only what’s done for Christ

Congregations in many evangelical churches sing a hymn composed by C.T. Studd titled, “Only One Life.” The chorus includes this line:

Only one life,’ twill soon be past,
Only what’s done for Christ will last.

This hymn is typically sung at the end of a sermon on personal evangelism. The text for the sermon is usually I Cor 3:11-13:

For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any man builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each man’s work will become evident; for the day will show it because it is to be revealed with fire, and the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work.

The sermon’s message is clear: personal witnessing is the most important activity of your life and everything else you do pales in comparison. Therefore, if you don’t want to waste your life, start witnessing and getting as many people as you can into the Kingdom. That is what will make your life worthwhile.

A pastor who engages in evangelism and discipling can immediately justify the eternal worth of his life’s work (it’s usually a “his”). The Biblical principle that is presumably invoked is that those engaged in ministry are doing God’s work. How common is it that a young person says, “I don’t want to waste my life. I’ll go to seminary to train for a job that will allow me to do God’s work full time”? But, what about the rest of us, who have “worldly” jobs that consume eight or more hours of our day engaged in activities that have nothing obvious to do with the Kingdom of God? Are we truly wasting our lives? An answer in the affirmative lurks like a demon below the surface.  Even if we share the gospel with people on a routine basis while on the job (something that is rare, indeed!), the vast majority of our time is consumed doing something other than God’s work. The typical congregant, listening to an “only what’s done for Christ will last” sermon is bound to accept a large amount of guilt, but is not likely to change his or her life.

As if psychologically stifling guilt were not enough, there are other serious problems stemming from the “only what’s done for Christ” approach to life as we generally understand it. Many Christians deal with the guilt by giving money to those who are engaged in God’s work, and the more money we earn, the better! But let’s tell the truth: does high income actually translate into a high level of support for Christian workers? Surveys indicate that more than 50% of Christians donate little or nothing to their church’s ministries and, on average, Christian giving hovers around 3% of income, falling rather far short of the proverbial tithe of 10%. Not only does our work lack intrinsic worth, we are largely unsuccessful at rescuing it’s worth by sacrificial giving for the sake of the Kingdom.

There is yet another consequence of the “only what’s done for Christ” sermon that is rather serious, partly because it is so subtle. We think that, if we’re not engaged in God’s work, our jobs are worthless in an eternal sense. “It won’t last” means that whatever we accomplish in our jobs will be burned up in the end, so from an eternal standpoint, our jobs make no real or permanent difference. Being fully convinced of this perspective precludes any attempt at discerning whether or not our jobs might actually be God’s work. We are robbed, thereby, of the possibility that God is actually interested in what we do from day to day, with consequences that are far reaching. Those Christians inclined to pray at all find it easy to justify supporting a pastor’s sermon preparation in prayer, but praying for a mom who must grocery-shop for the family at the same frequency that a pastor delivers a sermon seems like a waste. Surely, God is far more interested in this week’s sermon that the food that mom picks up at the store.

Swirling around this whole problem is the sacred-secular dualism. We have cleverly, and to our near destruction, partitioned life into the sacred and secular, when God makes no such division. Consequently, we see God’s work as being distinct from all other work: only what’s done for Christ will last, and the rest is an utter waste of time.¹ Since most of us are not missionaries or pastors, engaged full time in God’s work, then, by definition, most of us are wasting our lives as we trudge off to work every day to jobs that don’t hold a lot of meaning for ourselves, God, or the future. If this is true, then millions upon millions of Christians need to quit their jobs and becoming full-time Christian workers.

There is an alternative, though. We could decide that the whole construct is wrong-headed and contrary to Scripture, and then figure out a truly Biblical understanding of God’s work.

Any thoughts?

