Daily Devotion - Duty Over Impulse

Cultivating ordinary obedience.

“Obedience is the only reality. It is faith visible, faith acting, and faith manifest. It is the test of real discipleship among the Lord’s people.” - J.C. Ryle"

Men, young men especially, are often tempted to make a show of their religious zeal by taking bold, life-changing steps in a desire to make a lasting impact on the world and exhibit their true devotion to Christ. These can include beginning, or quitting, any number of new or old habits, moving to a new state or country, leaving a certain employer or occupation, or even leaving secular life behind entirely and joining the ministry.

In the performative age in which we live, small, daily disciplines hold little value compared to the large, sweeping decisions which require online announcements that garner widespread engagement. “I’ve committed to CU-Boulder” will certainly gather more likes and comments than “I read the Bible today.” A “six months sober” status would go viral, at least within one’s own corner of the internet; one stating “I did not covet today,” not so much. We were raised on pay-per-click headlines, and somewhere along the way, we traded the dignity of quiet, steady progress for the dopamine high of “announcement culture.” In so many ways, we have become our own marketing department, always working to refine our personal brand. It’s one thing to share news of an engagement or pregnancy with our social circle; it’s quite another to spend hours crafting the perfect post in hopes of charming the algorithms.

I love the holiday season because it demands that we all slow down and make room for life’s most important things. I have lost count of the number of DMs and emails I’ve received over the years between November 15th and New Year’s Day, presumably because guys are home with family and thinking deeply about the meaning of it all. Typically, young men leave the hustle and bustle of the barracks and head back to Small Town USA for the holidays, pick up a good book or listen to a podcast or sermon, and realize there might be something to this whole “God thing” their parents used to talk so much about. And so they see the depravity and hopelessness of the secular culture and begin to long for something ancient, sturdy, stable, and transcendent.

We see this with people like Russell Brand, Tim Allen, and Shawn Ryan, men