Pace

The Fast Lane

These days it is not uncommon for most of us to feel like our lives are moving at a frantic pace. This seems almost ironic coming from the pastor of a rural church in a small county in Arkansas, but gone are the days of slow country life. Please don’t misunderstand. I'm sure that the hustle and bustle of the big city is far worse than it is around these parts. However, the interconnectivity of our lives whether we are in downtown Manhattan or way out in Wyoming has meant that most of us are dealing with more information, decisions, and demands than ever before. Maybe this is just the inevitable march of progress that brings a quickening of our steps as we proceed through the adventurous future. It is rather ironic that most of the time saving and productivity improving technology have actually led us to have busier lives than our hard working and hard living ancestors.

The Sprint

The problem with going all out is that no one can sustain maximum effort forever. Sprinters clearly run faster than endurance runners but they could not keep that up for the duration of a marathon. Our modern age seems to have drawn us onto a hectic schedule that is difficult if not impossible to maintain over a lifetime. 

It is also possible that our insatiable appetite for youth has caused us to miss the natural and God ordained rhythms of life that come with different stages. For example, parents with young children and still growing families are in a different segment of life than parents of teenagers or even empty nesters. So often we seem to be trying to form all of society into a common mold where not everyone fits. 

This is particularly dangerous because many well intentioned believers, especially pastors, will burn out trying to keep up the pace. Or…. even more tragically, many Christians even pastors, may blow up their relationships, ministries, or local churches trying to prod more complacent believers into their olympic pace. 

The Long Way

The reality is that often the better way is the longer way. I mean that it maybe to the advantage of both our current race (our earthly life) and the Kingdom of God for us to keep after the hard slow work of cultivating fallow ground, sowing good seed, and watering in faith knowing that in His season God will bring the growth (1 Corinthians 3:5-9). My point is that we need to find a pace that we can run at that matches our stamina so that we can stay in the race as we press on toward the goal of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Philippians 3:12-16). In this text Paul explains that this kind of forward progress is a mark of spiritual maturity among the servants of God.

I do not mean that we are not supposed to be persuasive in evangelism or fervent in prayer or compassionate in our fellowship or passionate in our preaching or diligent in our studies. But I do mean that as we endeavor in all these important areas we must be mature and walking in the fruit of the Spirit in our lives (Galatians 5:22-24). Our lives must reflect love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self control. Nothing that we do apart from the working of the Holy Spirit will ever be of any spiritual benefit to us or to Christ’s church.

Keep Going

So what now? We all need to find our pace and keep going. It’s not ok to sit it out and just wait for heaven. We must be actively seeking to draw near to the Lord. We must be about the work of seeking to bring the needed restoration, reformation, and revival that our local churches desperately need. But we must be ready because this usually won't happen because of one single passionate appeal or a single loving gesture or a single tactical change. Rather God does this work through us as we engage in clear consistent teaching over the course of years, faithful compassionate care over those same years and diligent devoted fellowship over those same years to bring about the fruit in its season.

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