¹ If you have any lingering doubts about the fact that we divide work into God’s work and other work, then consider this. Who has the more important job? Is it the man who lives in a foreign country whose sole mission in life is to plant churches amongst a people who would otherwise have no hope of hearing the gospel? Or is it a school teacher in the United States? The knee jerk response would be, of course, the former. Let’s put the problem in stronger relief. A young person comes to you and says, “I really want to do God’s work.” Would not the general recommendation be that this person check into seminaries or do an internship in a church ministry? Who amongst us would suggest that, if he really wants to do God’s work, he should become a garbage collector?

whether we live or die

Do you ever read a Bible verse and think, “Yea, right.” Here’s one:

The LORD performs righteous deeds
And judgments for all who are oppressed.
(Ps 103:6)

God executes judgment for all the oppressed, but how can this be? Neither history nor personal experience seem to corroborate this assertion. In fact, God’s own people, generation after generation, spent 430 years in slavery under the oppressive hand of the Egyptians. No doubt, even fifty years into this 430-year period of slavery, the Jews were wondering about the claim that God is on the side of the oppressed.

If the Bible communicates truth about God and the universe in which we live, then Ps 103:6 must be entirely compatible, not just with the Jewish slavery in Egypt, but with similarly difficult situations in our own lives. But, harmonizing Biblical doctrine with real life can be downright difficult. When hard times come, and they invariably do, we are told to cheer up, because “God causes all things to work together for good for those who love Him.” Tell that to someone who, 400 years before Moses showed up on the scene, died without hope that the Jews’ lot in life would ever change. Better yet, quote Romans 8:28 to a Jew whose grandparents died in a German concentration camp during WWII. Platitudes, especially  Biblical ones, fall on deaf ears. It is too easy to cite the Exodus as evidence of the truth of passages like Ps 103 and Romans 8 because we know the end of the story. And as the saying goes, all’s well that ends well. If it were not for the Exodus, there would not have been a Moses, a Torah, a temple, the prophets, the Christ. When it comes to post-biblical events, though, we do not have the luxury of hindsight, so we are left on our own to decipher their meaning and significance. Frequently, we draw devastatingly wrong conclusions. I have a Jewish friend who told me, “I don’t believe in God for one reason: the Holocaust.”

*   *   *   *   *

“I don’t believe in God because…” What follows the ellipsis varies from person to person, but at bottom, the issue is a refusal to acknowledge the presence and the rule of God. That “things happen,” like the Exodus or the Holocaust, does not make belief in God harder. The shoe is on the wrong foot. Lack of belief in God makes it impossible to come to terms with the Exodus and the Holocaust. Every one of us has faced challenges and adversities, though they may pale in comparison to the Holocaust. How we think about our “everyday” adversities will inform us about our views of the Holocaust and other horrendous events in human history, which are practically without number.

In the midst of adversity, my natural tendency is to focus on my own fear and pain, which makes me a slave to adversity, unable to live free inside of it. Rather, I need to practice living in a place where God is central and I need to do this when life is reasonably good so that when hard times come, and they will, I will be ready. What does “God is central” mean? It means that His plans are the important ones. His ends need to be my ends. He tends to me because He wants me, not because He wants to coddle me and meet my every whim. He loves me, which is to say that He wants me for Himself and for His glory, not so that I will be a success as defined in my own corrupt eyes. He loves me for me; I must love Him, for Him, which is an arrangement that sounds a lot like marriage.

Let’s take two people who, presumably in love, are seeking the unity of marriage. While it is incredible to the rest of us, invariably, a newly-minted married couple believes that life together will be bliss. At the wedding, hope abounds, and the vow that each repeats to the other seems to them nothing more than a formality, really: “for better or worse…” Soon, though, life happens and half the couples bail on the vow and each other. Drawing from Ephesians 5 (not to mention many Old Testament passages), marriage is like the relationship that we have with our God. In the context of a commitment to unity with God, the serious disciple makes the same vow as a married couple: “for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.” But, sooner or later, everyone comes face to face a frustratingly difficult question: if God is all-powerful, then how does the worse, the poorer, and the sickness every happen, never mind the Exodus and the Holocaust?

