The Disciple and Happiness

There is a line in Pride and Prejudice in which one sister tells another, and I am paraphrasing here, that she cannot have her happiness until she has her goodness.  Jane Austen is relying on a traditional sense of happiness (and goodness) to make her point that virtue is the path to true happiness. For a very long time philosophers and theologians believed that humans were made to be certain kinds of beings, namely rational and virtuous beings, and that we would not lead fulfilling lives until we began to function according to our created mandate. Thus, happiness was to be a consequence of reason and virtue. This idea, which reigned philosophy and culture for centuries, has fallen apart and been replaced with one form of hedonism or another. Happiness now is a factor of what makes us feel a particular emotion without any regard to virtue or the right training of character. In fact most people now find the idea, "the right training of character," to be odd or offensive.

But for the follower of Jesus Christ, we must return to a version of this traditional notion. Moreland and Issler say, "According to the ancients [Moses, Solomon, Jesus, Aristotle, Plato, and the church], happiness is a life well lived, a life of virtue and character, a life that manifests wisdom, kindness, and goodness" (The Lost Virtue of Happiness, pg. 25, italics theirs). The way I want to put it here is that in the life of the believer happiness is the place where there is no tension between what gives God joy and what gives you joy.

For the Christian, maturity consists in the building of the life and character of God within us. As the Apostle Paul noted, we have been predestined to be conformed to the image of God's Son. This is not a bad thing. It is a good thing. It is a beautiful and powerful thing. It is a joyful thing. But it presupposes that we currently, or in our broken human condition, are not in the image of God (Romans 8:29). We must be transformed to get there. Thus, the things that give us joy or happiness now may need to change and the things that give God joy must replace them in the makeup of our character.

So, at the very least, the Christian needs to learn that they cannot accept happiness on hedonistic terms, or to settle for the kind of joy that comes with a broken and sinful nature. As C.S. Lewis said in another context, if we do those things we are happy with playing in the mud when the glories of heaven are available to us. The Christian is given the Word of God, the life of Christ, and the presence of the Holy Spirit, and these become our guides in learning God's kind of happiness and joy, and they become the power of our transformation.

Toward a Public Christian Faith

It has become a common, if unexamined, belief that the only institutions that have anything to say about a culture’s common problems are politics, law, and higher education, especially the hard sciences. What this means is that when we are faced with common, large, problems we look to these institutions, people, and their respective ideologies to provide solutions. The problem is that none of them have any solutions worth any serious devotion.

The Christian, however, has at their disposal another resource that has answers to public problems. At the very least it provides a sound and valid foundation for understanding and addressing our common issues. But our culture has ruled it out of bounds for public discussion. The living Christ and Christian theology is the resource that exemplifies God’s wisdom and power among humans and which reveals truth to us. But people of faith, theologians, pastors, and churches have been relegated to the insignificant shadows of “private belief” or “opinion.” And not only has the outside world pushed the church and her theology out of the public square, the church has, in many respects, become content there.

To come “out of the shadows” and put forward a full-bodied public life the church must learn that she is a public institution with answers to our culture’s common problems. We need not subsume ourselves and our priorities to the other institutions listed above, and neither do we need to learn a triumphant posture over them. Instead, for the follower of Christ, all these vocations (and many, many more) become means of expressing our theology. If this is understood and practiced, the Christian need not seek a revised form of Constantinianism (because they no longer see politics as a surrogate savior), and the Christian need not separate their faith from the tasks that consume most of their waking hours (because their faith and their lives have become indistinguishable).

Part of what this means is that the church must learn to use the resources at her disposal to begin learning and teaching what it would mean to begin thinking about daily life with Christ. Christ is not a spiritual add-on, or the ideal who guides some of our moral decision making. Instead, he is the very manifestation of the Creator of all things, the smartest man who ever lived, and still alive filling his people with the power and wisdom of his kingdom. So, we don’t begin thinking about marriage, politics, law, education, computer programming, or custodial work with the presupposition that Christ is not concerned. On the contrary, if the Christian is doing it, Christ is deeply concerned and involved.

