Why Is It Okay Sunday Afternoon?

I went to church. I listened to sermons. I played worship music. I wasn’t living it.

There was a stretch of my life where I went to church every Sunday morning. Got lunch after. Good week.

Here’s what the rest of my week looked like.

I had a life influenced by lust and not by love, and I really didn’t understand the difference then. I was drinking. I cussed like it was a second language. I watched things I had no business watching. Every worldly thing you can think of, I had a working relationship with.

And I still had the worship music on in the car.

I Wasn’t Living It

That’s the part that took me years to see.

I was doing all the right-looking things. Church on Sunday. Sermons after. Worship music playing. If you had watched me for one hour on a Sunday morning you would have said there goes a Christian man.

I wasn’t living it. I was consuming it.

“But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves.”

James 1:22

Fooling yourselves. Not fooling everybody else. That verse doesn’t say the people around you are deceived. It says you are.

And I was. I thought I was in decent shape with God, because I was showing up and I was listening. Nobody ever told me that listening was the easy part.

The Stories We Tell

Here’s one nobody talks about.

I’d get on the phone with guys I don’t talk to anymore and go straight back to who we used to be. Cussing up a storm. Talking about lust. Talking about the substances, the nights we barely remember, the things we ought to be sick about.

We weren’t confessing any of it. We were telling it like a highlight reel.

That’s what got me. I wasn’t out doing those things anymore. I was doing something else. I was making them sound good. I was keeping them alive and giving them a warm place to sit, and I was doing it in the car and at home around people I used to run with.

I don’t talk to any of them now. Not because anybody had a falling out. I just changed, and the conversations stopped working.

“Such people claim they know God, but they deny him by the way they live.”

Titus 1:16

You can stop doing a thing and still be selling it.

Then I Started Driving

Once I was out here, Sunday morning stopped being an option. No service. No lunch after. So I started having church in the truck.

Sermons between stops. Books. Scripture in the bunk.

And I was still listening to music that was worldly and about lust. Still cussing. Still telling the old stories like they were something to be proud of. I had a lot of room to grow and I did not know how much.

But the seeds were going in. All that listening and reading, month after month, mile after mile. It took a long time for any of it to take root.

Praise God it did.

Zero to Ten

I heard a pastor describe it on a podcast once and it’s stuck with me ever since.

Say zero is no faith at all. Say ten is all in. Hardcore, evangelizing, discipling, Bible nerd, the whole thing.

Most people don’t start at zero. Maybe you were baptized as a baby. Maybe your folks took you to church and you went along. That puts you at a one or a two before you ever decided anything.

Then life happens. You meet somebody. You sit through something. Somebody says a thing that sticks. And you move. Two to three. Three to four.

You almost never jump. You inch.

That’s what the whole stretch I just described actually was. Sunday mornings with a wreck of a week attached, then years in a truck with sermons playing and the same habits running underneath. I thought I was either in or out. I was neither. I was at a four and I couldn’t have told you that.

The Fourth Man in the Furnace

Then God put the right people in front of me.

One man in particular. He mentored me, and he set my soul on fire in the best way. Game on. Let’s go.

You know the story in Daniel 3. Three men get thrown into the furnace and the king looks in and counts four walking around loose in there, and the fourth one doesn’t look like the others. A lot of us read that fourth man as Christ himself.

That’s what a mentor does. He doesn’t stand outside the fire and holler instructions. He gets in there with you.

He and I don’t talk much anymore. That’s alright. He served his purpose in my life, and I don’t say that coldly. God put him where I needed him for as long as I needed him.

Now I’m trying to be that for somebody else. Which is most of why this publication exists.

So Where Does It Come From?

Now the questions, and understand I’m asking them of myself first.

Are you going to the new horror movie? Meeting everybody at the haunted house tonight, the one that’s supposed to be really scary? Got music on that you know isn’t pointing anywhere good? Watched the latest one, full of language and bodies?

I’m not going to rule on every one of those. I’d be a hypocrite twice over and I’ve got no interest in that.

But it’s fair to ask where a thing comes from. Fear. Lust. Somebody’s worst decade dressed up as a good time. Does that come from Jesus, or does it come from the other one?

And who is it pointing at? God, or me?

“Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you. For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions.”

1 John 2:15-16

Pleasure, wanting, and pride. I can sort everything I just confessed into one of those three columns without much effort.

Most of Us Don’t Get a Sunday Morning

Here’s why I’m writing this to you and not to a room full of people in pews.

Most of us out here don’t get a Sunday morning at all. No service. No lunch after. No hour a week where we put on the cleaned-up version and sit somewhere people can see it.

Which means we’ve got nothing to hide behind.

A man who can’t get to church has no Sunday self. Whatever he is, he’s that on Tuesday afternoon in Amarillo with nobody watching and nobody to perform for. There’s no clean hour to point at when he starts wondering where he stands.

That’s harder in one way and a whole lot more honest in another.

Where Are You on the Scale?

You’re somewhere on it right now. So am I. Neither of us is at ten and neither of us is as far along as we’d tell somebody at a fuel island.

The good news is you don’t have to jump. You just have to move one notch, and the next notch usually shows up as a person.

So here’s the question I’d leave you with, since I already know what mine used to be.

If nobody ever saw you in a pew, what could anyone tell about your faith?

I was in one every week, and it still wouldn’t have told you much.