Sin has wrecked our world. Unless we accept this basic tenet of the Scriptures, we cannot make sense out of the Holocaust. And, frankly, we cannot make sense out of anything else, either. An uncountable number of horrors, large and small, have resulted from sin, and the bombardment is relentless. Day after day, month after month, decade after decade, millennia after millennia, sin penetrates and devastates our lives and our world. There are the obvious consequences of sin: dictators; drug dealers; muggings and murder; wars and other disputes between countries and groups. Sin also has consequences that I might not think about:  the polluted air that I breathe every day; food that clogs my arteries; unequal (unfair) distribution of food, electricity, vaccines, education, the Internet, washing machines and flush toilets; being forced to pay (by taxes) for weapon systems that will kill thousands, if not millions, of people; advertising that very effectively convinces me that having some created thing is better than having the Creator, Himself; sensual pleasures that supplant spiritual joy and consolation; lies that attack our very faith in God every day. Do you own a cell phone? Think about this…

There is virtually no end to the list of the price we have paid for sin in our lives and our world.

After the Romans arrogantly nailed God to a cross, just to get rid of Him, can we imagine that there is any  boundary or limit to sin? Should I even be surprised at my own sin? If I am surprised at anything, it is that God did not immediately effect a permanent and severe penalty for my very first sin, as He did for Satan and his angels.  Imagine this for a moment: the Roman soldiers, after nailing God’s only Son to the wooden beams, stand the cross up in a hole in the ground. With a thud, the vertical beam strikes the bottom of the hole and Jesus feels the jolt through every joint in his body; the crude nails rip at his flesh and splinters dig into his back. The Father, watching all this from heaven, is getting more and more furious that the Romans are treating His thoroughly holy and innocent Son unjustly, and with scorn and contempt. The Father sent the Son to love people and then those same people are treating him horribly. In a flash of anger, the Father destroys the entire Roman Empire in one second. Gone is the mighty Roman Empire, its people, government, and institutions. Nicodemus and Joseph take Christ down off the cross. Together with Mary, they tend to his wounds.

If you can tell me why God did not stop the crucifixion of His precious Son in whom He was well pleased, I will tell you why He does not stop sin from wrecking our world and our lives. In the meantime, in submission to the wisdom of God, who is able to turn evil into good, for there is no one more powerful than He, my prayer must be… therefore, whether I live or die, I am the Lord’s.

sin is bad because…

Jerry Bridges, in Respectable Sins, observes that sin has fallen on bad times in our society. We don’t hear the word sin hardly at all any more outside of church. Even inside the church, Bridges argues, sin has fallen out of favor and the evangelical church has not been spared. Few of us seem to notice and our culture has made it easy to minimize or ignore sin. Why is this the case?

First, our society has interpreted as social or political or economic malfunctions many actions and attitudes that should be classified as sin. For example, in the West, we consume resources at an alarming rate, while our brothers in most of the rest of the world suffer for lack of basic needs such as adequate housing, clean water, balanced diets, and basic health care. We blame this on governmental inefficiency, but we do not name it as sin. Examples very likely abound, but we are so steeped in our own culture that identifying systematic sin is very difficult apart from the light of God.

Second, amongst religious people, sin has become a private affair, a matter between me and God. We thereby are blinded to the truth that our interior behavior contributes to the righteousness or to the sinfulness of the world around us.

Third, our society has trivialized grave wrongdoing by changing its name, or by saying, “Everyone does it,” or “It’s just the way our culture is,” or “It happens,” or even, “That’s the way God made me.” Such attitudes provide an excuse to rename sin, effectively softening or eliminating the seriousness of the offense. As Bridges observes, “People no longer commit adultery: instead they have an affair. Corporate executives do not steal: they commit fraud.”

If we explain away or otherwise minimize sin, one must wonder if we are even sure what sin is, considering the emphasis that the Bible puts on it. In general, we understand sin in the context of God having given us moral law. Breaking God’s law is simply wrong and we call it sin. To avoid sin, it would seem quite reasonable to focus on the law, asking, “What does God want me to do?” But, we immediately run into some frustrating roadblocks. First, our personal histories, the history of Israel, and the Scriptures themselves, provide ample evidence that obedience to the law is extraordinarily difficult. Impossible is the biblical characterization.

