There is a kind of spiritual danger that does not announce itself with persecution or open hostility. It arrives quietly, wearing the face of familiarity. It sits in the third pew from the left, knows all the words to the hymns, and has never once felt the need to count the cost of following Jesus. It is the danger of a faith that costs nothing—and therefore means nothing.
Pastor Thomas West describes this danger with uncommon honesty in a recent piece for The Gospel Coalition. Having planted a church in secular London before accepting a call to revitalize a 205-year-old congregation in Nashville, he arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion: the Bible Belt was the harder mission field. Not because its people were hostile to the gospel, but because so many of them felt they had already received it—and found it perfectly manageable. Read the source article. His diagnosis deserves a deeper look, because the spiritual condition he names is not unique to Nashville. It is the condition of every heart that has learned to use Jesus rather than follow him.
What Scripture Says About the Comfortable Heart
The prophet Jeremiah spoke to a people who were, by every outward measure, religious. They thronged the temple, performed the rites, and carried the name of God on their lips. Yet the Lord’s verdict was devastating:
