The Sowing Season

1

Breaking Free from Lukewarm Living

Being Faithful in Your Relationship with God

If someone were to view my daily routine with God on social media, they might think my relationship with God was always like this. But they would be surprised to know that, for a long time, I didn’t center my life on God at all.

I didn’t read my Bible every day. I thought it was quite boring and intimidating.

I didn’t wake up early. I slept through most of my alarms and rushed through my morning.

I didn’t talk to God much. In fact, I didn’t even really know who He was.

I would try to resist temptation and living in worldly ways—­but after trying, I would just find myself falling back into old sin cycles. (I’ll be talking more about those in the pages to come.) As a result, I would feel bad about myself and question my relationship with God again.

If you know me now, you might be thinking, Really, Ashley? I don’t believe it. Give me more details. So, let me share what a typical week looked like for me several years ago:

It’s a Monday morning. I’m eighteen years old, a sophomore in college. When I wake, my head is aching, the classic symptom of having too much to drink at a party the night before.

Looking at my phone on my bedside table, I notice it’s only 7:30 A.M. Surely I can sleep in until the very last minute before I have to go to my 8:30 class. And surely I don’t need to set another alarm, because my body won’t fall into a deep enough sleep for me to miss my class. And this bed is just so comfortable . . .

I wake up. It feels weird, like something is wrong. My headache is still there, and I need to take a shower. What time is it? My phone shows 8:20. Shoot. Class starts in ten minutes.

I hop out of bed as quickly as I can, throw on a sweater and jeans, and apply the quickest makeup routine of my life. I then run to class, arriving ten minutes late. Everyone stares at me as I find my seat. How embarrassing.

On Sunday morning I will follow this pattern all over again. Except instead of being late to school, this time I will barely make it on time for church. And I’ll try my absolute hardest to scrub off the hand stamp from the bar before I enter the sanctuary. Change, at this point in my life, feels like a million miles away.

It took a lot for me to change my “morning routine,” but I finally did. And if you want to have a healthy relationship with God, you have the power to change whatever you need to in order to begin growing closer to Him. Maybe you want to know how to leave the worldly lifestyle behind without having a single desire to go back. Maybe you’re not sure how to be a light to your friends or how to discern who in your life is holding you back from changing and growing closer to God.

You might be struggling today to overcome being a lukewarm Christian. The Bible talks about living a lukewarm life in Revelation 3:15–­16: “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth” (NKJV). If you’re not sure what it means to be lukewarm, it’s being neither hot nor cold about faith in Jesus—­wanting a little bit of what the world offers and a little bit of what Jesus offers. When it comes to faith, a lukewarm person isn’t particularly stoked about it. Maybe they go through the motions of attending church and reading their Bible, but they aren’t all in. Maybe they desire the good gifts God promises but still want to fit in with the world.

If you relate to this description, I’m glad you’re here. I hold no judgment, because that was my story too. You are not alone or too far gone. I know I needed to hear this when I was in my lukewarm phase. I also know that becoming a godly woman would have taken a lot less time and would have been a whole lot easier if I had a big sister to show me how.

I’d like to be that sister to you and journey with you, friend, if you’ll let me. Because you picked up this book, it means you also signed up for some change. In this chapter, I’ll share with you the events that led to me recommitting my life to God. We’ll discuss how to have intimacy with Him and commit your whole life to Him. And I’ll include tips on how to be disciplined in your everyday routine by waking up early and getting into your Bible first thing in the morning. It starts with a desire for connection.

Recommit to God

I couldn’t expect to receive much from God if I wasn’t giving my whole self to Him.

I wanted to be on fire for Him. I wanted to feel close to Him. I wanted to feel joy and peace. But it was no wonder that God felt so far away when I wasn’t making it my number one priority to be close to Him.

It makes me think of Matthew 16:24–­26: “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it. What good will it be for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul?’ ”

Jesus gave us everything. He died on the cross for us so we would be able to have direct access to God the Father. If He made the ultimate sacrifice of laying down His whole life for us, doesn’t it make sense that we would do the same for Him?

I had to come to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be close to God if I was also clinging to things of this world. If I was still getting drunk on Saturday nights. If I was still in relationships I shouldn’t be in, doing things I shouldn’t be doing. If I wanted to be cool to fit in with my sorority sisters . . . but also go to Bible study. Being lukewarm didn’t feel right to me, because it wasn’t ever in God’s best plan for my life.

I wasn’t feeling close to God, because I wasn’t pleasing Him with the way I was living. And by making these life choices, I was grieving the Holy Spirit.

But the Lord was gracious and merciful toward me. He started to chase me down, and I finally found my way back to Him.

When He knocks on the door of your heart again and again, it’s hard to ignore forever. In case you don’t know my testimony, I want to share about how I went from living lukewarm to being on fire for God.

My Very Messy Story

It was my junior year of college. I was having the typical college experience, complete with living in a sorority, drinking on the weekends, and fooling around with my boyfriend. Sure, I’d go to church—­but I was also partaking in things of the world.

Right around November, my boyfriend of four years and I decided to split. It was a mutual decision, but when you’ve dated someone for that long, it’s difficult to move on and immediately go back to normal life.

One day, about a month later, when I was home for winter break, my dad took me to Barnes & Noble. It was one of our favorite things to do together. I would go immediately to the Christian book section, and he would go to the history section. Then we would sit in silence in the bookstore café, slices of cheesecake in front of us, and flip through our books.

This bookstore excursion started like any other, but as we were driving home, my dad looked over at me and said, “Ashley, I have to tell you something. I know it’s going to be very difficult to hear.”

When someone tells you that, you brace yourself for what’s coming next, because you know it’s not going to be good.

His tone became even more serious. “Your mother and I are getting a divorce.”

The moments after that are sort of a blur, but I remember being in total shock. All I could do was repeat “What? . . . What?”

After that conversation, things would never be the same again for me. When I got home, the knowledge of my mom and dad’s divorce clouded my formerly joyful childhood home. A few days later, I watched as my dad moved his things out of our house.

That’s when I began to question God.

Why would a good, loving Father allow two such horrible things to happen to me back to back? Couldn’t He have been a little kinder to space out my breakup with my boyfriend and the breakup of my parents?

It was like my world was crashing down.

I would love to tell you, dear friend, that I ran to God. That I began to read my Bible more. Maybe even that I prayed about the confused feelings I was having about my faith.

But no, I did the exact opposite. I returned to school and turned away from God. I went from lukewarm to completely cold.

Within the first week back, I was drinking excessively and running to the party scene to fill the void in my crumbling life. I wanted to numb my pain with the dim lights of the bar and the attention I got from guys who really didn’t care about me at all.

I did this for about a year, repeating the same cycle again and again. It never felt fulfilling, but it numbed me enough to keep me coming back for more. I kept returning to the same things that always left me feeling empty, just as Proverbs 26:11 says: “As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.”