Evangelical Christians are beginning to tire of rigorous
calls to a radical, crazy love type of religion. Articles in some pretty conspicuous
places such as Christianity
Today and WORLD
Magazine cry out warnings against discontentment and legalism for those
who actually attempt to practice the type of discipleship David Platt and
Francis Chan (among others) are calling for. Down with “radical” and “crazy!”
The new word on the street is “ordinary” as Tim
Challies and Kevin
DeYoung tell us. All four of these articles and others have received very
positive responses. Seems like American Christians are just plain worn out! Can’t
we be comfortable and Christian? Can’t
we please just be ordinary, like everyone else?
But what exactly is “ordinary” for a Christian? Challies,
DeYoung, Bradley & Co. would point to some New Testament texts such as the
following from Ephesians, Colossians, and the letters to Timothy and to the
Thessalonians:
We’re commanded to do “honest work with [our] own hands, so
that [we] may have something to share with anyone in need.”
We’re commanded to “work
heartily” at whatever we do, working “as for the Lord and not for men, knowing
that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You
are serving the Lord Christ.”
We’re commanded “to aspire to
live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your
hands, as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders
and be dependent on no one.” Idleness and shameless mooching are roundly
condemned.
We’re called to provide for our
own family, and he who doesn’t “has denied the faith and is worse than an
unbeliever.”
Forgetting, for the moment, the contexts of these texts
(which are leveled explicitly at recovering thieves, poorly-treated slaves, and
negligent, lazy bums) let’s take what we can from them:
1. Work
hard.
2. Provide
for your own family.
3. Don’t
exploit others by forcing them to make up for your selfish laziness (Paul would
rather you starved).
4. Mind
your own business.
5. Live
a peaceful life (don’t be “those neighbors” late at night and don’t be
quarrelsome).
Pretty good stuff. In fact, these are many of the principles
that built America into such a land of opportunity and wealth. But there’s
nothing surprising there. Not even to an unbeliever. That’s ordinary, for sure.
But is that what makes us Christian? Are these the principles that make us “the
salt of the earth” and “the light of the world?” Only partially.
There’s more here. Let me add three more take-aways to
this list just from these four texts:
6. Make
one of the explicit purposes of your honest, hard work to “have something to
share with anyone in need.”
7. Work
hard as if every ounce of energy spent and every pound of production were going
directly to Jesus Christ’s advantage and your own eternal reward—not simply to
your earthly boss’s bottom line.
8. Work
consistently and honestly for the purpose of having an unstained reputation “before
outsiders.”
These last three principles represent, in part, the
unique doctrines that drive a lifestyle which sets a Christian apart from the
world, the unbelievers (or the Gentiles, as Jesus would have said): a work
ethic driven not simply by survival or getting-ahead, but by sacrificial
generosity; an attitude that battles feelings of futility with knowledge of the
King and His eternal reward; a faithfulness on the job fueled by missional
intentionality. These are doctrines that turn a mundane, ordinary job into a
radical vocation.
Yet we still don’t have a complete picture of what it
means to follow Christ. Here’s a few other texts to throw into the ordinary ole
life-mix:
We’re commanded to be holy “as He
who called [us] is holy.”
We’re described as “strangers,
sojourners and exiles on the earth;”
We are to suffer injustice as
Christ did, who, “when he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he
suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who
judges justly.”
We are promised persecution if
we “desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus.”
We are shown an example of
giving to God’s work that looks like an “abundance of joy and . . . extreme poverty [overflowing] in
a wealth of generosity.”
We are called to “show
hospitality to strangers.” And that’s more than a friendly sidewalk greeting.
And to sum it all up, the purest
expression of our devotion to our God is “to visit orphans and widows in their
affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.”
Ordinary? Well, if that’s your definition, then I’m
already too tired to hear what you’d call “radical.”
