To Live MUST Be Christ

Seasons of suffering do not always produce our clearest and most logical thoughts. The coming together of things like shock, sadness, anger, and confusion can sometimes lead to some wildly unhealthy and even irrational conclusions and decisions. And yet, I would argue that those difficult seasons of our lives can also end up being the moments when we see things with a surprising amount of clarity.

THE MONTH OF FEBRUARY

On February 4th, 2024, I went to the hospital to have a lump looked at. I expected to be home that evening with some medication to take care of a very mundane diagnosis. However, things do not always happen as we expect them to. That initial visit began for me a cascade of tests and appointments. The emergency room visit led to an ultrasound; the ultrasound led to another doctor’s appointment; that appointment led to a meeting with a specialist; the meeting with a specialist led to surgery; surgery led to more tests and scans; tests and scans led to lots of waiting, and all of which together led to the longest month of my life. Ill have you know that in my little part of North America, February is routinely the coldest month of the year, which seems to always make it the longest month of the year (even with only 28 or 29 days). As it would happen, February 2024 was the warmest February my town had experienced in ages, but the longest February I had ever lived.

Pretty early into the journey of tests and appointments I became aware of the expected diagnosis, and it wasn’t great. The effect of this knowledge was a flood of emotions and a spinning mind. I quickly called my elders team to request relief from preaching for the foreseeable future because I was finding myself unable to focus on anything except the situation before me. For days on end, I did nothing but walk. I would set out in the morning into the mountains and spend 8 hours of the work day walking in silence down dirt roads, petitioning the Lord and trying to come to grips with the likelihood of a shortened life. If you would have asked me in those days while I was walking those long dirt roads, if I was thinking clearly, I probably would have said “Unlikely.” Even while I was going through it, I could recognize in myself the list that I began with: shock, sadness, anger and confusion. This cocktail of emotions had me far too preoccupied to be imparting much wisdom or making any life-changing decisions. And yet, as I look back on my journal entries from that month, I realize that in some ways I was thinking about my life with a clarity that I’d never had before.

I won’t make a habit of sharing my journal on the internet, but for the sake of the topic let me share a brief exert. February 6th, while sitting on a flat rock on a mountain side with a Bible flipped open to Mark 8.34 and Philippians 1.21 on my mind, I wrote, “I have never been more sure that death is real. I have never been more sure that Jesus lives. This season of life has changed death for me. And it has changed life for me. To die is inevitably a gain. And to live must be Christ. Anything less makes no sense. If God died for me, if He lives, if I will be raised up with Him, if He is all satisfying, good and sufficient, how could He have half of me and the world have the rest? How could fear and worry have any place in me? How could my life not be surrendered completely in joy? Either I would I have missed who Jesus is and what He has done and promised, or I have would have failed to believe it.”

THE POWER OF facing your mortality

If you haven’t guessed yet, I was diagnosed with cancer. As I type here on the morning of March 11th, just over one month after the original diagnosis, I have been declared cancer free. I still have some hoops to jump through, but for the most part I have a clean bill of health, for which I am thankful beyond what words can even express. Maybe some what oddly though, I am also thankful for everything that has led up to this point. I wouldn’t trade February 2024 for anything. It was this trial and all the pain and uncertainty it entailed that led me to thinking about the gospel in ways that I pray I will never recover from.

You see, before this whole cancer thing, death to me was just other people’s reality. As a pastor I would go deal with it on their behalf, but it never felt too real for me personally. It was something abstract, even kind of theoretical. The result, I realize now looking back, was a very cavalier following of Jesus. No real urgency. No Psalm 42 like desperation. No comprehensive surrender. And it makes sense, because without a real sense of death and just how certain it is and deserving of it we are, how can we ever truly appreciate the life Jesus came to give us?

So, there I was, just casually following Jesus, trusting more in myself then not. Following Jesus at a safe distance. And then cancer hit, and suddenly death felt like it was on my doorstep, or I on its. For the first time the end felt absolutely real; my life felt fragile and finite, and the gospel, and in particular the cost of following Jesus, made more sense than it ever had.

Let me try to explain. In Mark 8.34 Jesus lays out the requirements of anyone that would want to follow Him, and it is nothing short of everything. He calls them to deny themselves and take up their crosses, which is to essentially say, “You must throw your life away and recklessly abandon yourself to God.” That is a steep price to follow. It couldn’t be any steeper. Who on earth would pay that price? Well, only the one who understands the value of what they are receiving. Jesus goes on to say in the next verse, “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” In other words, what is being received in the relinquishment of our lives is not just some added happiness, it is life itself. True life, eternal life, new life in Christ. A gift of infinite value!

Well if you are receiving something that is worth more than anything, what happens to the cost of that something? It disappears. And when the value of the life Jesus offers is understood, then the cost of following Him is no longer even worthy of being called a cost. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer so perfectly put it, “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life worth living.”

