The Antidote to Apathy – Active Obedience to God’s Word
By Elizabeth Griffin
Seeking inspiration to write this blog for my assigned week, I read through previous postings. I read about Kris Rep’s work in Guatemala and Cathy Taylor and Nancy Aguilar’s accounts of the Nicaraguan mission trip, and I wondered what on earth I have to contribute as I sit in my comfortable home fighting apathy.
Apathy. It’s a powerful weapon of the enemy against God’s people. Temptation to blatant sin is more apt to wake me up and make me angry enough to charge forth offensively with God’s Word, Worship and Prayer. But apathy just makes me want to take a nap.
According to Wikipedia (don’t write me off!), apathy is a state of indifference, or the suppression of emotions such as concern, excitement, motivation and passion. An apathetic individual … may exhibit an insensibility or sluggishness.
The opposite of apathy is flow.
According to Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi (I didn’t look him up, so I don’t endorse him, but I like what he said): Flow is completely focused motivation. Flow represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.
Sounds like God wants us to FLOW in our relationship with Him and as we do His work!
The Bible tells us in Eph. 5:14, “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” It goes on to say, “Be very careful, then, how you live – not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.”
1 Cor. 15:58 says, “Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”
In 1950, US novelist John Dos Passos wrote, "Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension."
The stimuli of this world is an unending barrage that can really shut us down, but we must also be aware of the apathy that comes when we become stagnant because we are not acting on God’s Word in our lives.
Those of us who attend Calvary Fellowship are extremely well fed. Let’s remember the admonition in James 1:22-25 that says, “Do not merely listen to the Word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the Word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it – he will be blessed in what he does.”
We are not all called to go to foreign countries as missionaries, but we are all called to obey what God is telling us to do, right here, right now.
The antidote to apathy is obedient action on God’s Word.
