It's human nature to set your mind on something and go full speed ahead after it. Commitment or recommitment to God can be similar to an explosion of desire to be faithful. Sometimes, it can start when a word of God is spoken to you that motivates you, or one day, you come to yourself and realize your life needs to change. In either case, there are pitfalls in the beginning that you might not see.
Day one and a few days following are always a blowout of faithfulness and commitment to God. You pray to God as much as possible and read your Bible as the words jump out. You stop doing certain things that rob you of God and start redirecting your energy towards Him. You feel alive, and you don't want to lose it. In those situations, what could possibly be the dangers?
A pitfall is a hidden or unsuspected danger or difficulty.
Question
What is one giant pitfall when learning to be faithful to God?
Answer
The pitfall is desire. Your great desire for God can create a false expectation of what your experience should be like. Instead of learning as you go, it is often easy to build false expectations in your haste.
False expectations are created with false allusions grounded in lustful desires.
Explanation
The truth is that part of your desire is an emotional commitment, which will eventually wear off. Emotional desire will deceive you from being faithful the right way. Yes, that explosion of desire is great, but it will fade, and many times, you are back to where you started. You will and must experience that, but you must also guard from allowing it to create false expectations for God, yourself, and others.
Faithfulness is who you are, not what you're going to do. You must train your unfaithfulness to be faithful. Faithfulness is established every day and proven over time through consistency.
As a teacher, I believe in consistency more than speed. God does, too, and that's where I learned it. Even in creation, He put limits on natural growth, which teaches us that only with time and continuance can growth be attained the right way.
When you believe that it's the Spirit doing the work and not your works of the flesh, you will see that much can be accomplished in the Spirit with little help from the flesh. You will learn that it's not what you do or how much time you spend, but God who gives the increase.
The pattern of lust is to live from moment to moment without regard for the future. This way is how liars think. Whatever can give you the next high is what lust wants. People often build their expectations on the highs and leave the lows out of it. When living this way, you are surprised and discouraged when the lows come and even feel like God has left you. That's a lie the world has sold you! God's highs and lows are always centered around the truth. In truth, God never leaves or forsakes you in highs and lows.
Sometimes, truth doesn't feel like truth, but because it's God's truth, you must live by it even when you don't feel like it. Trusting God with your life is based on His truth, not your emotions.
What to do
Get grounded and settled in God's words. Build your life with God on the truth, and don't cherry-pick what you will and won't believe. If you build on the truth, you will not be surprised or led astray by your desire to create false expectations.
Start with the right expectation by letting the truth of Jesus direct you instead of what you think you see in everyone else. Faithfulness is learned, and change takes time. Do the right things, and as your thoughts change, you will continue to do more and more for God's kingdom and not yourself.
Scriptural references
Matthew 7:24-27; John 8:31
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