Life can be complicated. It seems like the world just spins faster and faster, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. Everyone is busy, and most of us don’t want to add something else to our life unless we absolutely must. Between work, family, church, and everything else in between, it can feel like we are manually spinning hundreds of cogs to keep our lives running, leaving us perpetually exhausted and worn down. This often leads to burnout, and sometimes even worse things such as depression or anxiety.

Simple is better

In this busy day and age, we desire simple. We crave it. We want simple calendars, simple instructions, simple meals, and simple ingredients. Not just for the sake of comfort and ease, but also for purity of purpose and fullness. Simple often leads to efficiency and efficacy. Simple living does not deprive us of life. It gives it. If we try to add everything that promised a better lifestyle, we would run out of time, money, and energy on the first day.

Our faith is no different.

Activity is not maturity

Not all religious activity is beneficial to spiritual growth or worship. If we desire a pure and robust faith, then we must simplify. Not as an effort to give God a smaller piece of the pie, but the contrary. When we narrow our focus on what really matters, it changes everything entirely. We can measure our success and focus our time differently. We can weigh what is valuable and what is not.

Although it can be difficult to discern, there is a significant difference between a simple faith that is robust and a busy faith that is anemic. We can easily confuse religious activity and busyness as spiritual maturity and growth when, in reality, there is little to no connection between the two.

For example, I can be the busiest person at the gym. I can go there more than everyone else and stay longer, but that doesn’t mean I am going to be the strongest or even the healthiest person there. In fact, it is possible that I might be the least healthy. There is no connection between busyness at the gym and strength if my activity is merely walking from machine to machine drinking a Diet Coke.

Christians can approach faith this way. We might show up to church on Sunday and small group on Wednesday and expect our spiritual muscles to grow. Or we can listen to a few sermons throughout the week and abstain from any (what we would view as) egregious sins, yet we sense that something is missing.

So many pieces

We have all the right pieces, but we are still off balance.

Imagine trying to assemble a Lego set without any instructions. We might have all the pieces we need and spend countless hours putting them together, but without instructions, we are left scratching our heads.

I think the Christian life can feel this way sometimes. It’s like we are handed a bag full of random Lego pieces that we are supposed to assemble: Follow Jesus, go to church, go to small group, serve the community, have quiet time, study the Bible, live holy, bear fruit, find God’s will, seek the kingdom, bear our cross, keep the rules, keep the faith, obey the commandments, share the gospel, live on mission, make an impact… and the list goes on.

We are often left wondering how all the pieces fit together, and this doesn’t include all the other life pieces that come with it: go to work, take the kids to soccer, make dinner, go to the gym, pay bills, etc.,

So, we try to make sense of it all without fully understanding how the pieces fit. And this often leads to nothing more than frustration, confusion, and an incomplete picture of who we were meant to be. We just can’t seem to make all the pieces make sense.

Are you living a complex Christian life?

Many Christians find themselves living a complex Christian life but deep down, they still sense that something is missing. It is not a matter of “do we have faith?” because we know the answer is a resounding yes. Typically, what leads to complex faith is because we ask ourselves questions like, “Are we serving enough? Are we giving enough? Are we doing enough?” And the answer to these questions is usually, “no.” We are never giving enough, never serving enough, never doing enough. These questions lead us to the antithesis of a simple Christian life. They lead to complexities that do not equal spiritual maturity. We guilt ourselves into more commitments and more doing.

This one simple thing

But what if all those things could be boiled down to one simple thing? What if instead of focusing on twenty things, we could focus on one. What if instead of trying to manually spin every cog in the machine, we could pull on one lever that turns them all. This might sound like “another thing,” but it’s the one thing that everything else hangs on.

There is one thing that God desires for you and from you. It’s the one thing that fulfills our purpose. In Galatians 5:14, it says that the entire law is fulfilled in one simple command: “love your neighbor as yourself.”

That’s it. We are called to love. But what exactly does this mean? And what does it look like? And what about all the other things we are supposed to do in the Bible? What about spiritual gifts and evangelism? Input versus output? Spiritual disciplines and real life?

In the posts to follow, I will break down biblical principles and concepts for living a whole, pure, simple Christian life by focusing on what it means to remain in God’s love. Not by doing lots of things, but focusing on the one thing that everything else hangs on. So stick around as we explore this journey together.