"I need to spend more time working on my relationship with God."
I responded, "Why would you want to do that?"
Startled she says, "What do you mean?"
"Well, why would you want to spend any time at all on working on your relationship with God?"
"Isn't that what I'm supposed to do?"
"Let me answer by asking you a question. Can you think of anyone, right now, to whom you need to apologize? Anyone you've wronged?"
She thinks and answers, "Yes."
"Well, why don't you give them a call today and ask for their forgiveness. That might be a better use of your time than working on your relationship with God."
Take, for example, how Christians tip and behave in restaurants. If you have ever worked in the restaurant industry you know the reputation of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Millions of Christians go to lunch after church on Sundays and their behavior is abysmal. The single most damaging phenomenon to the witness of Christianity in America today is the collective behavior of the Sunday morning lunch crowd. Never has a more well-dressed, entitled, dismissive, haughty or cheap collection of Christians been seen on the face of the earth.
Both of those paragraphs come with disclaimers directly after them explaining that he was being "provocative" and "exaggerating", so don't judge them until you read the whole article.
Back when I was working my way through college by being a waiter at Chi-Chis, I can remember the waiters and waitresses complaining on Sundays that the Christians were rude and cheap. And they were. I never thought about it in terms of our universal witness to hundreds of thousands of waiters and waitresses every week. I focused on working in their midst trying to present a different type of follower of Jesus.
His concluding thought was great:
I truly want people to spend time working on their relationship with God. I just want them to do it by taking the time to care about the person standing right in front of them.
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?"
Jesus replied: "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'" (Matthew 22:36-39).
