Escapism – Part 1 – Watch out for Escapism
Ephesians 4:15-16 “Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”
We have been looking at “fellowship in depth” andwe saw how important this is for meaningful relationships with one another. However fellowship in depth for most people is a scary thing and one where we are tempted to try to escape. When it comes to building and having meaningful relationships we need to be very much alert about this danger of escapism.
What do I mean by “escapism?” This is where we try to avoid anything unpleasant that the Lord brings into our path for our own spiritual development; to bring us into a deeper relationship with one another andwith God.
Most of us live in a society or culture where we can escape whenever we run across something unpleasant. We can go to another church or fellowship group, or changeour location or job. Somehow we think that by leaving the unpleasantness we will be better off. But then we find similar things happening again and we realize that we still have got the same old problem. After a while we may even begin to realize that it is not somebody else, or something else that needs to be changed, but it’s me. Escaping only delays the process of God working in our lives to bring us to the place where He wants us.
Remember when I was talking about conflicts and how to work them out that I said there are four different ways that people try to use. One of those ways was to think or believe that there were no conflicts. What most people do is run from them, by having an unwillingness to face the conflicts. To face them takes admitting and then confrontation. Most people do not want to do this. We run away and in so doing we delay and postpone what the Lord wants to do in our lives.
However, God will not let us get away from it. It will take time, but He will workout the same circumstances as before and we will not grow spiritually until we learn the lesson that He wants to teach us through this experience (whatever that experience might be). It is why some people are 30, 40 or even 50 years old ‘in the Lord’ but spiritually they are still babies. They didn’t mature using escapism; making their own way of escaping what they don’t want to face and deal with.
When I was the director of O.M.’s ship M/V DOULOS I would often get young people in my office wanting to change departments. When they would come with their requests they made it sound very spiritual. For example, they had been praying and they felt that this was something that the Lord would have them do. However, upon closer scrutiny invariably I would find that there was a broken relationship and rather than face it and work it out, theywere trying to run from it, to escape dealing with it personally.
In these kinds of circumstances, when it seems that things are against us, we think that the person or the situation is the problem. No, the situation or the people that God surrounds us with are not the problem; they just highlight or expose the problem within us.
We will be spending the next chapters looking into why and how escapism takes place. May the Lord bless and keep us true from within.