I woke up this morning craving a good cup of coffee. Not the decaffeinated kind, but REAL coffee. You’ll never convince me decaffeinated coffee is legitimate. After all, they’ve removed the most important and most valuable ingredient. How can they still call it coffee?

That got me thinking…

Fill in the blank: “Coffee without caffeine is like _________________.”

Lots of things could be put in the blank, I suppose. Bread without gluten. Milk without lactose. Or what about sugarless ice cream?

What a weird world we live in. Some days I feel like I’m living in an Alice in Wonderland culture, where nothing is real.

It’s one thing to change the composition of our food products through the magic of modern chemistry, but many of the extractions today have far more serious consequences:

• Loveless marriages
• Fatherless homes
• Christ-less Christmases
• Churches and Christians with no evidence of the Holy Spirit

These are all quite grievous—never God’s plan. Marriages just aren’t the same without love and passion. Families without fathers are precarious at best, needing an extra dose of God’s grace and a mother’s love.

And what can we say about churches and Christians that have an absence of Christ and the Holy Spirit? Nothing could be a bigger travesty than that.

Yet we’re living in a day when there seem to be lots of decaffeinated churches and professing Christians. At first glance they may look like the real thing, yet they’re lacking the most important ingredient.

And one more word picture…

Perhaps decaffeinated Christians could be compared to a helium balloon that has lost its helium. There’s still some hot air, but no lift. Instead of rising high and victorious, the forlorn balloon languishes on the floor. It’s hard to have much of a party with balloons like that.

What about you? Have you allowed life’s most important ingredient to escape? If so, there’s still time to get it back.

And here’s the good news: You don’t have to put up with the agony and frustration of Christ-less Christianity (2 Timothy 3:5). It’s not too late to regain the joy and wonder of Christ living His life through you by the power of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 2:20, Colossians 1:27, Acts 1:8, Ephesians 5:18).

Friend, let’s not settle for empty substitutes. I don’t know about you, but I need as much “caffeine” as possible.