Safety, comfort, and security. They sound like wonderful, worthy goals that no one would take issue with. After all, who would willingly seek out and embrace their opposite numbers, danger, suffering, and turmoil? Yet in a previous post I began to make the case that these three nearly universally accepted values of the western world are in fact slowly suffocating and choking the life out of the faith of most Christians. In that post the focus was on our obsession with safety and its negative impact on a faith that trusts God enough to move into circumstances that on the outside appear risky, even dangerous, when remaining in place is actually more dangerous to your soul.

This post is about comfort. On the surface you would think who could possibly have an issue with comfort. The Bible itself is full of references to comfort and how God promises to comfort His people. Not all comfort is created equal. When God offers to comfort His people it generally is in the context of a people who are suffering and God wants to strengthen them in the midst of hardship. That is what comfort is really about. It is the combination of two Latin root words, com, meaning with or alongside and forte meaning strength. So to comfort someone in a classic sense is to be alongside them providing strength. I will take kind of comfort whenever I can get it, especially when it is God who offers it.

Far from a comfort that brings strength in time of need is the 21st century variety. Our value of comfort is more about making life free from all struggle, all hassle and all minor irritation. It is about making a nice life as soft and plush as possible. Don’t get me wrong. I am not advocating pain and suffering as a virtue to be pursued. Last year I put in nearly 175,000 miles in an airplane seat as I traveled the world helping train pastors and leaders to plant churches. That level of frequent flyer miles means that on rare occasions I get bumped up from economy to business or first class. Trust me, it has never crossed my mind to turn down that upgrade to a more comfortable seat in the name of some misguided love of discomfort. When you have a fourteen hour flight ahead of you and someone offers you a bigger, softer reclining seat with a meal served on real plates, you take it. There is nothing “holy” about bumping elbows with your neighbor as you try to eat bad food with the seatback in front of you nearly in your lap. Yes, I will take the upgrade when I get it. What I try hard to do is take it as a blessing so that when I don’t get upgraded flying overseas, which is 90% of the time, I don’t get annoyed and put out by the experience.

When I speak of our obsession with comfort I am talking about what I see as a value that no one should ever be physically, emotionally or socially uncomfortable. Take some time to watch ads on television and you will quickly see that Madison Avenue is selling, among other things, the life of comfort. Anything that makes life easier, more plush, softer, is good. It doesn’t matter if the product is a car or toilet paper. Conversely, anything that is difficult, hard or stressful is intrinsically bad. Parents want their children to never ever feel uncomfortable so to the delight of makers of sports trophies, even the worst player on the worst soccer or Little League Baseball team gets a trophy at the end of the year because Lord forbid that a child should be forced to deal with the painful reality that some people are better at kicking or hitting a ball than they are. 

So what does this have to do with your Christian faith? Simply this, I have found that my faith often grows stronger when I am forced outside my “comfort zone” and it grows weaker and softer the more comfortable my situation and surroundings. Our cultural value that seeks out comfort at nearly any cost is in direct conflict with one of the most important ways God uses to deepen our faith and relationship with Him. Imagine for a moment that you are faced with two possibilities. You can take a two-week vacation to that favorite relaxing spot you’ve always dreamed about. Be it a tropical beach resort or a lush mountain getaway, it doesn’t much matter. The point is it is a place of comfort, beauty, special service, fantastic food, huge soft beds and wonderful hot tubs. You enjoy the comfort of servants who cater to your every need. Each night you go to bed stuffed from the abundance and variety of the food you feasted on. At the end of it all you drag yourselves to the airport and go home to face the work week. You love the time you had in comfort but somehow feel like you need a vacation to rest from your vacation, yet you cannot of the life of you think of what you did that really mattered and will last.

Your other option is two weeks in a third world country caring for AIDS orphans. The food will be the same everyday, something along the lines of pasty grits with some beans on top. You will bath out of a bucket after a night of sleeping on a very hard bed under a mosquito net. But everyday you will be challenged by the smiles and laughter of children who have nothing but feel they have everything because you came to love them for the briefest of days. You will find yourself praying for strength and feeling guilty that you complain about the food knowing that these kids eat the same thing everyday. Well actually only Monday through Friday when they have school. On weekends there is no food at home. You will find yourself reading your Bible every morning AND evening because you need it like never before. Incredibly the words jump off the pages and into your heart as never before. When it is finally time to go home the tears flow as children rush to hug you and say goodbye and it takes all you have to peel them away and not smuggle one or two into the van.

Which was the more comfortable two weeks? Which was the more difficult, challenging and uncomfortable? Which one did nothing to strengthen your faith and as a result actually weakened it? Which one changed you forever and drew you nearer to the heart of Jesus as never before? That answers are obvious, yet most people will never, ever consider the uncomfortable two weeks because it is just that, uncomfortable. They dismiss it out of hand without realizing they have made a decision based on a deeply held cultural value and not a call from God to change the world. It is not just the decisions on what to do with two weeks of vacation that is in play here. It is the decisions we make every day to select comfort over challenge, ease over effort, soft over sacrifice. Those daily decisions add up over time to suck the life out of the Christian faith.