Henry Nouwen’s books always leave a deep impression on my heart and mind. I just finished rereading chapter 3 of Nouwen’s classic work, Reaching Out[i], and I am once again challenged by the insight of his words. In this chapter, which I would encourage every Christian to read, Nouwen helps us to see the profound interconnection between the brokenness of the world and the brokenness that resides within our own souls. I think there is value in exploring this interconnection by examining it from two different perspectives; we can look within first and then look out toward the world in general, or we can look out at the world first and then look within. (Everything that follows is inspired by Nouwen’s chapter and is a result of my interaction with the contents of that chapter. I hope you will get a copy of the book and read the entire book, or at least that one chapter!). Let’s start by looking within. To the degree that we are aware of our own emotions, if we look within we are likely to find some sadness, or anger, or brokenness, or desperation, or frustration, or hopelessness, or fear, or some combination of the above, probably coupled with an inordinate desire to have something that we do not have or to be something that we cannot be. We then begin to realize that everyone around us probably struggles with the same issues, to one extent or another. Finally we come to the realization that these struggles are common to humanity, and that the problems in our society come as a result of these struggles. They are behind every war, every act of violence, every criminal act, and every act of racism or discrimination that has ever occurred on the planet since the dawn of humanity. Broken people build a broken world. Or we can start by looking first toward the world. We see wars and violence and crime and injustice and every sort of evil deed. If we take the time to feel some of the pain of the world around us rather than simply allowing a knee-jerk reaction to it, we’ll see the pain and brokenness of the world in the faces of our friends and family, and we’ll eventually start to see it within our own souls. If we want to find out what motivated some tragic local tragedy or global conflict we need only to look within to find the seeds of it within our own souls. A broken world is the result of broken people. What happens when we don’t take the time to think, to feel, and to process our own dilemma in the light of the world’s dilemma, or the world’s dilemma in the light of our own dilemma? Then the world becomes a problem to fix, and we stand outside of the world and treat it as though it were a broken machine that needs to be repaired, rather than as a global community of fellow-humans whose pain and brokenness we share. If the problem is outside of us, then we can fix it by throwing money at it or by using power in an attempt to get society to work the way we think it should work. (This is probably the mindset of most people who become politicians and national leaders. This is not to disparage Christian political involvement. We should do what we can as compassionate followers of Jesus, but we also need to acknowledge the limitations of politics. These “solutions” can never be more than a rearrangement of the components of a dysfunctional system). To the degree that we lose the connection between the pain in our own lives and the problems of the world, our solutions become political. We think we can fix all that’s wrong with the world by proposing a solution, by trying to convince everyone around us that our solution is correct and that theirs is wrong, and by competing with those who offer a different solution. We end up locking horns in a power struggle with a competing group because we are convinced that our solution will work and theirs won’t. “We can fix this problem, you can’t, so shut up and get in line behind us or get out of the way”—so goes the rhetoric. This is the only kind of “solution” that our world has to offer. This approach simply perpetuates the very dilemma that it is trying to correct while giving the illusion of progress. That’s what happens when “we are all broken people in need of forgiveness and healing” becomes replaced with “the world is a problem that needs to be fixed”. If my brokenness is the world’s brokenness and the world’s brokenness is my brokenness, this changes everything. Now I can stand in solidarity with the rest of the human race, knowing that my struggles and the world’s struggles are the same struggles. The world is not a problem to be solved by means of a power struggle, but it’s people who struggle as I struggle, who need healing and forgiveness as I need healing and forgiveness. My angst is tied to the angst of the world, and my healing is tied to the healing of the world. What amazes me is that this understanding of the human dilemma corresponds perfectly with the view of reality that is represented in the Christian Gospel. According to the biblical worldview, all of our brokenness comes as a result of our sin against God. Before there was sin there was no brokenness. Humanity is in a state of rebellion against God, and this rebellion results in broken relationships with God and with each other and as well as brokenness within our own souls. Our lack of shalom (wholeness, well-being, peace) is the result of our broken relationship with God due to our