It’s a commonplace human reality, emotional and psychological, that there’s an inverse relationship between gratitude and familiarity.  To that generation new to indoor plumbing, every turn of the faucet would early on have occasioned an appreciative response.  As time passed and familiarity with the blessing grew, that response would naturally diminish; and for the subsequent generation, never having experienced its lack, the response would not even be a memory.  Try to imagine duplicating within yourself an experience of gleeful gratitude at taking a shower or flushing a toilet!

The generation evidence of this human reality is obvious, but a moment’s reflection will discover to anyone examples from his or her own evolving experience.   Who remembers the original joy of driving a car around the block after thousands of subsequent miles?  What opera singer still experiences the prideful glee in matching her voice to the sounds emerging from the piano?   The blissful relief of exchanging confidences evolves into a very different experience as the fortunate marriage evolves.

And that’s why it’s so misguided to expect of subsequent generations of Christians the same experience of liberation and wonder of those first drawn out of pagan culture; why it’s also misguided to expect habituated and well-behaved Christians to experience the emotions of the degenerate ‘coming to Jesus,’ or even of that same regenerate to bask daily in the joy of his salvation.   Asking such things of the people involved would be as bootless as asking oneself to burst with pride at being able to read the words on this page.  That’s just not how humans are built, and no amount of spiritual lecturing, however eloquent, however dynamic, can wring tears from a stone.

Which raises the extremely interesting and not at all simple question of what non-evangelical ministry should be about.