As we live out the Christian life and cooperate with the Holy Spirit through the precious means of grace, we face a number of foes, a number of enemies that mean to derail us from our pursuit of God. Of all those enemies, none may be more prevalent and none more deadly than complacency.
If it is humility that keeps us from thinking we have somehow risen above those ordinary means, complacency is that all-too-familiar satisfaction with our own accomplishments. It is that feeling, that conviction even, that we have done enough, that we have done more than enough, that we can now relax our pursuit of God. Yet what God said to Isaiah, he says to us: “This is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2).
Humility calls us to assess ourselves rightly as remaining so needy and so incomplete, while contrition calls us to be remorseful for how little we truly know of God and how full of sin we still are. Together they call us to commit ourselves to God and to his Word, to tremble before him and to forever desire him. As Tozer so presciently warns, “complacency is a deadly foe of all spiritual growth.”