sin. Our lack of harmony with God results in lack of harmony with each other and lack of integrity within ourselves. This all-pervasive soul-sickness and society-sickness is part of the curse that humanity has brought upon itself as a result of its sin against God. The good news is that this curse was undone by the death and resurrection of Jesus, who overcame the power of sin and death, and will be ultimately reversed in real time when Jesus returns. The apostle Paul wrote to the believers in Rome: For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. [ii] As we now stand in the period between the past death and resurrection of Jesus and the future return of Jesus we are waiting for the damage to be undone, the effects of sin to be lifted, the curse to be reversed. In the meantime, we groan. This groaning is common to humanity. The Christian knows that Jesus died and rose again to break the power of sin and death, and that when He returns the curse will be reversed, but that does not take away our groaning. Rather, it intensifies it, for we know that the solution is only partially realized now but will not be globally realized until Jesus returns. How crucial it is for we who are Christians to identify with the common groaning of humanity. This is our link to the rest of humanity. We can’t help the rest of humanity to discover the truth if we try to take a stance that’s outside of the suffering of humanity. Our common experience of suffering is what connects us to the rest of the human race. It’s a huge mistake to assume that the watching world needs to see Christians as those who no longer struggle with the pain that is common to humanity because we have been “saved”. That’s based on an understanding of salvation that is not biblical. Rather, we do humanity a great service when we suffer together with the rest of the world but then point to Jesus as the present and future resolution of our suffering. Our suffering will be ended when Jesus returns to reverse the effects of sin and to abolish death. In the meantime he makes our suffering meaningful and bearable—but we still suffer. If we go into denial about the suffering that we share with humanity, then we lose our link to the rest of humanity and we lose our ability to speak meaningfully and genuinely into the human dilemma. Our calling as Christians is to bring hope from within the milieu of human suffering. We are of no use if we pretend that we are outsiders who are somehow exempt from the suffering that is common to humankind. Our example of all of this is Jesus, who became a man, fully identifying with humankind, fully experiencing all of the pain and suffering and weakness and vulnerability that is human, in order that he might bring us to the Father. Jesus, “…a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief”[iii] delivered us by entering into the human dilemma and by fully identifying with the pain of humankind, not by standing outside of it and by trying to “fix” it as an outside observer. His identification with humankind was so complete that he absorbed all of our sin and brokenness into his own person and died on the cross in our place in order to bring about our forgiveness of sins and reconciliation with God, which is the only remedy for the human dilemma. If we are followers of Christ, then we need to follow him in our identification with human suffering, identifying with the shared pain of humanity and pointing to the One who absorbed that pain and overcame it. Only then we can invite others to share the hope that we have. Jesus had to enter into the suffering of humanity before he could lead us out. In a similar way (not in an identical way, because Jesus was sinless) we cannot lead others out if we are not willing to identify ourselves as insiders, fellow-sinners, fellow-sufferers, and fellow-humans. Nouwen explains: In our solution-oriented society it is more important than ever to realize that wanting to alleviate pain without sharing it is like wanting to save a child from a burning house without the risk of being hurt.[iv] Now we can look at the teaching of the Apostle Paul with fresh eyes: For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.[v] This teaching makes sense when we see all of humanity as one interconnected unit, rather than as individuals who sin and struggle in isolation, detached from the rest of humanity. If we struggle to identify with the rest of humanity, then we need to remind ourselves that Jesus did not come to save us from being human. He saves us out of the human dilemma, that is, he saves us from the obstacles that keep us from being authentically human, and he does so by becoming authentically human himself. God does not save us so that we may escape our humanity. When we are ultimately released from the bondage about which Paul wrote to the believers in Rome, then we will be gloriously and beautifully human forever, just like Jesus, who, although He is God forever, will also be gloriously and beautifully human forever. Scripture quotations taken from the NASB. [i] Nouwen, Henri J. M. (1975). Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. New York, New York: Doubleday. See chapter 3, “A Creative Response” on pages 49-62. [ii] Romans 8:18-23 [iii] Isaiah 53:3 [iv] Nouwen, Reaching Out, page 61. [v] 1 Corinthians 15:22
0 Comments
