An Ultimatum

First order of business: Congratulations Mary! I was very glad to hear this news :)

It is Logan here. This post is not overly well written, I had a lot of ideas swimming in my head, but I have been wanting to post on here since September, so here it goes. Life has been good but challenging for me over these last several months. I don't know if you guys will recall this, but I can remember sitting in gospels with Wes, and we were going through Matthew or Mark or Luke, when Wes presented Jesus' call to "pick up your cross and follow me" in a way that was much more real than I had ever heard it before. His asked us: "we are told to take up our cross and follow Jesus, but what does it mean for us to follow someone who is going to die?"  His words hit me like fire, yet at the same time I had no clue what to do with this challenge. Even now I find that this call should belong to a much bolder person than I.

At the end of last year I took another class with a very brilliant professor named Carl Hinderager called "The Sermon on the Mount." Many times I have heard parts of this sermon used for evangelism:

    The Bible says that "everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Well who can do that? You need to repent!

Now maybe this isn't wrong, or even a bad way to evangelize, but when I hear this as a Christian man I often do not view it outside of the context of evangelism. Yet just a chapter earlier Jesus has already called the people to "repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." The sermon then, from my understanding, is something which is applied to believers. Following suit, Jesus' commands then are commands addressed to believers. We are called to obedience. It may sound silly, but this was to me a radically new way of reading the Bible.

From here biblical passages started to speak to me and call me out in a much more direct way. Verses that I thought were to be intended for me when I got to be a better Christian turned out to have more weighty implications for me now. "Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness" (Col. 3:5) is a call for all Christians! "Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions" (Rom. 6:12) is a call for all who have been baptized into Christ. I was more and more starting to realize that the Bible was calling out to me, challenging me to be something that I was not. The Christian life, as it turned out, was one of obedience.

This theme of obedience continued to appear as we read through the Sermon on the Mount. But this theme was equally matched by another in the sermon: Dependence.

While I struggle with this call to obedience, I find dependence to be an even more difficult task to deal with, primarily because it is a task which strips me of my power, my will, my independence. When I first read about a tree and the fruit it produced (Matt. 7:15-20), I regarded it as a call to live an obedient life: If I want to produce good fruit, then I have to try really hard. Yet as I have continued to reflect on this, I find that it has less to do with straight obedience and much more with being dependent on God. Apart from this dependency, I might dare to say that most, if not all of our acts of obedience only transform themselves into pride in our hearts. While we look good and even holy externally, internally we are dying and rotting. We are white-washed tombs, and our fruit is rotting from the inside out.

How do we escape the wicked grasps of pride and sin? And who will deliver me from this body of death? It is Jesus Christ, who allows us to live life in the Spirit. Acts has many themes within it, but one of the most prevalent themes is that of the Spirit among the early believers. I imagine that I am not unique when I say that when I compare the story of Acts to my life, I see a significant amount of contrast between the two. I rarely even hear about, let alone see, anything of a miraculous nature take place around me. That was why I was caught off guard several weeks ago by the testimonies of several individuals I spoke to who had been missionaries. Their stories felt like a rushing wind. One man had told me about how he had been driving with his friend in Moose Jaw when the Spirit told them to evangelize to a lady who was walking on the sidewalk a ways up. They pulled off, stepped out, and started talking to her about Jesus. In about 10 minutes she had accepted their message and gave herself to Christ. The next day they went to her apartment to give her a Bible. When she was not home they went to the tenants and asked to give the Bible to her. Surprised, the tenants asked if they were sure they had the right lady. When the men affirmed it, the tenants told them: "we have been praying for her to turn to Christ ever since she moved in." Another missionary told me about how he leaves his Bibles and tracts in clear plastic bags when he enters countries closed to the gospel. He told me that years ago he had tried smuggling Bibles across the North Yemen border (which is a closed country to the gospel) and had been stopped and inspected. When the border patrol opened up a crate with a couple thousand Bibles inside, everyone around looked in and saw them, and then simply continued to proceed as if nothing was inside and let them continue on. After he was back in the vehicle, God told him "don't worry about smuggling Bibles, I will do that. You preach the gospel." Now he does not worry about concealing God's word when he travels. I also heard numerous stories about missionaries who had ended up in impossible situations, having no money with large taxes or bills, and how God had provided for them countless times, sometimes through a random person who they had never met sending them money on a 'whim' (or possibly as an act of obedience to God), and how God had provided financially like this for years.

All of these stories sounded wild to me, and as I thought about these men, I noticed a trend: all these men seemed to be very dependent on God for how they lived. There was no concern in them about losing their jobs, being poor, being ridiculed, or even being killed when they were focused around proclaiming the gospel (and at least one man I talked to had experienced all of these in some form or another). They did not fear what the world might do to them, or what the day might bring, because they trusted in One who was with them in all of these things. They lived through the Spirit. They were dependent.

What am I getting at? Well, I think that I have been learning both obedience and dependence are integral parts of the Christian life. Yet this life is impossible without wrestling with what Wes had asked us in our gospel's class almost four years ago: "we are told to take up our cross and follow Jesus, but what does it mean for us to follow someone who is going to die?" We too need to die. C.S. Lewis, in "Mere Christianity" puts it this way:

Christ says, "give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work, I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self [with morality], but to kill it. No half measures are any good.... I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you myself: my own will shall become yours."

He continues on from here to claim that "this is the whole of Christianity, nothing else." This is where I am right now, standing at the ultimatum of life. Putting myself to death, crucifying myself with Christ, means giving up things that I so dearly find my identity in. Things like my pride, in which I can assure myself that I am smart or funny or a moral person or a good friend, or my lusts, in which I long after what I do not possess, or my anger, which I can foster when things don't go my way. The call to follow Christ requires that we die and let Christ make us new. A kingdom cannot stand divided, and I certainly cannot serve Christ while still serving my passions. Yet presently I still cling to these things. I feel torn between what I know is right and true and good, and this life which I have grown so comfortable in. I need boldness to commit to this call of picking up my cross and following Christ.

Thanks for reading guys, I miss you and love you all dearly.

Logan