Today begins a new series of devotionals about who we are as people of God. We who have accepted Jesus Christ as our Savior and have committed our lives to follow him; what do we do now? What did we get ourselves into? Did we rise from our knees on that day of decision and think, ‘Well, that’s over; I’m saved. Now I can get on with my life and still go to heaven when I die’? Maybe we didn’t give it voice, but have we been living that way ever since? After all, it’s my life.
Or did we walk away with a burning desire to learn to love the God who was generous enough to forgive us and restore us as his children? God has an on-going mission here on earth, a mission in which God graciously wants to include us. In this case, it is far from over. It’s on, right now!
It is a call we all are to answer, we are expected to answer, and not just the priests, pastors, missionaries, and seminary professors. If we want to follow Christ, then we must engage in a discipline with the Holy Spirit that will transform us into faithful servants of the always-active God of the Universe. Instead of getting on with our own lives, we deny ourselves, we take up our cross, and we follow Jesus; first with tentative steps, then walking in the Spirit, and finally running the race that will bring us to maturity in Christ.
To grasp the huge difference between the popular conception of the life of a Christian and the actual more demanding path of a disciple, it would help to remind ourselves of where we began. Perhaps that way we can grasp the magnitude of what God did for us through Jesus Christ and what God will do through us through his Holy Spirit.
Start with the biggest question: Why are we here? Answer: Our origin is in God who created all things through Jesus Christ (John 1; 1-5). Second question: Then why is it that the people who call themselves ‘Christians’ often don’t act like Jesus?
As you have surely heard, we have a problem. Our continuing desire for the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3: 5-6) reveals that, above all else, we desire power more than we desire God. We want the power to judge for ourselves. In this, we depart from unity with God (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1955, Ethics, pages 17-20). It is a choice between the richness of our relationship with God in which the Spirit guides us and, on the other hand, the poverty of trying to be our own judge, and not only the judge of ourselves, but also the judge of everybody else. You see how that has turned out.
This power grab not only separated us from God, but it also separated us from ourselves (we learned that we were naked to the world and we felt shame, Genesis 3: 10) and has also separated us from others (we learned to base our relationships on our judgment of others, Genesis 4: 1-11).
We soon further deluded ourselves to think that we could have our cake and eat it too. We thought, perhaps our lack of relationship with God could be solved by following a list of prohibitions (Don’t do these things, like the Ten Commandments) and proscriptions (Do these things; go to worship weekly, pay your tithes, pray once in a while). We see how wooden compliance with the general rules has not improved our relationship with God, but has led us to faith instead in our own behavior. Why don’t Christian leaders ever repent until they are exposed?
The Old Testament constantly speaks of wanting a people who have a ‘heart’ for God, not just compliance with proper worship.
“I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them,
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
(Amos 5: 21-24)
To settle for the forms of worship, and keep our heart for ourselves, is a twisted way to look at our spiritual life. The Pharisees learned this when they continually tried to draw Jesus into the ‘good and evil’ conflicts they were having (Sabbath observance, temple worship, divorce, paying taxes, etc.). Jesus refused to see things through estranged human eyes, so he never answered people directly on their terms. (“Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” (Luke 12: 14).
Jesus always worked at a different level, more in tune with God’s original purposes (“But it was not so from the beginning” Matthew 19: 8). More in tune with God’s will than a condensed set of rules and reasons (“Yet, not what I want but what you want” Matthew 26: 39). Jesus clearly exposed the difference between what people say and what they actually do (“Which of these two did the will of his father?” Matthew 21: 31).
When we insist on judging for ourselves between good and evil, we open ourselves to a delusion. We think that if we avoid doing this list of sins and we perform this other list of good works, our obligation as disciples is fulfilled. That perspective has not turned out well either. Soon we sound like the elder brother who complains that he has never once disobeyed his father’s command, in contrast to his dissolute younger brother whom he wants to permanently exclude from the family (Luke 15). Little entitled Pharisees, all of us.
It was to heal our ancient division, to open the way to reconciliation with God, to give us life again through constant fellowship with God, that Jesus came and suffered and died. He gives us not just life in the hereafter, but life now. Washing away sins removes the barrier to rebuilding our relationship with God. It is a step toward abandoning the soul-crushing burden of constantly trying and failing to run our own lives, and instead frees us to follow God’s will which cannot be discerned outside of life in the Spirit.
That is what the temptations were about. Satan wanted to seduce Jesus into pursuing his God-given mission in a thoroughly human way; that is, Satan suggested that Jesus take control of his own life, do God’s mission his way. Jesus responded to Satan: “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Matthew 4: 10). That is why Jesus rebuked Peter when he tried to get Jesus to think that he could carry out his mission without submitting to God’s plan. “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block for me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Matthew 16: 23).
That is the larger picture of what was at stake on the cross, and what is at stake on the cross that we ourselves are to take up and bear (Matthew 16: 24-26). We are saved by Christ and trained by the Holy Spirit for a life of intimate fellowship with God. Anything else is not following Jesus.
Paul saw the results of true discipleship in his own life, and hoped for such results of discipleship in all our lives.
“All of us with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (II Corinthians 3: 18).
When we are reconciled with God, reunited in agreement with God’s will, then we become a useful part of God’s overall mission in the world. That is what new life in Christ means.
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view…. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; see, everything old has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (II Corinthians 5: 16-20).