Focus

"By and by, your attention becomes so intensely focused that you no longer notice the raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trance-like state settles over your efforts, the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accrued guilt and clutter of day-to-day existence – the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the festering familial sores, the inescapable prison of your genes – all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by the seriousness of the task at hand." – Jon Krakauer in The Devil’s Thumb

What parallels might there be for us in the Christian Life?

God Expects More

God indeed expects more out of Christians than the church in the West is currently aspiring to. He expects Christians to live holy lives (e.g. Eph. 4:17 - 5:20). He expects us to die to self; to offer our bodies as living sacrifices, to take up our crosses. He expects us to partake in making disciples of all nations, to love our neighbor as ourselves and to care for the least of these. He expects us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and mind and strength, but He has also empowered us to do so.

Living like that is the evidence that we have been born again, not the cause of us being born again. It is the evidence of real justification, not the means. Of course, as Paul says in Philippians 3, we have not yet obtained all this, but we press on toward the goal and we live up to what we have already attained (Php. 3:7-16).

The tragedy of modern American Evangelicalism is that we have dumbed down the Gospel and the Christian life to the point where I can have little more than a pulse and a profession and still be considered a Christian.