A Form of Faith: How God's People Drift into Practical Atheism

We just spent a long season in the book of Romans, downloading a lot of deep, rich theology. The danger in that is that you can get really, really smart about the things of God, and it stays in your head. You can have a full notebook and a thin heart. So we've turned to the book of Judges to move from what we know to how we grow.

I passed high school Spanish. You know how I passed it? Cramming. I memorized the vocabulary, conjugated the verbs, took the test, and passed. Then I moved to Central Florida, started going on mission trips to Nicaragua and Honduras and the Dominican Republic, and found out there's a difference between passing Spanish and speaking Spanish. You can know and not be. You can look like a Christian, act like a Christian, and talk like a Christian, and it never gets from your head to your heart to your hand.

Our key verse for this series is Judges 17:6:

In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Step one: a formal faith

Joshua's generation saw the Jordan River stop. They saw the walls of Jericho fall. Then Joshua died, the elders who outlived him died, and verse 10 hits like a brick wall:

When all that generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation arose after them who did not know the LORD nor the work which He had done for Israel. (Judges 2:10)

They were still doing the feasts but forgot what the feasts represented. They kept enough religion to feel safe but not enough worship to stay faithful.

If you're a second-generation Christian, here's my warning: the danger for you is to look the part and act the part without being the part. First-generation believers have stories of how God pulled them out of the miry clay. The next generation hears their stories, not their own. I'm a second-generation Christian. My dad came to Christ because of a friend in high school. It's risky.

Step two: forgetting God

If you forget your password, that's a memory problem. If you forget your anniversary, that's a priority problem. Judges 3:7 says they "forgot the LORD their God, and served the Baals and Asherahs." That wasn't "Oh, is it Sunday?" It was an intentional choice to trade God out for what everybody around them was doing. They still knew the stories. If you'd asked them, they'd have said, "Absolutely I'm one of God's people." But they had moved on.

Step three: God becomes a mascot

Some of us drift from Sunday worship to a little bit of everything else the rest of the week, and eventually God becomes our mascot. I was born in Miami, so my team is the Hurricanes, and our mascot is an ibis. A mascot runs around, hypes up the crowd, and is a cute placeholder. But a mascot doesn't call the plays. Once the Christian life is about you, God becomes your pom-pom-waving cheerleader. God says, "That's not my role in your life. I am the Lord."

Step four: a frantic faith

Then trouble comes and we cry out. And God, moved to pity by their groaning, raised up judges. But when the judge died, they went right back. We've got to break the cycle where we only pray when we need God. We need God all the time.

A temporary urgency is not the same thing as a surrendered faith. It can't just be "Lord, fix this." It has to grow into "Lord, fix me."