Indulgent

I do not like a word, "indulge". Well.. it may be because of my lack of understanding American culture, or English itself. However, I do not like the word. The word gives me negative image of powerless Christians. I have thought about how to live as a good Christian in this world, found several causes to make believers powerless. One of them is this self indulgent. I think that it is easy to compromise between indulgent and acceptance. We compromise to make things easy on ourselves in every single moment in our daily life; making reasonable excuses, being comfortable, being easy and so on. For me, it is a true challenge to discern and not to judge in many occasions. For example, people do not come to church on Sunday because it is cold, they are tired, and somewhere to go and so on. They send me e-mails or leave messages to let me know why they missed worship service. I usually respond that I miss them and hopefully they are coming back next time. However, I honestly feel very sad often that people even do not realize that it is not right. I rather want to tell them " You should have come no matter what... because this is the day to worship the Lord."

It is also same toward "prayer". "Oh... I am too busy to kneel. By the way, God is love. He knows what my heart is. He blesses me always. I am very happy now, so I am good. So, I do not need to pray. "I do not want to judge people because I am also one of the people. That is why I do not like indulgent. We make so many excuses to be reasonable, but hardly repent. We do not want to accept that we are sinners without God's grace. My feet are so fast toward running away from the Lord, and finding something else than the truth.

Hearing and learning about John Wesley's life and the Methodist origin yesterday made me sad with thinking of how the origin has changed in many ways. However, I found an important fact through the class.The Holy Spirit is the answer to renew our powerless lives as Christians. When Jon Wesley had an experience of the Spirit, his life was changed totally. His sermon became powerful and working in people's hearts, and he started ministering effectively. How can we get people having desire to be filled by the Holy Spirit? how? How can we chose not to indulge ourselves but to chose to obey God's commands?

I do know one thing to do; pray for His Holy Spirit to fill us wholly, fully! If we want to get filled by the Holy Spirit, He always fill within us. Sadly, it is matter of our hearts whether we desire or not. I pray that we all desire to be.