The Antidote for Spiritual Lethargy

Do you suffer from spiritual lethargy? Most American Christians do. The symptoms are many and varied. Some days you feel spiritually disconnected. You just can’t seem to find your way into God’s presence. Sometimes these spiritually disconnected days turn into two or three days, or a week. Lately it has seemed like they are happening more frequently. 

Sometimes you hear God clearly, but most of the time you’re not sure you’re hearing anything at all. You feel as though your spiritual journey has gotten stuck. You’ve felt this way for a long time. 

Your enthusiasm for participating in church activities has waned. Instead of feeling like you’re participating in a grand adventure of spiritual discovery, it seems more like you’re just getting your time card punched. 

These are some of the ways spiritual lethargy manifests itself. The common denominator seems to be that we don’t know how we got this way, and we aren’t at all sure what to do about it. There’s actually a straightforward, and very effective way to change the dynamics of spiritual lethargy, and get ourselves unstuck—seek God early. 

Seeking God early is the driving force that propels personal spiritual growth. If we don’t learn to seek God early, we won’t make sustained progress in our own spiritual development. Seeking God early is the doorway that leads to the knowledge of God (Proverbs 8:17). Unfortunately, the doorway that leads us into God’s presence is one through which few Christians choose to enter. 

Compelling spiritual benefits flow from your commitment to seek God early. You become engaged with the Word of God every day. As you learn to hear God’s Word, faith spontaneously grows in your heart. You become enabled to maintain a constant posture of faith toward God, which allows you to stay connected to God every day, year after year, for your entire life. Staying connected to God day by day enables you to live a life that is continually becoming filled with ever-increasing levels of truth and freedom (John 8:31-32). 

These are substantial, life-altering spiritual benefits. They can all be yours for the minimal cost of spending 15-minutes seeking God at the start of your day. However, it’s quite likely that if you start with 15-minutes a day, you’ll soon discover that 15-minutes will not satisfy your need to be with God. 

Seeking God is a self-sustaining spiritual activity. The more we do it, the more we want to be with Him. So, if you start with a minimal commitment of 15-minutes, you will expand the amount of time you devote to seeking God until it becomes adequate to satisfy your need to be with God every day. This is not an added cost; it’s an additional benefit. As you continue to seek God, your commitment to Him grows stronger and becomes deeper. 

Our spiritual development proceeds in tandem with our deepening commitment to God. As our commitment to God grows, our desire to be with Him increases, but there’s another important additional benefit. Our motivation for seeking Him changes. We stop seeking Him because we need something from Him. Instead, we seek Him just because we want to be with Him. This is the gift of spiritual desire. It’s the antidote for spiritual lethargy. It’s what causes seeking God to become self-sustaining, and it comes to us as a direct result of making the commitment to seek God first every day. 

Bill Geiger 
www.SustainedSpiritualGrowth.com 
bill@sustainedspiritualgrowth.com