Beware of the thing you shrug at and say “Oh, that doesn’t matter very much.” The fact that is doesn’t matter to you may mean that it matters a great deal to God. Asa was mostly right with the Lord, but he was incomplete in his outward obedience. Although he loved God and was a good king in many respects, he didn’t rid Israel of the high places, the places where gods were worshipped.
Are there any “high places” in your life? Take an inventory. Look at the life of your body and the life of your mind. Is there something you should be concentrating on that you’ve let slid? Are there protesting that your heart is right with God, and yet there is something he has caused you to doubt? Whenever you begin to doubt that God would approve of what you are doing, quit it immediately. Nothing is a mere detail to a child of God. Nothing is a light matter. How long will you make God try to teach you the same lesson? God never loses patience; he will keep trying until you learn.
You no more need a holiday from spiritual concentration than your heart needs a holiday from beating. You can’t have a moral holiday and remain moral; you can’t have a spiritual holiday and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely his, and this means you have to keep yourself spiritually fit. It takes a tremendous amount of time to learn how to do this. Some of us expect to scale the mountain in two minutes flat.
