A pastor sat down in a radio studio and said something you almost never hear said out loud: I enjoyed my sin. Not “my life was a wreck.” Not “I had nowhere else to turn.” He liked the life he was living, and he left it for God anyway.
That one line has been rattling around in me all weekend, because it quietly breaks a script most of us have learned by heart.
The testimony we have over-rehearsed
Somewhere along the way the church settled into a standard shape for a conversion story. The old life has to be grim. There has to be a bottom, and the bottom has to be low enough to be interesting. Then Jesus arrives like an ambulance.
For plenty of people that is exactly how it happened, and thank God for it. But the script does two kinds of damage. First, it leaves a lot of believers thinking they have no story to tell. Nothing dramatic happened. They weren’t rescued from anything with a name you’d recognize. They just came to see that Jesus is real and true, and they turned. That is a magnificent story and they have been talked out of telling it.
Second — and this one costs us more — it trains us to believe the gospel is for people whose lives have collapsed. So we wait. We wait for the diagnosis, the crisis, the unraveling, before we think we have any right to speak. And meanwhile we stand next to a neighbor who is doing fine, thanks, and we say nothing, because what would we even offer a person who is enjoying himself?
Scripture is more honest than we are
Listen to how the Bible describes the thing we usually flatten out:
“By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to be mistreated with the people of God than to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of sin. He considered the reproach of Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt, for he was looking to the reward” (Hebrews 11:24-26).
Read it slowly. The pleasures of sin. The writer does not pretend Egypt was nothing. He does not say Moses walked away from a palace because palaces are boring. He says the pleasures were real — and fleeting. That is the honest word. Not fake. Not imaginary. Short.
And notice what actually moved Moses. Not disgust. Comparison. He weighed one thing against another and judged that belonging to God — even with the mistreatment attached — was the greater wealth. He was looking at something.
What actually pulls a person out
Nobody leaves a life they enjoy because someone shamed them out of it. Shame can make a person hide. It has never once made a person free. What pulls someone out is a better love showing up and making the old one look small.
That is Holy Spirit work, and it is not only ancient history. I watch it happen now. Someone walks into our building with nothing obviously wrong — good job, decent family, no crisis to report — and they cannot shake a pull they didn’t ask for and can’t explain. That restlessness in a comfortable life is not boredom. That is God. The Spirit does not only meet people at the bottom; He has a way of interrupting people in the middle of a perfectly good Tuesday.
David said it plainly: “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). Forevermore — set against fleeting. The contest was never joy versus no joy. It was a short joy versus a lasting one.
Who we are actually sent to
Which changes who we talk to. If the gospel is only an ambulance, we only speak to the wounded. If the gospel is a better love, we can speak to anyone — including the friend whose life looks enviable and who still lies awake wondering what it’s all for.
That is worth carrying into Mission Sunday on November 1. When we think about mission we usually picture the desperate and the far-off, and those people matter enormously. But some of the people God is drawing right now are comfortable, capable and quietly unsatisfied, and they have never once been invited because they didn’t look like they needed inviting. Bring them. Let Jesus be compelling rather than merely necessary.
And if you are reading this still enjoying something you suspect God is asking you to lay down — you are not disqualified, and you are not a hypocrite for finding it hard. Tell Him the truth about it. He already knows, and He is not scandalized. Christ did not come to make you miserable enough to repent. He came so that what you let go of would be swallowed up by what you gain in Him.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.