Yesterday in Wal-Mart I saw a set of audio tapes advertising that you can do your morning devotional in your car on your way to work. This caught my attention on a few different levels.
My first reaction was, naturally, “Wow, that’s pretty cool.” This is probably what the advertisers wanted and with me they succeeded, at least momentarily. If I were only as impulsive as they probably hoped I would be, they would have received my patronage.
Then I realized how unilaterally and incredulously we Christians, myself included, immediately accept anything branded in the name of our faith as a good thing. Certainly a morning devotional is a good thing to do, but that is not to say that it is a good thing a priori regardless of the way in which it is performed. The way in which the act is performed communicates a message to us and others about the nature of the act. For instance, if I were to ring a bell every time I fed my dog, that dog would assume that the two actions are related. This is not to say that doing your daily devotional while driving to work makes you think that God and cars are somehow cosmically intertwined. Different ways of performing an act imply different things about the act itself. In this case, the message that is communicated by always having your daily devotional on the way to work is that there is not enough time in your daily routine for a devotional, so it must be integrated into some pre-existing part of the routine. What would God say to this? I can’t know for sure, but I believe strongly that he would cry out against such misprioritization and command us to allow him to saturate our entire lives. If the problem is that there is not enough time in your life for time with God, the solution is to find out why there is not enough time and make time for God as opposed to finding some way to squeeze him in without disturbing the “natural order of things.”
This may seem nit-picky at first, but over a long period of time casual acceptance of this new user-friendly Christianity will be deadly. In this case, the ultimate result of doing your quiet times in the car might quite easily be that we assume that our lives on earth are more important than God. This must be exactly what Satan wants. Surely he rejoices more when a human is deluded into believing they are a follower of Christ when in reality that person’s life barely resembles the life that Jesus commanded his followers to live than he is when a human patently rejects the faith. In the latter case, the hope of an about-face return is still there; in the former, there is no where else to go. How can you change into a believer when you believe you already are?