Does this mean we must develop a “Christian quantum physics,” a “Christian computer programming language,” or a “Christian” anything? Not necessarily. Instead, we ought to become people enamored with and filled with Christ and then go do our jobs, or relate to friends and family, or vote.

I wonder from time to time, what would it look like for the local church to become so robust a community founded on the truths and life of Christ that people find in her the resources they need to address life and all that comes with it?

Discipleship Changes Things - The Words We Use

When we become disciples of Jesus - or become serious about following him - all kinds of things are supposed to change. The Jesus way of life is a new way; a way of thinking, believing, and doing that is often radically different than other non-Jesus ways of doing things. So it would follow that discipleship to Jesus begins to transform our lives in ways we may expect, and in ways we may not expect. So, what kinds of changes might we expect if we begin to authentically follow Jesus? Over time I want to flesh out several changes, but here is one you might not expect.

Our vocabulary changes, and I don't mean we stop swearing. We may very well stop swearing when we become disciples, but I am thinking of a much more significant shift in the way we understand and use words. Words are powerful things. Language is more life-shaping than you probably think. At the very least, words signify things and ideas. When we use words we are verbalizing what is going on around us or within us. We express relationships between things in the world and we express what is going on in our inner states. We say, "The light is green," and we mean to say something about not only a certain colored light, but to also convey meaning. We are saying, "it is your turn to drive." We can say, "I feel anxious," and reveal something going on within us that another person may not know unless we say it, and we may be communicating a need for sympathy or reassurance. In either case, we use words in ways that we believe will communicate with other people.

So it is with our use of words and ideas that appear both in Scripture and in the common culture. What do you think of when someone tells you they spent Thanksgiving with their "family"? What ideas and images are conjured in your mind when someone talks about their "anger"? What about "friendship," "work," or "love"? The images and ideas that arise in your mind when people use those words with you are the result of years of contextual content-filling. In other words, those words have already been defined for you (in large part) by your background, education, language, culture, and so forth. Exaggerating a bit, you might say that whoever or whatever filled your vocabulary with meaning has also given you your view of how the world works.

There is an unavoidable tension here for the disciple of Jesus. Christian theology and practice wants to use words one way and the rest of the world wants to use them in another way. We live in a pluralistic culture, becoming more so all the time, and each corner of our culture wants to use words in different ways.  The more ways a single word is used, the more difficult it becomes to maintain a straightforward belief in the way "we" think that word ought to be used. To put it another way, if the church teaches you one thing about "love" for one hour a week, and media teaches you a very different thing about "love" 40-60 hours a week, which meaning will be easier to believe? And if you want to believe what the church teaches about "love" then you will need to work harder at it.

But then, it seems this is one thing the follower of Christ learns to do if they plan on being genuine disciples. If we are discipled by someone or something, we are taught a view of the world by them. The disciple is striving to learn the Jesus way of life, including the Jesus way of using words. This means that we learn how to begin with sound biblical ways of understanding words and their respective concepts and carry them into our respective niches of society. What normally happens is the reverse is the case. Church and Christian theology often feel odd or antiquated to us because we have let other things define the terms for us.

So, what does it mean for you to robustly learn and absorb the biblical meaning of "love" or "forgiveness" or "work" and then engage your world? We are all waiting to see, and we will all be better for it.

How To Avoid Being a Disciple, Part 2 - Refuse a Theology of Difficult Things

It is nearly axiomatic in the life of Christians that their greatest struggles with faith come in times of stress and difficulty. Financial pressures squeeze families. Serious illnesses come out of nowhere and throw every expectation and hope out the window. Betrayal pulls the rug out from underneath our relationships.  And on the story goes. Struggles of every kind create unexpected bends in the river and create tension for us, tensions between what we expected to happen, what we hope will happen, what we expect of God in our lives, and who we think God really is.

