One of the Most Unsettling Things You'll Ever Read (if you're paying attention)

What if we actually lived out what Scripture taught? What if, rather than being a passive affiliation our faith occupied every square inch of our being? What if our every decision was made in light of who Christ is, what He has done for us, and what He demands from us in return?
I distance myself from these ideas even as I write them.
This is crazy talk! I'd rather get back to amusing myself with bright lights and sounds than think on any of this. But I'm gonna get tired soon. And I'm gonna turn the lights off. And the darkness is gonna remind me again. I don't like to suffer alone. So I bring you into my world to think on the things that crowd my brain and send it spinning.
Kierkegaard is a dead man (alive in Christ!) who wrote 150 years ago. But his words are as pointed, and jarring today as they were then. The Melancholy Dane, who considered himself the prophet to the Church of Denmark, like Jeremiah the weeping prophet preaching to those who refuse to hear, he wrote:
"When one sees what it is to be a Christian in Denmark, how could it occur to anyone that this is what Jesus Christ talked about: Cross and agony and suffering, crucifying the flesh, suffering for doctrine, being salt, being sacrifice, etc? No, in Protestantism... Christianity marches to a different melody, to the tune "merrily we roll along, roll along, roll along'---Christianity is the enjoyment of life tranquilized, as neither Jew nor pagan was." (Attack Upon "Christendom" Princeton University Press, 1968, p. 34-5)
And...
"If I must be candid, I d not deny that I am not a Christian in the New Testament sense; if I must be honest, I do not deny that my life cannot be called an effort in the direction of denying myself, renouncing the world, dying from it, etc.; rather the earthly and the temporal become more important to me with every year I live." (p. 30).

Sometimes I wish Kierkegaard never said this, sometimes I wish I never read it. But I have, and here I am now accountable... left to deal with the question: What do I do with this?

Clearly, in my life at least, there needs to be change.

Lord, burn away every part of me that rebels again you and the holiness to which I have been called. And by your grace may I pursue you recklessly, even if I am alone. Help me to deny myself and the enticements of this world, and to magnify You! Amen.