When you foster this, you’re fostering ruin …

We like to think bad things “happen” to us. The truth is, we’re often the root cause of many of those “bad things” happening in our lives.

And a primary root cause of “bad things” happening in our lives comes from our practice of NEGLECT. Someone once said, “Our faith and our friendships are not shattered by one big act, but by many small neglects.”

For example, we neglect things. Robert Wentz provides an example of what can happen when we neglect things:

We often fail to consider the gradual, cumulative effect of sin in our lives. In Saint Louis in 1984, an unemployed cleaning woman noticed a few bees buzzing around the attic of her home. Since there were only a few, she made no effort to deal with them. Over the summer the bees continued to fly in and out the attic vent while the woman remained unconcerned, unaware of the growing city of bees. The whole attic became a hive, and the ceiling of the second-floor bedroom finally caved in under the weight of hundreds of pounds of honey and thousands of angry bees. While the woman escaped serious injury, she was unable to repair the damage of her accumulated neglect.

We certainly neglect people. In fact, the main reason why our relationships (of any kind) fail is our failure to nurture them (neglect). A sad story of just how deeply we can neglect people was reported in Resources:

A 64-year-old woman, whose decomposed body was found in her dilapidated Houston home recently, was discovered frozen to death for five months. She was forgotten all winter and spring by neighbors and family members. Neighbors described her as someone who “didn’t have anything to do with anybody, and nobody had anything to do with her.” This occurred after her children had grown up and moved away, and then her husband’s death. She had two children, one of whom lived about 10 miles from his mother’s house.

And most tragically of all, we even neglect God and the things of His kingdom. Think about how incredible it is that Jesus personally instituted the sacrament of Communion. Why? To remember Him and what He has done for us through the sacrifice of His body on a cross and the shedding of His blood on our behalf. Yes, we become so negligent toward God and His kingdom that we have to have the practice of Communion to remind us of Christ’s sacrifice!

The truth is, without consistently and persistently exercising some level of self-discipline, we will be negligent to some degree.

Here’s some good news: God has enabled us to be self-disciplined people so that we won’t be negligent people!

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self-discipline,” 2 Timothy 1:7.

Are you currently demonstrating negligence toward things, or people, or God? In what ways do you need to exercise greater self-discipline so that you will not be a negligent person, at least in matters of importance? What steps will you take this week to exercise greater self-discipline?

Scotty