During times like these, we need to consider whether we will fuel our faith and worship of Christ or fuel our awe of COVID-19.
Colossians 3:2 says, “Set your mind on things above, not on things that are on earth.” Most of us, myself included, are spending a lot of time thinking about things on Earth. It’s like every article, every social media post, every conversation we have with someone is in some way inundated with setting our minds on the things on Earth. And then conversely, we might spend 15 or 20 minutes with the Lord.
So I don’t think we should be shocked that we struggle with worry or fear. It’s just spiritual math. We’re spending hours a day fueling our faith in the coronavirus and spending 20 minutes with God. And so of course, COVID-19 is huge. It’s like we spent our daily devotions with the virus and now we stand in awe of it and we fear it. It’s much bigger in our hearts than God is most of the time. Then the practical encouragement to people is for every look at COVID-19 is to take many, many more looks at Christ. Then as we fuel our faith in him, we find freedom from our fears and worries.
One of the things I told my congregation is that we usually joke about what’s going on in life, but I haven’t made any jokes about this situation because it’s not going to hold up well. We all understand the gravity of what is going on.
Yet we don’t want to talk or preach in such a way that COVID-19 is bigger than Christ. We want to remember that Christ is so much bigger than this virus and that we should be in awe of him. And as we stand in awe of him and as we fear him, we come to a better place of peace and contentment. So during this time when we’re very tempted to fuel our faith in other things, let us fuel our faith in Christ.