Christians are as subject to complacency as anybody else, and we can certainly settle into repetition and forget that something radical and extraordinary is being asked of us as well – that we hold to an extraordinary promise about how, from moment to moment, something enters the world and enters us, after which everything is different.
Francis Spufford
Complacency is “a feeling of un-critical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements, self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies; contented to a fault.” -American heritage dictionary compilation third edition- Being complacent means we stop being self-aware – or generally aware. We stop looking. We stop learning. We stop being prepared. We stop hoping. We choose either consciously or unconsciously to stop examining the facts, the truth of the situation in which we find ourselves, our families, our Nation or Christ’s Church. We start seeing only the obstacle and not the opportunities. We begin to focus on the clouds and not the beneficial rain. We concentrate on failures rather than successes. We count defeats rather than victories. We look at our inadequacies and not our strengths. We pay more attention to what we do not have instead of what we do possess. We prefer to hold on to the turmoil of our past more than the treasures of our future. The Church stops envisioning. The Church stops evangelizing. The Church stops equipping. We make it about us and not about Jesus Christ.
One writer has said: “Complacency is a blight that saps energy, dulls attitudes, and causes a drain on the brain. The first symptom is satisfaction with things as they are. The second is rejection of things as they might be. “Good enough” becomes today’s watchword and tomorrow’s standard.”
A great example of complacency is the Titanic. A ship built by man with the most up-to-date technology available and declared by its builders to be unsinkable. Such was the complacency of the ships invincibility they only had enough life boats for 33% of those on board – which happened to be enough for only all of the first class passengers. Those in second, third or carriage class were not even told where the life boats were. Such complacency led to the loss of 1500 lives. Another example has been proven in the scenes of what transpired with the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Europe leading up to American involvement in World II. Hitler took over parts of Europe because the world was lulled into a false security the Nazi’s promised “Peace” by the time the world came out of its sleep over six million Jews lay dead millions more soldiers and civilian casualties from around the world due to battle, disease, starvation and yet, millions more wounded.
Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and trust in the mountain of Samaria, which are named chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel came! Amos 6:1 KJV
Time’s up