And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.[i] God created a beautiful world and placed into it two magnificent humans, Adam and Eve, invited them to enjoy a personal relationship of intimacy with Him, and told them to multiply. Humans were in an ideal relationship with their Creator and with each other. All the ingredients for a perfect society were present. The world was a beautiful place inhabited by loving and gentle people who, at least at the outset, trusted and obeyed their God and took good care of each other. All was right with the world. Now we live in a world of violence, poverty, crime, homelessness, hunger, war, injustice, terrorism, and all sorts of unspeakable evil. Who wrecked the world? Our culture seems to be sold on the idea that some group of evil people wrecked the world, though there is no agreement as to who those evil people might be. Some put the blame on the conservatives or the liberals, the socialists, the communists, or the capitalists, the Democrats or the Republicans, or maybe those who adhere to some other religion, or people who have no religion, or those of a different race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. We are the “good guys” who wring our hands and complain and stand by helplessly while the “bad guys” wreck the world. If only they would come around to seeing things our way, so says our culture, the world would be a better place. Shame on the bad guys. We good guys can pat ourselves on the back because we “like” all of the right things on Facebook and show appropriate displeasure toward those with whom we disagree. God bless “us” for blowing the whistle on “them”. The human dilemma is reduced to a battle between competing ideologies, and that ideological battle is further reduced to billions of one-liners plastered throughout social media. This is the ultimate trivialization of our culture. The biggest tragedy in all of this is that many Christians have bought into this odd way of thinking. Especially here in the U.S., we Christians can play the “blame game” as well as anyone else, maybe even better. When Christians start to pit “them” against “us” then we have declined to a low level indeed. We have forgotten our own Gospel of redemption. We have lost site of what it means to be a Christian. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, all of humankind sinned. We all rebelled against God, corporately, as a human race. We all were sent out of the Garden as the human family. We all wrecked the world. We are all guilty. When we ask “Who wrecked the world?” we need only to look in the mirror to see the answer looking back at us. If we are humans, descendants of Adam and Eve and therefore part of the human family, then we are all part of the problem, and we are all guilty. We all have a part in wrecking the world because we have all rebelled against God and chosen not to love, trust and obey Him, thereby bringing destruction into what God created as a world that was both beautiful and good. There is simply no other way to read Genesis. When Jesus died on the cross it was so that he could redeem humanity, not just the “bad guys”. Jesus came as the “second Adam”, a second representative of the human race, to undo the sin of Adam and to reverse the effects of that sin. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all shall be made alive.[ii] Do we admit that we are the bad guys who wrecked God’s good and beautiful world?[iii] Then we are acknowledging our need for Christ’s redemption. Do we blame the wrecking of the world on someone else? Then we are saying that we don’t need Christ’s redemption. Jesus himself said that he came not to call the righteous, but sinners.[iv] If we don’t recognize that we are fellow sinners, fellow earth-wreckers, fellow humanity-destroyers, together with the rest of humanity, then how can we have a part in the redemption supplied by Christ on the cross? Jesus taught a parable about the Pharisee and the tax collector: And He also told this parable to certain ones who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee, and the other a tax-gatherer. The Pharisee stood and was praying thus to himself, ‘God, I thank Thee that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax-gatherer. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get’. But the tax-gatherer, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner!’ I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted.” [v] Yet somehow we Christians have made ourselves schizophrenic. On the one hand we look at the cross and we say “that was for me”. Then we look at the condition of the world, the poverty, the wars, and all that is wrong with humanity, and we say “that’s their fault”. Am I the only person who sees this as a glaring contradiction? If I claim that Christ died for me, then I am admitting that I am co-responsible for the horrors of the world. If I claim that it’s “not my fault”, then I am implying that I don’t need the death of Christ on the cross. We can’t have it both ways. One way that some Christians have tried to get around this is by making an artificial distinction between personal sins and social sins. We say that we are guilty of personal sins (against God alone) but not social sins (at least not those of the world-wrecking and humanity-destroying magnitude). Those are the sins of the terrorists, the violent criminals, the evil world leaders and the warmongers. That’s a false dichotomy for two reasons. 