We are dabblers most of the time. In most things in life, we simply skim along the surface and refuse to go deep. Relationships, work, and even our play don’t get our full attention or our best efforts. For most of us in the West, even our faith is susceptible to this perfunctory treatment.
We float on the surface of the water, and then complain that it’s hot and refuse to jump in for a dip.
We nibble at the skin of the apple and complain that it doesn’t taste very good.
>Charles Spurgeon, a 19th century Baptist preacher in England, said that every Christian is born a warrior. “It is his destiny to be assaulted, his duty to attack.”
Instead, most men find themselves in the infirmary, with little injury other than having sat on their helmet.
The expression may, by now, be a bit passe, but one hears occasionally within church culture references to thinking and acting “outside the box.” Unfortunately, many are willing, even anxious, to join the hordes of those who “think outside the box” (but who are most definitely, by now, calling it something else entirely), even when such thinking puts us squarely outside the confining walls of Scripture. Indeed, the “walls” of Scripture liberate, rather than confine.
The common refrain among these free spirits is that those of us who insist on permitting Scripture to limit our sin-prone mental wanderings are “putting God in a box.” Yet if true this proposition would leave us in the position of asserting that God created a box that he does not inhabit and necessarily ignores.