It’s Sunday morning and the last thing you want to do is haul yourself out of the bed, wake up the family, and head off to church. Work this week was challenging. There were several family emergencies. Plus, you had a misunderstanding with the woman who always sits two chairs in front of you and the last thing you want to do is see her again.

God will understand if I miss a week, you tell yourself.

But then a week becomes a month and a month becomes a year.

Life keeps throwing things at you that you never could have planned for. God continues to take the backseat in your life—but at least he’s there, right?

One thing we tend to forget is that there’s a difference between knowing of God and knowing God. Anyone can say they know Jesus’ story. Anyone can say they’ve read the Bible. As a former atheist, I can give credence to the fact that atheists sometimes read the Bible much more extensively than Christians—many of us like to find the small details which we can use when arguing with Christians. But knowing the Bible, knowing Jesus is the son of God, knowing that Jesus came to save sinners—anyone can say they know these things.

To be a Christian, we have to know God and know Jesus. When we read the Bible, we have to become familiar with their character. When we live life, we must do our best to imitate their character. By imitating God to the world, we become more familiar with his character and learn things about him that people who know of God never really learn.

We learn to sacrifice the comfort of a comfortable Sunday in bed for an opportunity to gather together with the community of believers to practice mirroring God’s character.

We learn how to sacrifice the entitlement of being frustrated with work in an effort to make work better for others (and, inadvertently, make work better for ourselves).

We learn how to sacrifice our pride in an effort to repair relationship with the woman who we had a misunderstanding with.

We learn that there is a cost to following God and that this cost is our own life and comfort:

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