1) Any personal sin will have a negative effect on those around me, and through the ripple effect will have a negative impact on society. A sin against God will always hurt another person and will always have some negative effect on society. 2) We are all part of sinful society and are complicit in its ways, whether our complicity is overt or more subtle and passive. We can’t live in the world without somehow being complicit in the evil that is woven into the fabric of society, for we participate in the structures of that society. We may contribute to the overall sin-sick environment in small ways, for example, by an angry or selfish attitude, but what may seem “small” to us makes us in no way less than contributors to what society has become. Didn’t Jesus teach us that if we are angry with our brother it’s the moral equivalent of murder? But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court; and whoever shall say to his brother, ‘Raca,’ shall be guilty before the supreme court; and whoever shall say, ‘You fool,’ shall be guilty enough to go into the fiery hell.[vi] Put a thousand angry people together and you’ve got a riot. Put two groups of angry people into the same place at the same time and you’ve got a war. Social sin is just personal sin multiplied. We are also complicit when we do not do the good that we are capable of doing. Whether it’s by sins of commission or by sins of omission, we are all responsible for what the world has become, so let’s not let ourselves off the hook. It doesn’t work. Not if we are going to take the Sermon on the Mount seriously. OK, so what if we were to live on a remote mountaintop somewhere, isolated from the rest of the world, so far from society that we neither influence nor are influenced by the surrounding society? Even if living in a vacuum were possible (and it’s not), we would still be guilty of our share of humanity-wrecking sinfulness simply by virtue of the fact that we are part of the human race, which has been and continues to be in rebellion against God. We see a biblical example of this principle in the prayer of the prophet Nehemiah: Let Thine ear now be attentive and Thine eyes open to hear the prayer of Thy servant which I am praying before Thee now, day and night, on behalf of the sons of Israel Thy servants, confessing the sins of the sons of Israel which we have sinned against Thee; I and my father’s house have sinned. [vii] Nehemiah was confessing the sins of those who lived in Jerusalem, but he was nowhere near Jerusalem and hadn’t been there for many years. He could have easily said “it’s not my fault”. Yet he identified himself with his people, so that their sin was his sin. Nehemiah understood that the sin of his people was his own sin, even though he hadn’t personally participated in their sinful behavior. He was guilty because He was part of a guilty group, so he identified with his own people and confessed their corporate sin as though he himself had participated in the sin. This runs counter to our American individualism, but it’s a biblical way of thinking. We take ownership of the sins of the people with whom we identify. Jesus showed us the way by taking responsibility for sins that he had not committed when he died for us at the cross. Jesus was the perfect and spotless Lamb of God, completely without sin, but so thoroughly had he identified with humanity that our sin became his sin, the sin for which he died. The cross is all about identification. For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, in order that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit…[viii] One of the reasons that Christianity has become so trivialized in our age is that we no longer have a deep appreciation for the cross. We don’t have a deep appreciation for the cross because we don’t have a deep awareness of our own sinfulness. If someone else is a really bad, world-wrecking and humanity-destroying sinner but I am just a small sinner who never wrecked anything, then someone else needs the cross more than I do. If I start to think that way then I will soon start to devalue the death of Christ on the cross for me. Without a deep appreciation of God’s mercy that is rooted in a deep awareness of my own sinfulness, the cross will be trivialized in my own life, and my Christian experience will be superficial. I will become a cheap salesman for a Gospel that has never affected my soul in the deepest places, and no one will want it. My sharing of the Gospel will be less than genuine, and I’ll be reduced to repeating a formula. My Christian experience will lack the ring of authenticity. I am not able to invite others into a process of forgiveness and healing that I myself have not entered. I am inviting us to embrace with consistency the worldview that we claim to hold as Christians. We need to begin with a profound appreciation for our unspeakably magnificent and glorious God, for the beautiful world that God created, and for the perfect society that would have appeared on the earth had it not been for our sinful rebellion. Then we need to look with horror at the results of our willful rebellion against our good and holy God, shudder at the ugliness of the destructive effects of our own sinfulness, and take ownership of our own utter sinfulness. We need to recognize, with great