Daily Power By Craig Groeschel: Fuel For Your SoulSample

When I was growing up, it seemed like every adult I knew smoked cigarettes. I never realized the effect it had on me until I went away to college. After being away for several weeks, when I came back home, I thought, “Man, this place smells like smoke! Wow, I never noticed that before.” Then I kind of got used to it again and didn’t think about it until I got back to my dorm Sunday night.

When I walked into my dorm room, my roommate said, “Dude, get out of here! That’s rank! Where have you been—inside a chimney?”

Then it dawned on me. For the past eighteen years, I’d lived in this smoke-filled environment and didn’t realize the toll it had taken on me. I had been breathing in this secondhand smoke, this poison, and it was affecting me and I didn’t even know it.

So often our culture affects our souls the same way. We breathe in secondhand toxins that infiltrate our minds and hearts and make us sluggish. After a while we don’t realize it and are just going with the flow, doing what everyone else around us is doing, not what God wants us to do.

If you want to build a stronger relationship with Christ, you have to live apart. You have to follow his ways and not the crowd. You have to recognize the impact that those around you are having on your faith.

Power Lift: Father, thank you for calling me to a life that’s set apart from the world. Today help me see the ways I have been affected by spiritual pollution.