting on the sidelines. I’m so comfortable with my easy evangelical life in my safe evangelical church.

I make grand statements about how I want to give my life for Christ, but do I really understand what I’m saying? The one thing I’m learning is that these great movements of God’s Spirit are advancing at a great cost. To get off the sidelines and into the game, so to speak, would cost my reputation, my comfort, my safety, and perhaps even my life. But, isn’t that the very cost that Jesus paid? He knew that the cost was miniscule compared to the glory that was reveal in Him in the resurrection. Paul knew it too.

“But whatever was to my profit I now consider a loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him. I want to know Christ and power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.” (Philippians 3:7-11)