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.
2 Comments
Pat Walsh
4/2/2016 05:29:08 pm
Reading this thoughtful post put me in mind of *Sit, Walk, Stand* by Watchman Nee. Thank you for posting, Joe. God bless your writing.
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Joe
4/2/2016 06:09:44 pm
Thanks so much, Pat!
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