THE COST, NAY, THE GRACE OF FOLLOWING JESUS

Here’s the thing, I had loved and followed Jesus for many years. I had contemplated and rested in the Gospel for many years. But I had always wavered in how much of my life I gave to Christ and how much I held back. Simply, because while never really comprehending the reality of the death I deserve, I had never understood the value of and felt the consequent gratitude for the life that Jesus gives. But when death became for me a real reality and an immediate possibility, then the abundant life that Jesus died to give me (the already and not yet) finally appeared as the real, invaluable, undeserving, and infinite gift that it truly is. And when that happened, the incredible cost of following Him dissolved into worship. It became the only logical response. The cost, as Bonhoeffer explains, was transformed from cost into grace.

It is probably good that I wasn’t operating heavy machinery last month. But in terms of thinking about Jesus and about my living and dying, I don’t believe I have ever thought so clearly as when I sat on a mountainside and paraphrased for myself the apostle Paul, “To die is inevitably a gain. And to live must be Christ. Anything less makes no sense.”

The Church - Why Bother Studying It?

There is a tragically interesting situation in western Christian culture right now, and it is this: an increasing number of people who are not only leaving the church, but who are leaving behind any religious affiliation whatsoever. They have grown tired of religion in general (at least as they understand it) and they no longer want to be connected to it or with it in anyway. And so they are departing. This group has come to be labelled as the nones; those who belong to nothing; those who are no longer identified with any organized religion.

The nones are on a staggering rise. Today, for every one person that had no religious affiliation and now does, four people leave the church and become a none. Just between 2007 and 2014, while Christianity in America was declining, the number of nones rose literally by millions. The largest portion of them were millennials (22–37-year-olds), but it wasn’t limited to just that demographic. The rise also included baby boomers and those in generation X. In other words, the nones were and are crossing all generational boundaries.

At the same time that this exodus of nones is occurring, there is also this group who wants to continue to embrace Jesus and to identify as Christians but like the nones, they don’t want the church. They argue, and maybe rightly at times, that the Christian church has become politicized by agendas and sides and has been infiltrated by televangelist like preachers seeking to make gains off the backs of religion and religious people. The only way forward is to liberate themselves from the church and get back to the simplicity of Jesus and His Word. No creeds; no traditions; no buildings; no religiously infused positions; just Jesus.

Add to that this group as well: those who identify as Christians and who are remaining as participants in and of the church but who don’t see it is as a primary priority or necessity for the Christian life. They are the products of an individualistic age and culture, where there is a primacy of the individual over and above the corporate, where everything is about personal freedoms, personal experiences, self-interest and self-help. To them (which is probably all of us to some degree), church is great if you want it, but it’s a voluntary choice. In the list of priorities, church comes after one’s personal experience and relationship with Jesus.

Don’t we see this priority of the individual even in our evangelism? We say everything about making a decision for Jesus and almost nothing about being incorporated into a church, because that’s secondary to the personal experience and ultimately optional.

The Situation

So here we are then. We have professing nones leaving the church; professing Christians leaving the church and professing Christians staying in the church but not seeing its importance. All of that tells me that we need not to develop more strategic programs to attract people and keep them, but rather to develop and share a right theological understanding of the church. We need people who understand what they are apart, or what they are being invited into. I am convinced that if we could see the church even a sliver of how God sees it, we wouldn’t run from it no matter how hurt or offended we got.

Did you know that in all the areas of theological study over the last two-thousand years, one of the least studied areas or subjects has been the church? Scholars speak of ecclesiology (the study of the church) as being in its “pre-theological phase.” And it shows, doesn’t it? We don’t know if the church is a building, a service or a group of people. We are not sure where a bible study stops being a bible study and becomes a church. We don’t want to be members of the church because that doesn’t seem right to us. Still, many of us are dedicated Sunday attenders, unless there is a special event. On snowy days many make statements like, “Church for is on the ski hill.” One group says the primary function of the church is worship, while another group says its social justice. When it comes to understanding the church, we are so confused!

If you go to a Christian bookstore today you will find lots of writing on the church, but almost all of it will be practical: how to plant a church; how to attract people to church; how to lead a church; how to be a missional church. There is a big concern for how to do church and a seemingly little concern for understanding it biblically. That means for the average Christian and maybe even the average pastor, there is little biblical knowledge of who and what the church truly is according to God’s Word. This makes it very easy to not care about the church, and very hard to promote the church. It makes it very easy for the church to become whatever humans think it should be, and very hard to see when it has actually stopped being a biblical church.

The Hope

All of that to say, in this short series I want to ask the theological questions: What is the church? What is its mission? What is its structure? Etc. And I want to look to the Bible for the answers to those questions. My hope is that, God willing, by the end of this little mini-series you will not simply have more knowledge about the church but will have a new and invigorating love for God and His church, as well as an unrelenting desire and conviction to be a part of it. Whatever category you land in right now in your relationship with and opinion of the Christian church, I pray that you will come to see it as Christ sees it, as something beautiful and essential.

