INSINCERE SORROW

 

INSINCERE SORROW

Jer. 3:10 “But in spite of all this, her faithless sister Judah has never sincerely returned to me. She has only pretended to be sorry,” says the LORD. NLT

Israel and Judah had fallen away from God. Their attempts at reaching out to God were feeble at best. They wanted all of what the world had to offer and yet retain a semblance of their religious identity. God was an afterthought in their lives rather than a forethought. God was turned to only in times of great distress and danger. Sincerity was not their strong suit.

Many of us are just like that today. We too lack sincerity in our walk with God. We too want to have what the world offers and still be identified as followers of Christ. We too give lip service to Christ and not heart service. There is a shallowness in the life of the Church today that is downright scary. We are easily worked up emotionally and think that is godliness. We become so caught up in ourselves that we fail to move on to the deeper life of holiness. We accept with our minds holiness of living, but not with our hearts. We fail to sincerely pursue godliness in our thinking. We treat living in Christ as if it doesn’t really matter. We think that a “profession of faith” at some time in our lives will automatically get us into heaven. Our sorrow over sin is more that we got caught than it is a sorrow that we have disobeyed and offended God.

We think that it is enough to “worship” the Lord an hour or two out of our week. We think that as long as we put forth some effort to be Christ-like that it is good enough. We think that holiness is an option, not a necessity, in our lives.

We think that as long as we repent of our sins it’s okay to repeat them. We somehow get the idea that God doesn’t care what we do. We think that He loves us and will overlook our lack of holiness, that God is not as strict and demanding towards us as He was to those who lived before Christ.

I wonder what the Lord thinks about the way we think and live.