a faith of convenience?

Disclaimer: The idea for this blog came to me while I was watching M*A*S*H a little while ago. If you have never watched the TV show, some of details that I explain to try to get my point across may not make sense to you.

OK, so on with the blog now . . .

I was watching Season 10 of M*A*S*H after I got home from work. In this particular episode, Father Mulcahy (the company priest) is talking to a soldier who has gone AWOL from his unit. When things go wrong and the soldier turns on Father Mulcahy with a rifle, Father Mulcahy utters these words while trying to talking to talk the soldier down: "A faith of convenience is no faith at all."

For some reason, hearing those words tonight started me thinking (and it's far from the first time I've heard them . . . I own all 11 seasons of M*A*S*H on DVD and have watched them many times). Anyways, I started to think a lot about that statement and what it means.

I think that we often do have a faith of convenience. We are willing to call ourselves followers of Christ so long as everything is going right. But, as soon as things get hard or someone says something disparaging about Christians we no longer claim the Name.

Why do we do this?

We know that it's not right . . . that we have not chosen a faith of convenience . . . but a faith that costs us much. Yet, it is so easy to fall into a mindset of only following it when it is convenient.

I don't want to just have a faith of convenience, because that really is no faith at all. I pray that this is not what you want for yourself either. We need to be willing to have a faith of inconvenience . . . a faith that is costly!