To paraphrase a popular bumper sticker, all kinds of awful things happen. This is the human experience, and as such, it needs to be dealt with in ways that make sense of both our experience and our faith. If we believe in a sovereign God, we need to come to terms with his plan and power and the fact that things in our lives often do not go the way we expect them to. On the whole, however, we have failed at this task. We have simply not taken enough time on the "street level" of Christian lives to develop a theology of difficult things - an understanding that God is still good and great even when we suffer. And the failure to do so is more than a theological oversight, it is another way in which we avoid discipleship.

If we are unable to develop a clear and faithful understanding of God in the most trying times of life, we will find ourselves tossed and turned by even the slightest of winds. It will not necessarily be the gale-force gusts that topple our faith, it may be one contrary breeze. There is no surer way to destroy the future faith of a young believer than to insinuate that if they follow Jesus everything will go well for them. If we do not deepen our comprehension of God beyond believing in his greatness and goodness when "all is well," we will end up with a shallow projection of ourselves and our wishes on the sky, resulting in us following ourselves and not God. Our default theology is never who God actually is, but who we wish him to be.

At the very least, the disciple must learn where they stand in the God-to-human gamut of power. God is God, I am not and can never be. God is, by his very nature, necessarily good and right. I am, by my very nature, small in power and rife with error. So the disciple learns to respond to God's very existence and his call with confident abandon. The three Hebrew children about to be thrown into Nebuchadnezzar's famous fiery furnace understood this well. They refused to bow down to the pagan idol because they knew who truly was God. At the moment of their peril they said, "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image that you have set up" (Daniel 3:17-18).  In another situation, not leading to potential death but to a radical change in the rest of her life, a young girl also saw what this meant for her. When the angel Gabriel told Mary that as a virgin she would give birth to her long-awaited Messiah, and that her older cousin was also surprisingly pregnant, she replied, "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word" (Luke 1:38).

If the follower of Jesus Christ gains an understanding of the character and power of God, they become able to follow him in the most complicated of times. This is not to say it will be easy - that would, in fact, contradict my entire point. The three Hebrew children were actually thrown into the fiery furnace and Mary watched her son be executed by the Romans. But if a Christian fails or refuses to come to terms with their sovereign and good God in the midst of trials, in the end they will follow their feelings instead. It is a very quick way to avoid being a disciple.

Part 1

How To Avoid Being a Disciple, Part 1

To be a disciple is to follow Jesus Christ. There is no discipleship without following Christ in all he teaches us to obey and in how we live our lives under God. There is, however, a form of the Christian life without discipleship, which is a life without Christ (2 Timothy 3:5). The call to follow Christ goes out to everyone, but not even all those who answer the call in the beginning follow through as disciples.

To follow someone is to allow them to be your teacher and begin take on the character of their life, and in the case of Christ it is to also take on the power of his life. In fact, we become like what we follow no matter whom or what it is. The Psalmist tells us about this in the context of idols by saying, “those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Psalm 115:8). So, over time, a mark of the disciple is how different they become from the world and the idols around them. Christ is the one true God, so nobody and nothing else offers us the life that Christ does. People may follow many different idols in this world, but they all end up looking very much the same. The people who stick out as different are the followers of Jesus Christ.

But the minute we say that, we struggle to think of the differences between Christians and the others around them. Christianity without discipleship makes little to no difference in a life at all. After all, how could it? This form of belief is nothing more than lip-service without any intent to allow faith in Christ to sink deeper than some kind of proclamation. As the prophet put it so memorably, “they honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me” (Is. 29:13). So, what are the hallmarks of a Christian proclamation without the difference discipleship makes?

Christianity without adherence to the fundamentals of the faith will create a life that is indistinguishable from a non-Christian life. It may seem odd to some that we begin talking about a different life by talking about what we believe, but our lives are inevitably the result of our most deeply held beliefs. If you want to know what a person truly believes about an issue, do not put stock in what they say, rather, pay attention to what they do. Behavior inevitably betrays belief, and our beliefs turn us into who we become. It makes a difference whether you believe God created the universe and you or not. You will live differently if you believe Jesus is God in flesh reconciling the world to himself. Your priorities will be different if you believe Jesus is worth obeying and he tells you to make disciples of every nation teaching people to obey everything he tells us to do. You will be a very different kind of person if you really believe that people who are persecuted for righteousness are blessed. And the list could go on.

