Do You Need a New Clutch?

We are encouraged to review ourselves and our lives from time to time, and make special efforts to re-tune our lifestyle to God’s instructions; two such times are Lent and Advent, but these don’t have to be exclusive.  Nor does such a discipline have to be corporate.  We can as individuals undertake such a review at any time.

There are two kinds of review.  We can compare our life now to what it was like a month, a year or a generation ago.  We can read meaningless statistics like the number of loaves of bread we could buy for the price of a new car or a television, for example, or note that certain aspects of present-day life didn’t even exist in the age we’re comparing to.   From that we can draw our conclusions about the way life has progressed or – depending on our point of view - regressed.

A more searching review comes if we measure what we have, the way of life in our nation now, against some absolute scale of values.  And what better absolute scale than God’s text-book for life itself, the Bible?  As we do so, we may realise that many of the problems in our lives are not the result of cataclysmic events or upheavals, but are the consequence of gradual change, a steady slip from the ideal.

In the same way, the servicing of a motor vehicle is a kind of review, and in this respect I’m undergoing a process of transition.  The van I use for my work, travelling up to 70,000 miles a year, is serviced every couple of months or so, while the motorhome I’ve recently acquired for the retirement I’m gradually phasing into only needs to be serviced once a year.  These are two different attitudes to what is essentially the same task.  In one case, I have a pretty shrewd idea of what will need doing, because I remember fairly clearly what was done at the last service.  In the other, I’m expecting a lot of things will be checked over according to the programme, but I don’t know precisely what will be involved.

If your motor mechanic tells you that your car needs a new clutch, you might well be surprised.  When driving along, you hadn’t noticed anything at all amiss.  The fault – natural wear - had developed gradually and as a result you were accommodating the problem without realising it.  It’s not until he’s fitted the new one and driving the car is so much easier, that you realise just how bad it had been.  Life itself works just the same way.  It’s all too easy to slip into comfortable ways, habits that fit in conveniently with those around us, but which aren’t the way life was intended to be.

There’s a very appropriate phrase in the book of Revelation, “I know … that you are neither cold nor hot. … So, because you are lukewarm … I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”  (Rev. 3:15-16).  It is a reminder of our responsibility to be positive for God, to dispense with lukewarm political correctness, call a spade a spade and denounce sin for what it is.

We need to consider: are we enjoying a lukewarm comfortable-ness, or are we fired up with enthusiasm for God and His love?