As our CTI teams travel around the US this year, they’re engaging their audiences with this theme of awakening, which is an exhortation to us, the church, to awaken in passion to our responsibility and privilege of taking the Spirit of God that lives in us to the world. 

The following is the text of an address that I gave in a chapel service at Northwestern College on September 14, 2007 while traveling with one of our teams on the Awaken tour.

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Do any of you read Relevant magazine?  I recently received the latest issue.  The cover sports a photo of folk artist Ben Harper and advertises articles inside including several artist interviews, a story on the aftermath of Katrina two years later, and a rundown of this fall’s TV shows.  Relevant has a pretty in-depth website too, and a podcast – both of which you might assume, based on the name of the magazine. 

Their tagline is “God, Life, Progressive Culture”.  If I had to identify their primary mission, I would say it was to draw attention to spirituality, both within “Christian” media and “secular” media.  In fact, I doubt that the Relevant editorial staff really believes in differentiating between the two.  The point seems to be that God exists in the music, writing, personalities and art of our culture, regardless of whether or not they are deemed exclusively “Christian.”

But I’m not here to endorse the magazine, nor am I here to defame it.  I just want to draw attention to both the word and the concept of being “relevant” because the term has been getting a lot of press among younger Christians within the last few years.

I think it’s become our cultural buzzword for the concept of being “in the world, but not of it.”

Have you heard that phrase, “in it, not of it?”

I’ve heard it over the years – back in 2000, the CTI team that I was on covered a song by Avalon called “in not of.”  Somehow I just assumed it was taken from scripture, I guess. 

So I spent some time looking for it while I was preparing for this message.  I was surprised by how difficult it was to find those words in the Bible.

In fact, I couldn’t find the phrase “in the world, not of the world,” or anything like it, anywhere that I looked.

What I did find, however, was a lot of scriptural support for the fact that we aren’t of this world.  It’s not so much a command as it is a reality that we need to embrace.

As an example, while praying for his disciples in John 17:16, Jesus said that they weren’t of the world just as he wasn’t.  And in I Peter 2:11, we read “Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.”  And there is more scriptural support for the fact that we are not of the world.

As for being “in” the world, Peter goes on in verse 12 to instruct his audience of “aliens and strangers” to “Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”

Drawing it all together is the Romans 12:2 exhortation: “Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

So we’ve got some scriptural basis to stand on as we talk about this issue of being relevant to the culture we live among as aliens and strangers – in effect, being “in the world, not of the world.”

But sometimes, it seems like our efforts to be “in the world, not of the world” have prompted us to create a completely separate world.  And we’ve stocked this separate world with every Christian alternative we can come up with… inventing “patterns” of our own world that resemble the ones of the world outside, and then we conform to those patterns instead.

And in the end, our zeal to be “in the world and not of it” has led us totally out of the world, yet left us totally of it.  We can be very worldly, having everything that the world has, though the version in our separate Christian world is often viewed as sanitized.   

And relevance has often become the term we use to define doing all of the things we can do to our separate world to make it more appealing to “them.”  We think of it as the gravity of our separate world – the force we hope will draw people in.  We reason that, if we use enough video, lighting and rock music, and then have a softball team on top of that, they’ll be attracted to our world, because it will look like theirs.

Have you ever walked into a Christian bookstore and found something that tries to persuade you that “If you like this secular band, you’ll like this Christian alternative”?

If you like Weezer, you’ll like Bleach.

If you like Gavin DeGraw, we promise you’ll like Nate Sallie. 

If you like Avril Lavigne… well… maybe we don’t want you in our world that badly after all.  (But if you really must come, we suggest checking out Jessie Daniels.)

It seems like we want to stand on our own cleverness and the things we have created, instead of relying on the overpowering attraction of the Spirit of God.  We’ve forgotten that we have nothing to offer.

Remember, Peter said to live such good lives among the pagans that they may see our good deeds and glorify God… not for us to live in separation, and bid them come to us.

