What do you live for? What are you here to do? What do you intend to accomplish on Earth?
Until about a year ago, I had very detailed answers to these questions. All of which focused on me, my desires, my passions, and, ultimately, my own personal glory. I lived to one day make a name for myself, gain the esteem of colleagues, be sought after as an expert, and die having left behind books and articles and lecture halls with my name on them. That was my purpose.
If you had said, Well, how exactly does God fit into that?, I would have had my immediate response ready and aimed: Oh, see, I'll do it all by God's strength. That seemed for a long time to be the right answer as a Christian. I'll do whatever I like, indulge whatever ambition I have, and give all the credit to God like so many of the country music stars do when they receive their accolades at those awards ceremonies. Deep down, though, I'll know that all along it was all my doing--all my success, all my accomplishment: all mine. God was my tool, my means to an end.
Thankfully I see the sham and foolishness and danger in this now, and, more urgently maybe, the wastefulness in it too. My faith was lukewarm for so long, and my understanding so shallow, and I think I liked it that way. Even though I had long-term plans for my life, I never wanted to confront the deepest flaw in all of it, that someday I'd be judged, and I'd have to account for my wasted life. God's glory--whatever that meant--simply had no place in my plans. When I did glimpse other Christians making huge sacrifices in order to serve God and others, I scoffed. What a waste! They're wasting their lives away, I'd think.
My delusion, I know now, was part of that general blindness that living outside of God's truth and wisdom produces. Everything seems to reduce down to the self, to the service of the self, to the expansion and flourishing of the self. The content of my every thought was me. I looked around at my world--a comfortable 21st-century America--and saw vast numbers of Christians doing (or seeming to do) exactly what I proposed for my own life. They went to church, they followed along in the sermon, and the rest of the week they fit in with the rest of the world. They screamed and cursed at crazy drivers in a traffic squeeze, they labored under the burden of debt while continuing to buy new clothes and new cars they didn't need, they spent their evenings watching mindless TV, they looked away in disgust when they passed by beggars, they gossiped, they cut corners, they lived like God wasn't looking, and then put their happy "church faces" back on when the next Sunday rolled around. That is to say, sadly, I didn't see much fruit of the Spirit. This was the slice of "Christendom" that I knew and instinctively sought membership in.
But this was all just stale bread. It's not living for anything, and it's not really life at all. It's animated decease, and it's ghostly. There is superficial churchiness and little faithful, Spirit-led pursuit of righteousness and wisdom. And all indications are that this has become frighteningly widespread in the West, especially in our country. The theory goes: We're a nation of such a blindingly stable privilege and freedom that in the process of growing complacent we've normalized (and gutted) Christianity and made it a safe, conservative, unassuming, friendly bit of polite culture. Yet surely we must see that this is not the faith of Paul, nor the faith of Augustine, nor the faith of Luther or Calvin, nor the faith of Jonathan Edwards, nor the faith of William Wilberforce. This is not a faith that saves us, a life made with radical purpose.
Radical! Yes, radical! Jesus's exceptionally brutal death on the cross and magnificent resurrection are the most radical events ever to have taken place. And we live by them. Or at least we are called to. As Christ is at the center of God's glory and plan, Christ is our life and our purpose. And our selves are to be crucified on the cross with Christ. As we live, the self (which this world tells us is of such significance--think Oprah, think subjectivism, think the American Dream, think rugged individualism, think advertising) dies. Galatians 6:14 puts it this way: "But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world." We have to be purified of the flesh we carry and so be sanctified for a holy, holy, holy God.
There are still some '60s-era hippies around--especially in New England--and their clarion call still remains: Subvert the dominant paradigm, man. (OK, I added the "man" part.) Well, let's take that call and make it our own; let's subvert the Church of Self that Western civilization has been constructing for generations; let's smash the self with all the righteous fury of the iconoclasts! By clinging to the cross, boasting only in the cross, living by it, breathing by it, knowing with life-transforming intensity that it is the only cause of our liberty--this is how we break out of the jail-cell of sin and so free ourselves from the world of flesh and material and mammon. That is the kind of Christian I want to be.
Next time: What this all means in practice in my life (and maybe yours too).
P.S. Piper gives an infinitely deeper, clearer explanation of the bases of radical Christian living in the first few chapters of his book Don't Waste Your Life. Read it, I beg you.
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