When I was still in junior high school, my sister and I asked our grandmother about what it was like when she finally had things like vacuum cleaners and washing machines to use in her household chores. Had the new gadgets made life easier?
Without batting an eye, my grandmother, who had grown up the daughter of a sharecropper in East Texas during the Depression, lived in one-room houses with packed-dirt floors, and raided pack-rat nests for pecans to sell to the grocer for thread, gave us a quick and emphatic, “NO.”
Instead of reducing her workload, the advent of these electric aids to housework only gave my grandmother more to do!
Today, smartphones are supposed to make our lives easier as well. But, if you are like me, you know that a device that allows you to easily take a phone, email, internet connection, banking interface, social network, endless library, and gaming center wherever you go doesn’t simplify anything at all.
I have finally “smartened up” and put a hiatus on my electric devices after a certain point in the evening (unless I am writing my blog or a novel, of course) in an attempt to reduce the constant strain on my neck. With increased access to everywhere, I am also experiencing increased and unceasing stress!
Our consumer-driven society has given us an addiction to abundance that makes us less likely to slow down, be still, and feel the power of God around us. The challenge of balancing work, family-life, friendships, responsibilities and relaxation may just be the major crisis of our century.
But there is another kind of abundance that brings with it a different set of challenges. I’ll tell you right up front that I like these challenges much better.
The abundance I am talking about is the love of God for us, a love so great that Jesus died for us, accepting the punishment for all our sins when He Himself had done nothing to deserve punishment, so that we might have a chance to accept Him as our Savior and thus achieve salvation.
Christ’s love for us is an abundance that we must be willing to accept with the faith of a small child, and that we should desire to share with others. Christ’s love is a way of being when we interact with it on a daily basis.
How do you meet the challenge of the abundance that comes with a God who loves you so much, He comes to earth in the form of man to be humiliated in the end and crucified for you?
If you really accept this abundance, you will exhibit the fruit of the Spirit, as Paul describes it to the Galatians:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law (Galatians 5:22-23).
This abundance of love is something that we humans can so easily take for granted, which means we aren’t as patient with others as we ought to be, we gossip just a little, we watch more television than we spend time in the Word, prayer, fellowship.
In other words, we are very good at proving over and over just how fortunate we are that Jesus was willing to die for us. None of us are perfect. But God’s love for us should make us want to be.
How do we take advantage of the abundance of God’s love? All we have to do is ask:
“Ask and it will be given to you;” Christ tells us, “seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:7-8).
But we can also practice the disciplines of love: studying God’s word, praying, being still to listen for God’s direction, being in fellowship with other believers who can help us be accountable to God’s truth, paying attention to our actions and repenting of our sins to God.
Abundance can be as bad as it is good, but in the case of God’s love for us, the abundance of the gift of salvation is certainly uphill all the way.
goodchristianfiction 
I hear ya. Sometimes I want to throw them all out the back door.