I Am Excited?

One of the things that my son Matthew and I like to do is play guitars together.  I play passable rhythm guitar  and he has a little guitar that he just strums and dances with.  His favorite song is "Blessed Be the Name of the Lord" that we sing during praise and worship at church.  To curtail singing this one song endlessly I have found a site that has chords and words to a lot of Christian songs.  A few weeks ago I printed off a bunch of songs and we started to play through them to see which one might distract him from 20 rounds of "Blessed Be the Name of the Lord".

One of the ones that I ran off was "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus".  As I was picking through it Matthew started singing.  He knew this one already.  Sort of.  Instead of singing "I Have Decided..." he substituted "I Am Excited...".  I corrected him once.  He still insisted on singing his version.  I played it through a few more times and decided not to challenge his perception. 

That got me thinking...  

Do older Christians squelch the "excitement" of new believers?  Have we ever seen or experienced babes in Christ ready to evangelize the world only to be told by older saints that they need the proper tracts, the perfect words, and irrefutable Bible knowledge?  Why can't they just go out and tell everyone about the joy the feel from accepting Christ as their savior?  The new believer is always the best evangelist.  They are filled with an unadulterated view of faith.   They have not been pushed down by the mechanism of the church, the gossip of the members, or the trappings of "tradition".  Rather, it is the responsibility of more seasoned Christians to nurture the flame of the newbie.

The second option is one that I borrowed from Bishop Joey.  You can find him on www.oneplace.com.  Look under the House of the Lord ministry and you will find plenty of audio messages.  And if you listen enough you will find that he "can preach a lot better than you can shout"!  He has conjured a theological term called "cranktification".  This refers to the feeling you get when you hear a convicting message from the pulpit, an awesome testimony, or you attend revival.  You get all revved up about being SuperChristian and want to recapture that feeling you had at the moment of justification.   The problem with this form of "I Am Excited" is that it often winds down very quickly.  Just as rapidly as we cranked up, we decrescendo.  We make all those promises and decisions about getting back into the Word daily, praying like we should and making sure we make it to church AND Sunday school.    It never lasts.  

The reality of it all is that most of us will never be as excited now as we were when we first accepted Christ.  Sadly we fall into what I like to call "catch up Christianity".  We are so busy trying to make up for all of our spiritual shortcomings that we forget that we have already been granted our reward.  We can't make up for not reading our Bible daily, witnessing to two co-workers everyday and spending quality time in prayer.  God knew this a long time ago.  Ephesians 2 says "8For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9not by works, so that no one can boast. 10For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."  You see, faith is not a feeling.  It shouldn't go up and down like our emotions.  We should be committed to a constant and steady pursuit of a closer relationship with Christ.  Be excited about that.