Where Did The Excitement Go?

“What must I do to make sure God will accept me?” This was the question I was asked the other day, and which I eagerly responded to with the words of the Gospel, how God already made the way by sending His Son to pay for our sins on the Cross. The individual to whom I was talking had no problem acknowledging that he had sin and even though he did not want me to pray with him, I could see from the concentration and expression on his face, he was silently praying to ask Jesus to save him. I uttered an audible, “Amen,” and his face brightened.

To the unbeliever, so battered by sin and guilt the wonderful news that “Jesus paid it all” can be the best and most exciting news that can be heard. However, to many of us who have known salvation for a long time, this truth seems to have lost its luster. Where is the excitement in our local churches over the fact that Jesus saves and keeps? Why do we get excited mostly over spectacular experiences rather than the most spectacular event of all—Jesus saves?

Perhaps we have come too far in our Christian walk that we no longer fear condemnation, but not far enough to realize that our lives must be all about Him and not about us. We get ourselves worked up over a specific event. People come and hear the Gospel. We feel the church is being blest, but we don’t press on. We go back to our complacency—to our normal routines and are not concerned that those that just heard the Gospel are not following along in it. Have we really understood what Calvary means and ought to mean to us.

In Galatians 2:20 Paul said, “I am crucified with Christ, Nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ liveth in me.” What a statement. How many of us professing Christians really understand the depth of this? Have we really understood what it means to ask Jesus to come into our hearts? Have we truly received the Lord Jesus Christ? What Paul was saying is that when we receive Jesus, we have been placed into Him and when He died on the Cross, that was the place our sinful natures were crucified as well. That is why we are to die to self daily. When we do this, how can we live in complacency? How can we ever lose the excitement that Jesus “Paid it all.”