To Do List

I’m a “To Do List” kind of person.  This is for two reasons.  First, I like the satisfaction of crossing something off.  There are times that I do something that isn’t on my list, and so I write it down and then cross it off immediately.  Second, if I don’t write things down I forget them, so the only way to ensure that important things get done is to put them on my “To Do List.”

When it comes to faith, many people view their relationship with Christ more like a “To Do List.”  There’s church and small group, yes, but there’s also prayer and Bible reading and outreach and service tithing and children’s ministry and youth weekend and marriage retreat and that fundraiser and… the list goes on and on.  If we want to, there can be a zillion things we add to our list of things to do for God.  And often we allow our “To Do Lists” to make us feel more spiritual.  “Look at all the things I am doing for God!” we say as we cross something else off the list.  However, the truth is that if we do those things in order to feel more spiritual, we’re not really doing any of them for God.  We are doing things to make us feel more spiritual; we are doing them for ourselves.  When our faith looks more like a “To Do List” we do all those things for our own glory. 

What if our relationship with Christ looked more like, I don’t know, a relationship?  What if we allowed it to have ups and downs?  What if instead of making the goal crossing things off a list we tried to slowly become more and more like Jesus?  What if we gauged our spirituality not by the depth of our Bible studies but by the depth of our compassion for others?  What if we viewed evangelism not as adding tick marks to some heavenly roster, but actually making disciples? What if we saw discipleship not as information transfer but as life transformation?  What might things look like then?