remorse, that we are fellow sinners against God and against humanity, fellow earth-wreckers. Then we need to return to the cross with repentance and humility, with a deep and remorseful sense of appreciation for all that God has done for us by sending his Son to identify with us in our broken humanity and to die in our place, wearing our nametag, so that we might live. Only then we can celebrate the fact that we, the guilty, world-wrecking, humanity-destroying sinners that we are, have been fully forgiven and eternally reconciled to God, that it took nothing less than the bloody death of the Son of God to accomplish this, and that God was willing to do the unthinkable because of His great love for us. Let this grip us to the depths of our innermost being. Then we will stop blaming “them” because we will have an authentic message that stands as a true antithesis to everything this world has to offer. If we think that we are justified in blaming some evil group for the evils of society, then we have been greatly deceived. We speak and live our message authentically not by differentiating ourselves from other human beings but by identifying with them. The point of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector is that we are “like other people”, equally in need of God’s mercy, and we need to own that. Otherwise we are implicitly saying that the death of Christ is not as necessary for us as it is for others, and we reduce Christianity to a knock-off version of the real thing. The Gospel that we proclaim ends up being a counterfeit of what Jesus intended for it to be, and we, the Church, end up being a counterfeit of what he intended for us to be as the company of the redeemed, eternally proclaiming the mercies of God and inviting others to share in His mercies. Scripture quotations taken from the NASB. [i] Genesis 1:31 [ii] 1 Corinthians 15:22 [iii] See Blamires, Harry. (1978). The Christian Mind. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications (see especially chapter 2, “It’s Awareness of Evil” on pages 86-105). [iv] Luke 5:32 [v] Luke 18:9-14 [vi] Matthew 5:22 [vii] Nehemiah 1:6 [viii]1 Peter 3:18 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us. In all wisdom and insight He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him with a view to an administration suitable to the fulness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things upon the earth. In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will, to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ should be to the praise of His glory. In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation — having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.[i]
As I read through this passage I am struck by wave after wave of the majesty of a God who would orchestrate such a complex and beautiful plan. Pondering this passage leads me to ask two questions: 1) How do we personally “plug into” this plan? 2) Once we have become plugged in, how should living in this reality impact our lifestyle? The problem is that some expressions of Christianity have distorted the issues so that we now tend to see these questions as one question rather than as two questions. We tend to confuse becoming a Christian with being a Christian. I am proposing that we need to see them as two separate, but closely related questions before we can give the proper answers to these questions. To illustrate, there is a difference between moving into a house and living in the house. Every day is not moving day. The fact that we have moved all of our furniture into a new house does not imply that we know anything about living in the house. What happens when the empty moving van pulls away and we are left standing in front of our new house? We still need to learn the practical implications of living in the house, and those implications must be worked out on a daily basis. Likewise, becoming a Christian through the miracle of the second birth does not imply that we know how to be a Christian, that is, how to follow Jesus in the daily grind of life. Let me try to illustrate this by using three different colors (red, blue, and green) to describe three understandings of what it means to be a Christian. (The identification of certain colors with certain understandings is arbitrary. There are no political or environmental associations intended in the selection of these three colors). Some Christians have an understanding of Christianity that places most of the emphasis on the initial crisis experience of coming into a saving relationship with Christ. We’ll call them “red Christians”. According to their understanding, becoming a Christian by embracing Christ as Savior is essentially the entirety of the Christian Gospel. There is no distinction between becoming a Christian and being a Christian. They are one and the same thing. You are a Christian if you can look back to a time when you became one. If you have become a Christian, then you are a Christian, and that is the end of the matter. Other Christians have an understanding of Christianity that places most of the emphasis on spiritual formation. We’ll call them “blue Christians”. According to their understanding, what really matters is what we are becoming. Christianity is all about becoming Christlike, thereby displaying the character of Christ to those around us. We are Christians