Overcoming Inertia

1/13/1997

This is a really short thought, but there is something in the physical world called inertia, which says that if something is stationary it takes a lot of energy to get it moving, and if something is moving it takes a lot of energy to make it stop. In other words, it’s hard to get something to change its current state of motion. Whether that’s static, it’s not moving or if it’s already moving. Anyway, we’ve talked tonight about being a worshipper, we’ve talked tonight about learning lessons. What would it take for God to get our attention? Regardless of who we are and regardless of exactly where we are in our spiritual journey, we are all going to have to overcome some level of inertia. That’s just the facts of the matter. I guarantee that everybody in this room, as they try to put something into practice, is going to come up against that within the next twenty-four hours. Probably before you go to bed tonight. You will come up against something where there has been a pattern that has been formed which can fall short of the glory of God. God tugs at your heart to spend a little bit of time with Him, and you just go to bed. Who knows what it is. You know what it is. I don’t know what it is.

But there’s things like that, there are specific things that, there’s inertia, there’s movement, there’s patterns that we’ve formed and habits that are going to take some energy. Those things have to be overcome by making choices, really, and by bringing to mind the things we’ve talked about tonight. The glory of the Good News is that God changes lives. That’s one of the aspects of it. But in order for Him to do that, there is this inertia, there are these things that are in motion that have to be redirected or stopped or totally changed and we are going to have to deal with that. It’s hard. And it’s not easy. And it’s hard for any human being, Christian or non-Christian to change the way he’s living. As people we form life and patterns and ways of doing things in the way we conduct our days and it’s not easy to change those things. We can have lots of right reasons, and so on and so forth, but it’s still not easy to change those things. It’s difficult to overcome that inertia. And I guess I just thought it was appropriate to remind us all of that and to encourage us all, all of us, to make the choices to overcome that. Because everytime there is something of value spiritually or for any other reason, you’re going to have to overcome that, and it’s not easy, but it can be done and it has to be done to make progress.