“The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn't cool.” Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
What do you believe in? What would you die for? It's a heavy heavy question and heavy heavy questions aren't really all that fun to answer if you don't like to think. Thinking takes practice. Thinking takes patience. Thinking requires getting rid of distractions and just... thinking. Believe it or not, we have to learn how to think. People who think a lot seem to be a bit more serious and even slightly more awkward than people who don't. But we need to think and we fail to think.
Organize your thoughts for a moment. What do you you believe in? Do you believe that you are alive? Do you believe that what is happening around you is actually happening and that your current surroundings actually exist? Can you prove it?
What if your life is actually happening and there are two story lines occurring around you all the time? One story line is what you are living in day-to-day. That includes waking up, brushing your teeth, eating breakfast, going to work, picking the kids up from school, studying for an exam. Then there is another deeper thread that is connecting humanity together. This one is even more important because it has eternal consequences. Either you believe that these two story lines exist or you don't. I'm not going to try and convince you of either.
What I want us to think through together is the "what if?" What if there is a deeper story-line that has eternal consequences? What if that underlying deeper story-line is intricately interwoven into the day-to-day happenings of your life? What if the eternal implications were life and death, a life everlasting in relationship with a creator God who loves you more than you can ever imagine or a life of everlasting in separation from that creator God who loves you more than you can ever imagine?
Again, my point isn't to prove to you that this is the truth. I want you to consider the implications if this is the truth.
So let's just say that the deeper story-line is interwoven with your day to day tedium like washing dishes, studying for your test, picking out the right shoes for you outfit today. We have to live life in the tedium, it's crucial otherwise we'd be naked and hungry. And it's easy to ignore the deeper story-line in our lives. I'd venture to guess that most of us do. There are a ton of people out there who would like to sell you their version of a deeper story-line whether it has to do with new-age philosophy, eastern religious thought, Islam, Christianity or secularism (which one might argue has no deeper story-line). People are living and dying every day for these deeper story-lines while we go on living comfortably either ignoring them altogether or broaching them halfheartedly.
It's the halfhearted pursuit that concerns me the most. When we know that there is something so incredibly important that our eternity and, more importantly, the eternity of others depends on how it plays out but only pursue living out that story with the slightest modicum of intentionality, we are in essence defeating ourselves and committing a crime against our own moral standard.
Let me explain. There is s disease that is killing people throughout the world. You and a handful of others know what the cure is for that disease and have the knowledge to save humanity. Some people say that there is no cure, some say that there is no disease, some say that their cure is the real one and your cure wont work, but for argument's sake, let's say that you do actually have a very real cure for a very real disease. You have some options with what you do with it. You can depend on others to pass on the knowledge/cure. You can withhold the knowledge/cure because you don't want people to think you are crazy for saying you have it. You can occasionally tell a few chosen people over the course of your lifetime about the knowledge/cure or you can make a choice to live to see as many people cured as possible. Which would be the most moral choice?
The moral choice is obviously to get knowledge of the cure out to as many people as possible, even making it part of your life's mission. That is the sense of urgency that Christians should be living with everyday. We don't, or at least most of us don't, and that should bother us. So why don't we treat the Gospel with the same sort of urgency? I'm sure that we can come up with several reasons if we were to sit down and brain storm.
Allow me to submit some of my ponderings: Part of the problem is that it's a weighty topic to give much thought to. It burdens our hearts for people in a way that breaks down certain protective barriers that we have spent our entire lives fortifying. We don't know how people will react. We are afraid of what a message of such urgency would do to our friendships, families, work environments and even our churches. It's not cool to carry around something to heavy and burdensome because once it is shared there is no taking it back and maintaining any sort of ethical consistency with our lives.
We need this sense of urgency in our churches, and frankly, folks, I don't see it. As a matter of fact, the church of America is awash with comfortably neutered Christians who are hard chargers for the gospel at church and maybe even in Bible study but away from church, how do they express the love and life giving truth of the Gospel message?
I'm no less guilty of this than anyone else, but let's pray this together, that God renews a sense of urgency in our hearts to reach out, touch lives and hearts, in grace and the love of Jesus Christ. Let's pray that our hearts are broken for the lost and that we would become willing vehicles of the Holy Spirit to reveal the underlying story-line that unites all of humanity.
