As we grow in the Lord, we discover that as soon as we turn from one thing, there is always another. There is no plateau in this life where we can afford to relax, pretending that we now have everything well in hand. If we turn away for a moment, if we offend at just one point, we discover we have broken the whole law. If we stop swimming up river, we have no alternative but to float downstream.
This should not make us discouraged, but it should make us vigilant. There is always something before us that will take us out of, as the cliché goes, our comfort zone. We should be eager to be taken out of our comfort zone.
There are several categories here. One is the issue of overt sins, attitudes and actions expressly prohibited by Scripture. Lust, malice, and theft would fall into this category. But another area—where comfort zones are most likely to develop—would be failures of wisdom, and not rejection of any express command of the Lord. An example of this would be the tendency for Christian men to postpone the age of marriage in just the same ways and in the same degree that the world around us has done. Men used to marry regularly at around 23-years-old, and now it is closer to 28. But when God said that it was “not good” that man be alone, when He said that man needed a helper suitable to him, it is likely that He did not intend to meet that need with an empty pizza box.
Whatever the issue, in whatever area we need to be “wisdom-stretched,” we should be confessing our blind spots, and asking God to have mercy on us. We should be eager for God to tell us to do something which, for us, is radical. If we are praying, “Lord, anything but that . . .” we need to pray for the courage to drop the last two words. We need to pray, simply, directly, and honestly . . . “Lord, anything.”