Faith Is Not A Spectator Sport

Its easy to get into the habit of being a consumer and a spectator in life. We learn in school that we are the receiver of information because we spend years sitting in a classroom listening to someone teach us while we give very little feedback until test time. The same is true in traditional churches where being a part of the congregation is to sit in the pew and receive the teaching from the pulpit. We even trust our civic leaders to make decisions and take actions that directly affect our life and well-being with little or no active involvement on our part. There seems to be 2 groups in these scenarios, producers and consumers. The producers are the ones who study and prepare so they can present information or make decisions. The consumers are the ones who are intended to receive the fruit of the other’s labor. The intention is for the consumers to be the beneficiary of the interactions.

The argument can be made that the actual beneficiary is the producer. The leader is the one who has engaged the topic to intimately understand it, whether to teach it or to make potentially life changing decisions about it. The recipient is too often a passive consumer. Students spend time at their desk listening needing only to remember the information long enough to pass a test. The church goer in the pew may or may not remember the message even until the end of the day and receive only a passing good feeling in the moment. Citizens may approve or disapprove the decisions made by their civic leaders and complain about the results, but rarely spend the time to understand the issue or the consequence of the decisions to provide input and feedback.

Faith is not a spectator sport. We are not intended to be the passive beneficiary of someone else’s labor (Eph 4:28). In fact, if we are only a spectator we will not really benefit spiritually. It is the labor that grows our faith and causes us to mature. Faith requires that we engage the message and the process. To grow in faith we must internalize the message and apply it in our mind. We stand on the shoulders of giants, those who came before us and did the spiritual work in their own mind so that they could pass the work on to us. We can and should be thankful to them for all they made available to us. Even in the world, the greatest form of flattery is imitation. We don’t want to imitate our elders just for the sake of appearances or play acting. We want to labor in the same way that they did so that we can produce in us the same life giving fruit. Jesus did the work in his mind and taught the disciples to do the same. They in turn were able to pass on the same work to those who accepted their message and the early church was born. If each hadn’t labored in his own vineyard God’s word never would have spread as it did. Likewise we also have been given the understanding of the process to become a clean soul and a mature disciple in christ. It is easy to be a consumer because there is little accountability. It is easy to sit in the seat and be a spectator of someone else’s labor. But if we want the benefit of that labor we need to do the work ourselves and become producers and pass it on (1Co 15:58, Heb 4:11, 2Pe 1:10,11).