to the extent that we are becoming like Christ so that those around us might see the character of Christ reflected in us. Yet other Christians have an understanding of Christianity that places most of the emphasis on what we do as Christians. We’ll call them “green Christians”. According to their understanding, actions speak louder than words, so authentic Christianity is measured by the service that we do for others. We demonstrate that we are followers of Christ by living as he lived, following his example. We are Christians to the extent that we live as Jesus lived. Hopefully by now you see where I am going. The three colors represent the flow of the Christian experience, but through our denominations, movements, and schools of thought, many Christians have tended to overcompensate for each other’s errors and have thereby divided into segments what God intended as a harmonious and seamless whole. How do we put the pieces back together again? Let’s examine the flow of the Christian life. Before we can live as Christians we must become Christians, so we start out by acknowledging our sinfulness, recognizing that Jesus died for us on the cross and rose from the dead, turn away from our sins in repentance and toward God in personal faith, and trusting in his free gift of salvation, which we receive by grace through faith. We become born of the Spirit. This is the foundation of the Christian life. The foundation is “red”. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast.[ii] As a result of our spiritual awakening, God begins to work Christlike character into us as we yield to God and are transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit. We start to become gentler, more loving, more patient, more compassionate, less selfish. The beauty of Christ starts to rest upon us as God changes us from the inside out so that we begin to reflect his character. We are developing an inward quality of heart that is seen by God alone, but it also finds expression in our daily interactions with other people. If we are becoming more like Jesus, then when we people cross our paths they should get a sense of the presence of Jesus reflected in our personality. This is a high ideal that we never totally reach, but we should be moving toward it, even if very slowly. This is the fruit of the Spirit of God at work in our lives. The fruit is “blue”. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.[iii] As God continues to produce in us the fruit of Christlike character we are enabled to live more and more as Jesus lived, loving what he loved, grieving over what he grieved over, angry over what made him angry, rejoicing in what made him joyful. Our lifestyle begins to look more and more like the lifestyle of Jesus as we involve ourselves with the things that characterized his lifestyle (caring for the poor and oppressed, going out of our way to help our neighbor, etc). Through the empowering of the Holy Spirit we are learning to follow Jesus. It will take a lifetime and more, but we are starting to walk in the footsteps of the Master. It is true that if we could follow Jesus on our own then we wouldn’t need him to die for us and we wouldn’t need the Holy Spirit to empower us, but he did die for us and we do have the Holy Spirit. This is what makes following Jesus possible. We are becoming more authentic followers of Jesus to the extent that we yield to the work of the Holy Spirit and allow Him to transform our character, which in turn transforms our lifestyle, with the result that we learn to live as Jesus lived. This lifestyle is “green”. What use is it, my brethren, if a man says he has faith, but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself. But someone may well say, “You have faith, and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”[iv] We can say, then, that becoming a Christian means turning from our sins (repentance) and turning toward God (faith), acknowledging that the work of Christ on the cross was for us, and embracing Christ by grace through faith. This is a spiritual awakening, and happens once only, at the inception of our journey (red). This is the answer to my first question at the beginning of this post. Being a Christian involves allowing God to transform our character on a daily basis, making us more Christlike (blue) so that we gradually learn to live as Jesus lived (green), as empowered and enabled by the Holy Spirit. This is the answer to my second question. So, red flows into blue and blue flows into green. They are all part of the same flow. Becoming a Christian, which saves us, is the first step toward being a Christian, which transforms us. We can further illustrate this through use of color theory. Color theorists tell us that different colors of light are related to each other through a subtractive process, so that when we “add” colors of light we are really subtracting color. This means that red light + blue light + green light = white light. When we combine red, blue and green light we end up with very bright white light. So, what happens when we combine the red, blue, and green understandings of Christianity into one harmonious flow? Jesus said: You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do men light a lamp, and put it under the peck-measure, but on the lampstand; and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.