I’m a big fan of the gospel.
No secret there – it’s all over everything I’ve done. I’ve said time and time again that the gospel is not just the ABC, it is the A–Z of the Christian faith. What, however, does that mean with relation to Christian spiritual growth or ‘maturity’? How do we encourage growing up and growing deep and becoming more like Christ?
Neglected texts
I’ve been fascinated recently by various texts that are not ‘poster’ texts for us these days. For instance, how often is 1 Thessalonians 4.11 the lead text for a conference or sermon or new Christian movement: ‘Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, …’
Granted that this has a particular context as well as a particular purpose – the purpose being evangelistic as well as provision for a family, and the context being a time when working with your hands was more common than the typical slavery to the computer keyboard of many in the West today. That said, the ‘ambition’ or ‘aspiration’ is startling.
Great things for God
Does it mean that we should not want to ‘do great things for God’? I doubt it. Another conversation I had recently with someone suggested that what he was looking for from the church today was more ‘gumption,’ ‘standing up and being counted,’ ‘bravery.’ That is not, or at least not apparently, a ‘quiet life.’ Paul’s life doesn’t appear to have been ‘quiet’, or at least not very often, and nor does Jesus’s. He was harassed by the crowds, doing all he could to teach them, observing them as ‘like sheep without a shepherd’.
No, I do not think Paul is advocating mild, bashful, uncertain, unexciting Christian lifestyles, where nothing is ventured and nothing gained. I am sure he would have resonated with the famous watchword of D.L. Moody that ‘the world has yet to see what God can do through one person fully devoted to him.’
However, there is a centre here, a maturity, an integration of personality (to use that nomenclature) that is remarkable. Not bothering with someone else’s business. Doing what God has called you to do.
The way to godliness
Where does that come from? Perhaps another – and far more famous – text would help. Romans 12.1-2: ‘Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.’
I certainly don’t have time to exposit that in these few words here. But essentially it involves five interrelated steps:
• Viewing the gospel (‘God’s mercy’)
• Offering your whole self (‘offer your bodies as a living sacrifice’)
• Saying no (‘Do not conform to the pattern of this world’)
• Going deep in the Bible (‘be transformed by the renewing of your mind’)
• Serving with passion (‘test and approve what God’s will is’)
With that brief summary I have left more ends untied: and points that need clarifying, nuancing. Suffice it to say, though, that godliness, maturity and Christlikeness require deliberate effort on the part of the Christian.