And Jesus, through his final recorded address to his disciples as recorded in Matthew 28:19 commanded us to “go, make disciples of all nations…” 

Eugene Peterson renders it this way in The Message: Go out and train everyone you meet, far and near, in this way of life.”

And so it strikes me that the only way to be relevant is to go,

to live our lives among the pagans,
to train those we meet, far and near, in this way of life,
to erase the fictional divide between the “Christian” and the “secular,”

and to remember that our words, our efforts, our lights and video and rock-and-roll praise bands are nothing to them without the reality of Christ and the Spirit of God.

As our CTI teams travel around the US this year, they’re engaging their audiences with this theme of awakening, and this is what that’s all about:  As an organization, we long to see us, the church, awakening in passion to our responsibility and privilege of taking the Spirit of God that lives in us, and going to the world instead of waiting for the world to come to us. 

After all, the presence of the Spirit is the only thing that really makes our world any different anyway.

We should not only want to be merciful, kind, unassuming, and patient persons but also be making plans to become so. We are to find out, that is, what prevents and what promotes mercifulness and kindness and patience in our soul, and we are to remove hindrances to them as much as possible, carefully substituting that which assists Christ-likeness.

Many well-meaning people, to give an example, cannot succeed in being kind because they are too rushed to get things done. Haste has worry, fear, and anger as close associates; it is a deadly enemy of kindness, and hence of love. If this is our problem, we may be greatly helped by a day’s retreat into solitude and silence, where we will discover that the world survives even though we are inactive. There we might prayerfully meditate to see clearly the damage done by our unkindness, and honestly compare it to what, if anything, is really gained by our hurry. We will come to understand that for the most part our hurry is really based upon pride, self-importance, fear, and lack of faith, and rarely upon the production of anything of true value for anyone.

Perhaps we will end up making plans to pray daily for the people with whom we deal regularly. Or we may resolve to ask associates for forgiveness for past injuries. Whatever comes of such prayerful reflection, we may be absolutely sure that our lives will never be the same, and that we will enjoy a far greater richness of God’s reality in our lives.

In general, then, we “put on” the new person by regular activities that are in our power, and we become what we could not be by direct effort. If we take note of and follow Jesus in what he did when he was not ministering or teaching, we will find ourselves led and enabled to behave as he did when he was “on the spot.”

The single most obvious trait of those who profess Christ but do not grow into Christ-likeness is their refusal to take the reasonable and time-tested measures for spiritual growth. I almost never meet someone in spiritual coldness, perplexity, distress, and failure who is regular in their use of the spiritual exercises that will be obvious to anyone familiar with the contents of the New Testament.

That reminds me of the Richard Foster quote that I used as my prelude post to this series.

He said “for a while there, you were writing your heart out, and then… nothing.”

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that my busiest season of the year runs from May through September when we close out the year for our Fulltime program (which I direct) at CTI, move through our Summer outreach season (I coordinate all our international outreaches), and launch a new year for the Fulltime program in August with training that runs until October (I’m responsible for developing and overseeing the program and associated training.)

Consequently, I have very little time or mental energy to devote to “recreational pondering” during this season. The moments of introspection I do have are almost all dedicated to visioning for the next year of our Fulltime program.

But something else has kept me away from the blog these past few months as well, and that’s the “now what?” factor. The lack of a clear answer to the problems I’ve evidenced to myself through the “Way of Love” series has sort of sapped my motivation to probe further into the subject… and I’m a compartmental eater, which means I have a hard time moving on to something else until I’ve completed whatever is currently on my plate.

The point of the “Way of Love” series has been, mostly, for me to objectively journal about my personal struggle to truly evidence the virtue of love in my life. I’ve spent a lot of time proving to myself that this fruit lies at the heart of all other Christ-like character traits; that without it, no other godly pursuit really matters.

Well, mission accomplished. I’m convinced – and more than a bit disheartened - because I have once again evidenced my knack for clearly documenting problems, but not identifying the solutions. And I really want to see this problem of love solved in my own life (if I may be so pragmatic.)

And so we turn the corner from exploring the problem to exploring the solution.

[to be continued]