Growth is hard...playing the game is easy.

Growth is hard because although everyone wants to get there...very few people are willing to put in the work. We get lazy, distracted, overwhelmed, and simply discouraged so we stop and sit. We get excited at the beginning and eventually we go, "what the...nobody told me it was going to be like this."

But what happens is because know better but refuse to move forward is that we do everything else instead of truly growing. We'll get preoccupied with secondary issues and think that it's the same as growing. We'll simply neglect the core issues and settle for other stuff. But you end up deceiving yourself. You go back to living from one event to the next. And maybe you've learned to disguise it by cloaking it in religious lingo. So you hang out with church friends and call it "community" when there's really no genuine biblical community that ever comes out of it. You get together and sing "Christian songs" and listen to "Christian artists" without there ever being any true worship. Don't fall into the trap of playing the game. Because you can do everything that looks right and feels good without any true sense of transformation. Justify it all you want...but what ends up happening is that you slowly become conformed to a pattern of religion while your heart is never transformed at all (Rom. 12:1-2)

And my biggest fear is that sooner or later you'll notice you're just playing a game but never have any intention to grow...so you'll pick up your bags and find the next big "thing" in town (another youth group, another speaker to listen to, another whatever...) You never really bought in and truly wanted to grow deep. Dear friends...examine your own heart and see if there's any truth to this. If so, repent and turn from your ways...plug in and "do what you did at first."  Do the hard work of discipline and work hard at growth.