Ouch!

Man, talk about feeling convicted. This Christianity Today editorial smacked me in the face:

David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, detects "a pattern of widespread cheating throughout U.S. society." He defines cheating as "breaking the rules to get ahead academically, professionally, or financially."

We might add "spiritually." More than 20 years ago, Eugene Peterson, in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, put his finger on the problem: "One aspect of the world that I have been able to identify as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly, and efficiently."

If cheating is taking inappropriate shortcuts to achieve a good, even a holy end, much of evangelical Christianity stands guilty. We read one-minute Bibles, pray through five-minute devotions, or wander from one conference to another to get five keys to spiritual success. We expect spiritual maturity in 40 purpose-filled studies. Though such resources are designed as milk for the immature, we fear they are viewed as the meat of discipleship by too many.

As Peterson puts it, "The first step toward God is a step away from the lies of the world. It is a renunciation of the lies we have been told about ourselves and our neighbors and our universe." One of those lies is that we can have instant discipleship or short-cut spirituality.

Whether we're tempted to cheat in the world or in the pulpit or in our spiritual lives, it amounts to the same thing: an impatience with the way God has made life. We do well to remember that he has created us not to be tourists, who seek instant and intense gratifications, but to be pilgrims on a long journey.

Our destination is the heavenly city, but unlike other journeys, God has made it so that the views and trials, the experiences and people we meet along the way make this journey a "destination" of its own, a process by which we prepare for the moment we come "face to face" (1 Cor. 13:12).

Shortcut the journey, and we'll never enjoy the beatific moment.

An instant society needs to be reminded of the divinely ordered way—in business, in journalism, wherever. But first, we Christians need to get our own journey in order.