[v] We shine the light of the Gospel into the world not merely by telling people that they need to be saved, nor merely by demonstrating Christlike character, nor merely by following the lifestyle of Jesus. All three are part of the same flow of God’s work in our lives, and they cannot be separated. To give an example, The Barna Group uses a list of nine items to determine whether or not a person who is being interviewed is an evangelical Christian. You can read about it by clicking here[vi] and here[vii]. While I agree with all nine items on the list, I also note that this list is basically what we have been calling the red understanding of Christianity. There is not much blue or green to be found on this list. This is understandable, as the Barna polling people are trying to distinguish evangelicals from other groups by itemizing their distinctive beliefs, not the common ground that they may have with other groups. What troubles me is that many professing Christians have an understanding of Christianity that is almost entirely red. To Barna’s list of nine items I would add two more items: 10. Belief that becoming become more like Jesus in character is crucial to the Christian life and is the fruit of being reconciled to God through him. [blue] 11. Belief that being a Christian includes learning how to follow Jesus, adopting a lifestyle based on his model, not just being reconciled to God through him. [green] Our Christian walk is not authentic without adding items 10 and 11. This is what transforms a faith into a lifestyle. The fact that these two elements seem to be off of the radar of so many people who call themselves Christians today is one of the reasons why I am using the term “follower of Jesus” as much as I do in this blog. By using the term “follower of Jesus” I am identifying myself with full-orbed, “bright white light” Christianity that I see in the New Testament, not placing myself into the green category. Note: Let’s not turn “bright white light” into a fourth category. We are trying to put back together again what people have divided. We are not creating a fourth category. If we stop here, though, we are left with a human-centered Gospel that is focused on “getting me out of trouble so I can avoid hell and have eternal life with God”, but the Gospel as it appears in Scripture is a God-centered Gospel. Let’s put our own personal benefit back into its rightful context. We need to get away from talking about “my salvation” as though it were a benefits package that we could pick up and carry away with us. We need to think more in terms of what God is doing on a cosmic level. God’s mission becomes our mission, and it’s a mission of cosmic proportions with an eternal timetable. We exist to proclaim and to be a part of God’s story by our words, by how we live, and by what we are becoming, and to magnify, glorify, and enjoy God forever. Salvation is not a benefits package that we claim. It’s a life-transforming journey that brings God eternal glory as we participate in God’s cosmic mission of redemption. This means that we need to see our own personal salvation against the backdrop of God’s redemptive work throughout history: Creation, fall, covenants with Israel, atonement and redemption through the death of Christ, resurrection of Christ, ascension of Christ, outpouring of the Holy Spirit, establishment of the Church, grafting in of Gentile believers, return of Christ as King, earthy rule of Christ, new heavens and new earth. Without this backdrop the Gospel is trivialized and reduced to a formula for personal salvation. A. W. Tozer warned us a generation ago that a truncated Gospel would produce truncated Christians, and his words have proven true over time. A Gospel that is truncated and trivialized will never transform our lives and will never be the least bit appealing to a society that is sick of superficial triviality and that is looking for something worth believing in. The better we understand what God is doing, the better able we will be to live for what we were born for. As a result, when we verbalize the Gospel message we won’t be repeating the same tired old formula about “asking Jesus into our heart”. The message will have a ring of authenticity that cannot be ignored because our words will flow from our lifestyle, our lifestyle will flow from our character, our character will flow from our redemption, and all that we say and do will flow from our destiny. This is what brings eternal glory to God, and this is why we exist. What are your thoughts on all of this? I welcome dialogue on this crucial subject and invite you to leave a comment below. Scripture quotations taken from the NASB. [i] Ephesians 1:3-14 [ii] Ephesians 2:8-9 [iii] Galatians 5:22-23 [iv] James 2:14-18 [v] Matthew 5:14-16 [vi] https://www.barna.org/barna-update/culture/111-survey-explores-who-qualifies-as-an-evangelical#.Vv3OllJZoko. This article was posted by The Barna Group on their own website on January 18, 2007. However, the list of nine items appears to have been deleted from the end of the article. [vii] http://bigthink.com/age-of-engagement/are-evangelicals-38-of-the-population-or-just-9-measurement-matters-according-to-new-survey. This is an article about, not by, The Barna Group. I have included this link because the article includes the list of nine items. |
About Joe Scordato
Archives
March 2024
Categories |