bible and theology on Complacency

Righteous God, we receive your grace and forget your justice. You teach us to move with compassion yet we have remained complacent. God, forgive us for our complacency and our apathy. Fuel us with you...

Even as we eagerly await your return, Lord Jesus, we must confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart, with our entire mind, nor with all of our strength. We have loved our rituals and our...

James 5:16 invites us to confess our sins so that we might be healed. Let us go before our Creator in humility and confession. Lord Almighty, we come to you in humility today. We have sought security...

Lord Jesus, your life shows us how you want us to live. So often we know exactly what it would take for us to become more like you, and yet we sit back, rather than taking a step toward your holiness....

Heavenly Father, forgive us for the times when we take advantage of your unfailing love. You forgive us day in and day out, you never fail us, and you’ll never leave us. As a result, we become complac...

Christianity began in a culture where “desert” and “wilderness” were familiar environments, both respected and feared as the place where angels and demons might be found. In wild, desolate places God’...

Lord God, forgive us for how we have let our faith atrophy. We grow complacent, stagnant, and we fail to strive to follow you. Give us passion, give us courage, and give us motivation to excel for you...

Prayer of Adoration Lord – You are good …and Your goodness knows no bounds. When we were lost, You sought us out, found us and brought us home. When we were alone, You came near to us, and You gave ...

Almighty God, you love us, but we do not love you fully. You call, but we do not always listen. We often walk away from neighbors in need, wrapped in our own concerns. We often condone evil, hatred, w...

I would like to buy about three dollars worth of gospel, please. Not too much– just enough to make me happy, but not so much that I get addicted. I don’t want so much gospel that I learn to really hat...

Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.

In Eugene Peterson’s wonderful book, Run With Horses , Peterson draws from the life of the prophet Jeremiah to provide a picture of what a great life looks like. Not in the world’s eyes, but in God...

One of humanity’s problems is forgetfulness. Forgetfulness can happen at multiple levels, from a simple problem of recall to a posture of hard-heartedness and disobedience toward the command-giver. Wh...

The deep and dark tragedy of affluence is how it takes away curiosity, how it accepts the world as it is, how it conforms to the talking points of empire and Pharaohs.

[Many Christians] below the surface of their lives are guilt-ridden and insecure ... [and] draw the assurance of their acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, th...

If your idleness is a complete slump, that is, indecision, fretting, worry, or due to over-feeding and physical mugginess, that is bad, terrible and utterly sterile. Or if it is that idleness which so...

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was mean...

People do not drift toward Holiness. Apart from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromis...

We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy...

Learning to be satisfied with what we have rather than desiring more, more, more— this is the essence of joy.

Today, the church in America seems to have traded in its mandate to be eccentric and aimed instead at an unconscious conventionality. Rural norms are too quaint, urban norms too dangerous, so the chur...

In his excellent little book, A Testament of Devotion , written almost a hundred years ago, Thomas Kelly describes the true heart of the problem related to the complexity of our lives: Let me fir...

A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult...

We are complicit and we do not even realize it, O Holy God. Every day we participate in systems of idolatry, and we promote the captivity of a nation to gods. We have bought the subtle lies of our cul...

Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.

Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God l...

Our goodness is our biggest self-delusion, and all of us seem to be living with it.

Unfortunately, the reality is that we tolerate being less than we are called to be. Pride is not the ultimate sin; forgetfulness of our origin and destiny is, in fact, the ultimate tragedy.

A friend of mine who is an entrepreneur was listening to a CD of a series of messages I had given on the Beatitudes. When he came to meekness, he told me, he skipped over it. He wasn’t interested in b...