Ethel Waters, the beloved America gospel singer, was converted at the age of 12. Then due to some unfortunate circumstances in her life she did not stay in the church or close to the Lord for many years. She was 61 years old before she came back to him. She renewed her relationship to the Lord at a Billy Graham crusade in 1957. She said concerning that experience, “I realized that though I hadn’t been displeasing him too much, I hadn’t really been pleasing him either. And what a difference there is in the two!”
It’s that way with many of us too often. We haven’t been doing anything really bad. But we haven’t been doing the good things either. The best you can say of us is, “We are good for nothing.”
We’ve got to stop playing at church. Once a man returned to his hometown after having been away for many years. He met a young man on the street and asked him, “Whatever happened to that old church on the hill and the glory it once had?” The young man replied, “Sir, if you’ll travel up the hill to the church you will see a sign. That sign will tell you what happened to the glory of that old church.” As the man went up the hill he saw the sign. This is what it said: “Caution, children at play.”
We’ve got to stop playing at religion like children. It’s not enough “not to be bad.” We need to be good for something and fill our lives with love and goodness. Otherwise we are just playing church and this neither pleases God nor impresses the world.