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It’s easy to slip into a routine faith. We go to church, read our Bibles and pray every once in a while, and think that’s enough. We forget that God wants us to continually yearn for Him.

Our devotional this morning from Charles Spurgeon’s Morning and Evening can be seen as a wakeup call to any of us who have slipped into a lazy faith. In it, he exhorts us to forcefully cast off whatever it is that is keeping us from experiencing God to the fullest:

Rouse thee, O believer, from thy low condition! Cast away thy sloth, thy lethargy, thy coldness, or whatever interferes with thy chaste and pure love to Christ, thy souls Husband. Make him the source, the centre, and the circumference of all thy souls range of delight. What enchants thee into such folly as to remain in a pit when thou mayst sit on a throne? Live not in the lowlands of bondage now that mountain liberty is conferred upon thee. Rest no longer satisfied with thy dwarfish attainments, but press forward to things more sublime and heavenly. Aspire to a higher, a nobler, a fuller life. Upward to heaven! Nearer to God!

Is there anything in your life that you’ve let come between you and the fullness of God’s love and grace?

Everybody’s busy these days. You’re busy; I’m busy; I don’t know if I’ve encountered anybody in my adult life who wasn’t busy balancing work, school, childcare, travel, and all the other usual suspects.

Busy-ness is a part of our lives, and it’s not very practical or helpful to insist that we simply stop being busy. But it is nevertheless critically important that we not let the hectic pace of our lives pull us away from God. That’s the topic of this devotional from Words of Hope:

Many of us are terribly busy. Our hectic pace of life spins like a merry-go-round, threatening to throw us off completely. So we go to the opposite extreme. We “veg” out, passively watching program after program on TV. Yet somehow this inactivity fails to give us the rest we seek.

Rest is not simply inactivity. It’s also a state of being. Both work and sleep are blessings, but they cannot cure the restlessness of our hearts. Augustine put it well when he said: “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” King David celebrated this deep sense of rest in Psalm 16. The refuge he found in God centered his whole being.

Read the rest of the devotional at Words of Hope.

There are two messages in this devotional that I very much needed to hear today. One is that laziness isn’t just a matter of sitting around doing nothing; in our world of constant distraction, you can keep terrifically “busy” but still manage to neglect the things you ought to be doing.

Secondly, there’s more to spiritual and emotional “R&R” than simply sleeping in on the odd Saturday morning. (My sleeping-in, video-game playing college self could have benefited from this message a decade ago.) Just as you can be lazy while keeping “busy,” you can also sit around doing nothing—our culture’s idea of “rest”—and not find spiritual refreshment.

The solution, of course, is to turn to God himself, who promises “rest for your souls” if we but turn to him. How busy are you today? Where do you find your rest—and is it the pure, renewing rest that God provides?