Why would a Christian not hold to the essentials of their faith? There are probably as many answers to that question as there are nominal Christians, but I think at least two general reasons account for most of the failure of discipleship. First, many Christians are not taught what they believe, and they are not intimate enough with the Word of God to learn it on their own. Their churches and pastors fail them. Their TV watching habits fail them. Their lack of reading and comprehension skills fail them. Whatever the case, the warp and woof of their doctrine has not been made clear and desirable to them, so they go merrily along their way, none the wiser.  Secondly, to believe the things Christ teaches us to believe is to – by very definition – stick out. The follower of Christ learns how to believe that forgiveness is more powerful than vengeance and that humility is greater than the exertion of power. These values, and many more like them, are not at all like the world around us. In cultures where the grass of cultural convention is mowed pretty often and people are told to look and believe the same, Christians are like fast-growing weeds that simply cannot be leveled off for long. But, being that weed, the Christian must get used to getting mowed from time to time.

Disciples must know what they believe as followers of Jesus Christ and strive to have those beliefs reflect the truth as closely as possible. To paraphrase Dorothy Sayers, the drama of your life is wrapped up in the power of your doctrine. Otherwise you will find yourself in an inevitable drift of both belief and behavior toward the way the world sees and does things. You will be indistinguishable. 

The Disciple - It Is All True

I have been reflecting for a long time on what it means to really follow Christ in our changing world. What does discipleship look like when it really takes hold of a life? I believe that discipleship is the priority in the Christian life, so why is it so important? (Yup, I said, "the priority.")

I'll begin here with a few thoughts about what is probably the bottom line, the ultimate reason. It is true.

The whole story is true. Every bit of it really is the way God said it is. He really did create the universe and place humans created in his image in it to tend to it and be in relationship with him. He really did reveal himself. He really did come in person of Jesus Christ, born of a virgin, lived the sinless life, willingly died on the cross, conquered death and walked out of the grave, ascended into heaven, and sent the Holy Spirit.

Every promise Christ spoke about the reality and power of the Kingdom of God is real. None of it is bubbles and smoke. None of it is intended for only the super-spiritual. All of it is for whosoever will.

The uncomfortable things spoken about the brokenness of the human condition by God are all unavoidably true. It has been said that the doctrine of original sin is the most unlikeable of Christian doctrines, but also the most obvious. Humanity, without Christ, is hopeless - literally.

Now the reason this is an answer to the question of why we ought to be disciples, is that humans are conditioned to believe what is true. It is in our very nature to seek out what is true about ourselves and the world around us. Reality is unwavering and we must, in the end, live according to its terms. This is so ingrained within the human nature that psychology has at least a handful of diagnoses for people who refuse to deal with what is real and true.

We actually live as if 2+2 really does equal 4. Whether we acknowledge it or not we live according to the laws of reason. Human communication would be nearly impossible otherwise. We are ultimately uninterested in false theories of gravity and chemistry because we know they are only useful as curiosities or as bad ideas that help us understand the goodness of the true theories.

The same is true between people. Unless we have reason to believe otherwise, we assume, within reason, that people tell us the truth. If you don't believe me, try going through a day believing everything everyone says to you is a deliberate lie. You will not get far. Even when we interact with strangers, we are built to tell and believe the truth.

There is no good reason not to apply this same standard to ultimate things - to the things of God, life, and salvation. We live best in reality when we are in accord with it, and if God created all things then, we live best when we live in accord with that God. And discipleship is learning to live in accord with God and his creation. When we learn to follow Jesus Christ in his way of life, we are learning to think and act the way God did when he was here on earth in human flesh. Truth himself came and walked among us (John 1:14, 14:6), now we follow.