As serious as this is, there is yet another problem that is even more concerning because it effectively “locks people out of the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 23:13, NRSV) Jesus said, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain.” He spoke these words directly to a group of Pharisees, people who excelled at obedience to the law. That Jesus spoke such harsh words to a group of people who kept the Law better than anyone in Jewish history indicates that, despite their faithfulness to the law, they were missing something crucially important: “…their hearts are far from me.” We must be careful to note that Jesus acknowledges that these distant hearts engaged in the worship of God! In this declaration, Jesus highlighted a ubiquitous problem, which is religious activity that is carried out in the absence of God, accompanied by self-deception that zealously justifies the activity. Surprisingly, perfect obedience to the law that effectively excludes God, despite ongoing worship of His holy name, is sin.

As difficult as this may be to hear, it is not the first time that Jesus uttered such a sobering assessment. On another occasion, Jesus said, “On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’” (Matt 7:22-23) Jesus will say “I never knew you,” to people who preached his name, cast out demons, and did many good and wonderful things in the name of Christ! The parable of the prodigal son conveys the same message: the older son faithfully obeyed, but he was not truly seeking his Father.

Our inability to keep the law to the satisfaction of God the Eternal Judge is one thing. To miss finding God, at all, is quite another, especially when He has cleared the way to His throne at the great cost of the blood of Christ. Legalism requires that we ask, “If sin amounts to the breaking of God’s law, how else am I to avoid sinning except through obedience?” That is the wrong question, as Jesus made clear to the Pharisees. By the surpassing mercy of God, the sacrifice of the Lamb of God has converted this question from an eternally crucial one to a clearly secondary question. It is not the question that God wants us to ask. The question we should be asking is, “What does God really want?” The answer, surprisingly, is not obedience, first and foremost. The Psalmist wrote, “For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; You are not pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.” The story of the prodigal son makes the point clear: God wants my obedience, but He mainly wants me. God wants my obedience, but not if it is based on a sense of religious obligation. He wants a relationship that is grounded in and driven by love for Him.

From this perspective, then, why is sin bad?

First, sin does great harm to me, many times in ways that I never think about or notice. I have told so many lies over the course of my lifetime that one more does not seem such a big deal. Besides, there have been times where telling a small lie makes my life much easier, not harder. How can that be so bad? This is what I mean by not being able to discern the harm that sin does to me. I am like the wife of an alcoholic, who gets beaten half to death every Friday night. When her husband finally dies of cirrhosis of the liver, she remarries… an alcoholic! Such a decision is surprisingly consistent for women in this situation. Of course, it makes no sense to those of us who have not walked in her shoes. Likewise, my lying makes no sense to Jesus. The fact remains that sin has wrecked my life and, because I have never lived in a world without sin, I must pray to God for the wisdom to see the horror of sin in my life and my world.

Second, my sin has the practical effect of keeping me from God, and I lose as a result. Yes, His throne of grace is always available. But I cannot have my cake and eat it, too, or as the apostle Paul put it, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase?” Grace may abound, but I must recognize that my sin keeps me from being intimate with God. This becomes more clear when I consider that sin boils down to a desire for something other than God, Himself. The author of the wonderful little booklet, The Cloud of Unknowing, spoke to this: “Lift up thine heart unto God with a meek stirring of love; and mean Himself, and none of His goods. And thereto, look the loath to think on aught but Himself. So that nought work in thy wit, nor in thy will, but only Himself.” The apostle John was similarly straightforward in his admonishment: “Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world.” Love for this world, even a little, will keep me from loving God with my whole heart. I pray, therefore, that God would put His finger on the sin that is buried deep in my soul, that keeps me away from His heart.

Third, my sin offends God. Since He is invisible, I cannot ever see the look on His face, or His immediate reaction whenever I do something sinful. However, I have witnessed the reaction of my wife many times as she responded to something I did that offended her. Because I love her, I do not want to offend or hurt her. My love relationship with her provokes me to behave well. It is not a legal obligation, but a desire driven by love. And that is the subject of my prayer, in both my marriage and my relationship with God.

The question is not, “What sin do I need to work on today?” It is, “How can I love God more today than I did yesterday?” The implications of switching one question for the other are life-changing.

And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God. (Phil 1:9-11)