The following article appeared in the most recent edition of Insight, the magazine of the Association of Baptist Churches in Ireland:
Look up your
average church constitution in search of some advice about Christian lifestyle
and you’re likely to find words to the following effect:
‘It is the responsibility of all
saved souls to live soberly, righteously and godly in this present age’
This is a
concise, lean, succinct prescription for Christian living which lends itself
well to the context of a constitution, but in terms of how one is actually to live as a believer, it gives little
practical information. What does it mean to live a godly life? What should be
the marks of a Christian lifestyle? Are there any pitfalls to be avoided in
dealing with this issue? It is precisely these kinds of issues that this
article seeks to address, albeit suggestively rather than exhaustively.
Motivated Living
An essential
foundation stone to any treatment of Christian living is that of motivation.
Without placing this issue at the heart of Christian lifestyle, the believer
exposes him or herself to a number of very real and common dangers. The
Christian life is not primarily
concerned with externals, nor with slavish conformity to superficial standards
of behaviour. It goes much deeper than that. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gave perhaps
the fullest treatment of Christian lifestyle in history, articulating the
principles of His kingdom for the practice of all Christians. The preamble to
this great preaching section in Matthew 5-7 puts the heart under the
microscope, probing the internal attitudes which inform external actions.
Christian lifestyle consists of poverty of spirit, mourning hearts, meekness,
hunger for God, a heart of mercy, a desire for purity, a peace-making spirit,
and strength under persecution. This take on Christian lifestyle emphasises the
inside-out, rather than the outside-in, privileging authentic seeking after God
over rigid legalism.
The rest of
this great sermon extrapolates these issues into almost every conceivable area
of human concern, from sexual standards to bioethics, from relating to one’s
neighbour to meeting God in the Judgement. And at the heart of this teaching is
the issue of the heart. Sincerity, integrity and a desire for God which is
deeply personal, function as the operating system for all other Christian
behaviour. Everything else is merely application.
Christian
lifestyle is preoccupied with motive. This helps us to avoid many common
pitfalls which attend any attempt to live for God. Authentic Christian living
isn’t concerned with donning a tie or a hoody for ourselves, or damning a tie
or a hoody on others. It isn’t about preferred worship style, or a whole host
of personal predilections which seek to bind our consciences and those of
others. Christian lifestyle is a calibrating of the heart on the concerns of
God, an earnest desire to live for Him, and for His glory. It is not the
begrudging acceptance of other people’s standards or a matter of fulfilling
certain arbitrary conditions out of a sense of duty – rather it is the sheer delight
of living under Christ’s Lordship. J.I. Packer phrases this powerfully when he
states:
‘Any idea of holiness as required
refusal to do all that one most wants to do must be dismissed as the
unregenerate minds’ misunderstanding. True holiness, springing as it does from
what the Puritans called the “gospel mystery” of the sanctifying work of God,
is the Christian’s true fulfilment, for it is the doing of that which, deep
down, he now most wants to do, according to the urging of his new, dominant
instincts in Christ’[i]
This means
bringing every decision about how we live into conformity with Christ’s counsel
as revealed in Scripture, and undergoing the painful-now, pleasant-later
discipline of God as he shows us our hearts as measured against his holiness
(Hebrews 12:4-13).
Military Living
There are
many metaphors used in the New Testament for Christian lifestyle. From the
worlds of cultivation, commerce and condiments, many word pictures are employed
to drive home the reality of living for God. Arguably one of the most
compelling and crucial of these images is that of warfare. Ephesians 6:10-20 is
a seminal passage on how to live for Christ, showing us that successful
Christian living must be armour-plated, prepared to meet a ferocious and
implacable enemy with all of the resources God has provided. An in-depth
treatment of how the Christian’s armour is to be worn or used is beyond the
scope of this present article, but this well-known passage at the very least
presses home the war-torn backdrop against which Christian lifestyle is
embodied. Living for God entails wrestling not repose, engaging with our enemy
Satan with all his hordes in a theatre of war strewn with casualties. We live
in a world of devalued Facebook ‘friendships’, and where the concept of
‘following’ has been reduced to clicking an icon on Twitter. There is, however,
nothing casual about the Christian lifestyle; this is a way of living which
entails struggle, opposition and pain.
The post-war
rewards of this kind of living are beyond imagining – when the Captain of our
salvation will place the collective suffering of His people on the scales and
show us just how much weightier and wonderful the glory of an eternity spent
with him truly is. But for now, the Christian is called to wage war, finding
their discipleship forged in the furnace of a relentless spiritual fight.
To grasp the
military nature of Christian lifestyle changes everything. We begin to see
other Christians as comrades, a band of brothers (and sisters) allied against a
common foe; we will begin to see Scripture and the preaching of it not as dry dead
didactics, but as fresh dispatches delivered from heaven to help us through our
most fearsome times. Perhaps most profoundly, our prayers will be transformed.
Rather than an obligatory exercise to be undertaken our prayers will be marked
by urgency, fervency and dependency. John Piper has articulated this aspect of
Christian lifestyle beautifully in the phrase: ‘Until you believe that life is war, you cannot know what prayer is
for’.[ii]
Realising the military flavour of Christian living transforms our perspective
on discipleship, granting us a sense of urgency and purpose in seeking to be
conformed to the image of Christ.
Mutual Living
All of the
foregoing leads us to one final meditation on Christian lifestyle – fellowship.
Christian living is at once deeply personal and profoundly relational, private
and public. It finds its inspiration and articulation in community, in being
part of something bigger than ourselves, in finding nurture and growth in
partnership and mutual prayer with other Christians. The writer of Hebrews, in
seeking to encourage Jewish believers who were struggling to persevere,
strongly exhorted them to work out their Christian living in community with
others. There is, he says, a context for ‘spurring one another on towards love
and good deeds’ and that this is to be capitalised on with each Christian
ensuring that they do ‘not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit
of doing, but let us encourage one another – and all the more as you see the
Day approaching’ (Hebrews 10:24-25). Christian lifestyle is not nurtured in the
isolation of the cloister, but finds expression in the dynamic of relating to
other believers, learning from one another, and mutually seeking to prompt
growth in one another’s lives.
Christian
character thus finds it initiation in God’s work of grace in our lives, giving
us motivation and power to live for Christ. It finds expression through a sense
of urgency in the face of spiritual warfare and is nurtured in fellowship with
other Christians. Under these terms being a Christian is an exciting, terrifying,
enriching experience; an adventure in grace in which God works in and through
us for the glory of His name and for the renown of His Son Jesus.
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