No Intermediaries

How amazing is it that Christians have direct access to Jesus? You know it didn’t have to be that way. When Jesus was on the earth he had his twelve disciples. Within that group of twelve disciples he had his inner circle of three. Then within that inner circle of three, at least according to John’s gospel, he had that one disciple, “the one whom Jesus loved” (John 20.2). Given these close and intimate relationships it would have made sense for Jesus, at least while he was on earth, to have routed access to him through the one, three or all twelve of his disciples. And then it could have continued that way when he ascended, whether through Saints in heaven, angels, etc. In other words there easily could have been a hierarchy where the disciples, or Abraham, or angels ended up acting like his assistants, and the intermediaries between other Christians and himself. That would not have seemed that crazy. Really, it wouldn’t have been so different then the setup in the Old Testament between Israel, the priests and God.

But he didn’t do that. He didn’t set up the disciples or anyone else as intermediaries. He didn’t appoint more priests. Instead, he said things like, “Let the little children come to me,” (Mt 19.14) and “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Mt 11.28). Instead of making any hierarchy or system of intermediaries he made himself directly available to anyone that would come to him.

Again, how amazing that even right now I can come to Jesus and speak to him without anyone standing in between? And how crazy that I/we don't take advantage of that relationship more often; that we aren't on our knees before him more than we are?

Easy Christianity

It is truly wild how seemingly easy we have made Christianity in the West. We have crafted this version of Christianity (which is really no Christianity at all) that requires so little effort. You don’t have to get your knees scraped or your hands dirty; you barely need to break a sweat. You almost don’t even need the power of the Holy Spirit. You just accept Jesus into your heart, then proceed to do your private devotions each day, sit in a church once a week like you’re at the movie theatre, try not to curse in public and maybe send some money out to a few different charities. I mean there is probably a little more to it then that in most people’s minds, but at the same time, maybe not.

I remember N.T. Wright wrote in a commentary on Mark some years ago, “Jesus is not leading us on a pleasant afternoon hike, but on a walk into danger and risk. Or did we suppose that the Kingdom of God would mean merely a few minor adjustments in our ordinary lives?” I think that is exactly what many of us think Jesus is leading us on these days, a pleasant afternoon hike that means little more than a few minor adjustments to our otherwise ordinary lives. Again, I say it is wild because just like N.T. Wright is highlighting, nothing could be more contrary to what Jesus is actually calling His disciples to then that.

Take one verse. It is a short and simple verse and its one that caught my attention this morning and reminded me once again how uncomfortable and dangerous the Christian life is and also how impossible it is without the Spirit’s power. It is 1 Corinthians 10.24. Paul is addressing the Corinthian Church on eating food in the marketplace, i.e., is food sacrificed to idols, and he sums up his instructions to them with this command: “No one should seek their own good, but the good of others.”

Did you hear that? Well maybe read it again to make sure you are picking up what Paul is putting down. Do not seek your own good, but the good of others. That is a crazy command! How is that even possible to do consistently? How do you do that without adjusting your whole life? Now just in case your knee jerk reaction is to say that that statement pertains only to the situation Paul is addressing in 1 Corinthians, take note of two other places that such a command comes up: Romans 15.1-2, “We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbour for his good, to build him up,” and Philippians 2.4, “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

The interesting thing about all of these references is that they are all rooted in the person of Jesus. In every one of these references Paul gives the command, then points to Jesus as the example of one who truly walked out this command, and then he tells the crowd that he is writing to, “Now imitate Christ.” Well to be completely accurate, in 1 Corinthians specifically he follows up the command by saying, “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ,” but you get the point. This command comes from the example of the person of whom Christians are disciples of. In other words, there is no getting around it. The command to put others needs before our own is a universal command for disciples of Jesus everywhere. This is a slice of what it means to follow Him.

When I really think about it, I am not sure that I could find a more difficult ethic to walk out then this one. I mean come on, no one naturally seeks the good of their neighbour before the good of themselves, or at least not all the time. Its impossible. But I think that is kind of the point. As Jesus once told His disciples while speaking of another impossible part of the Christian life, “With man this is impossible, with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19.26).

If you have found some version of Christianity that doesn’t make you frequently think, “How can I even do that?!” then I would guess you have found something that is not Christianity at all. The reality found in the pages of Scripture is that Jesus is not calling us to an afternoon hike, but instead is calling us into danger and risk. He is calling us into an innumerable amount of uncomfortable adjustments to our otherwise ordinary lives. Jesus never calls His disciples into an easy Christianity, instead He calls them into the kind of lives that can only be lived through the power of his Holy Spirit; the kind of lives that make little of themselves and instead make much of the needs of others so that in turn they make much of Jesus Christ.