Do the Word

Pastors are only too willing to rail against performance-based Christianity as a serious ailment afflicting large numbers of Christians these days. But that railing is actually quite woefully off the rails.

By performance-based Christianity I mean a Christian life that apparently, according to these preacherly protestations, causes a person to be ground down into nothingness by excessive attempts to serve the Lord in a mistaken effort to earn his favor.

The problem is that when you frame the problem this way, the solution comes out sounding something like this: “I had to learn to stop doing and just start being. I had to learn how to just accept God’s love and know that there was nothing God was requiring of me in return other than to believe and trust in his grace. There is nothing I can do to earn his favor, and when I try to earn his favor it is an insult to the sacrifice of his son for me.”

This sounds good, but on closer examination such a solution is actually no solution at all. The being/doing dichotomy is a Buddhist concept, not a Christian one. So while “I switched from doing to being” sounds holy enough, unless your doing-to-being enlightenment entails you heading off to a mountain monastery for round the clock meditation under a vow of silence, you actually do still have about the same amount of doing in your life, even after your doing-to-being aha moment. You’re just choosing to do different things.

And therein is the rub.

The more honest, accurate way to express the “doing to being” transformation touted by many pastors is: “I stopped doing (or reduced the amount of time I devoted to doing, or decreased the seriousness which I associated with doing) discipleship activities that I did not enjoy or wasn’t very successful at.” Suddenly, daily Scripture reading becomes slavery to the law. Refraining from eating a second muffin becomes rank legalism. Confessing your sin to God and your spouse when you masturbate becomes aspiring to the righteousness of the Pharisees.

In this doing-to-being paradigm, when you sin you can actually feel quite good about it. It proves the pastor right: You are no Jesus. You’re the mess-up, not the Messiah. Jesus loves that role, pastor says, and you should, too.

But that overlooks one very central truth of Scripture that can be found on virtually every page of the Old and New Testament:

Enduring Happiness is Only Possible If You Live According to the Gospel.

Enduring happiness, in other words, comes from hearing and doing the Word.

So am I advocating that you “jump back on the performance treadmill”? By no means. But I am advocating that you discard this nonsense, non-Christian talk that opposes being and doing and instead trust—really trust—that everyone who hears the words of Jesus and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Notice that there’s no caution or caveat here from Jesus about performance fatigue. The reason why is that the dichotomy we must attend to is not doing-versus-being but rather leading-versus-following.

Do you know what a performance-based Christian life really is? It’s a life where we attempt to lead, rather than follow, Christ. It’s a life where we regularly attempt to do the Word without first having heard it. If we let Christ lead, and if we hear his Word, we will recognize that he, not us, has already prepared good works in advance for us to do. Some of those works are just plain fun. Others are arduous or boring or tedious. But all have the effect of growing us into his fullness.

And that’s why his yoke is easy and his burden light: It’s not because a sloppy, sinful path leads to eternal life. (Sin, after all, means not trusting him to provide a way to overcome temptation.) Instead, it’s because his spirit is the one doing the heavy lifting. Like the disciples distributing loaves of bread that Jesus multiplied, our task is not to bake the bread but simply to share with others the loaves-and-fishes whole body grace and goodness and lovingkindness we receive daily from our master’s hand.

When we do that (when, in other words, we live according to the gospel), we discover that doing the Word is a means of grace—one more way we come to know, experience, and be blessed by God’s character—not be fatigued by it.

The gospel is the announcement of the rule and reign of Christ in three equally important and essential acts:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Modern gospel formulations typically stress the first act and either go soft or quiet or queasy on the latter two. They either fail to mention those two acts altogether (i.e., “Christ died for your sins, and if you believe that, your afterlife will go down much more smoothly”) or  they subvert them to the first act (i.e., “Christ died for your sins; his resurrection proves it; and he’s gonna come back and be jolly decent to you if you believe it”).

But the latter two proclamations are far more than just struts and supports for the first. They are essential elements of the good news in their own right. When we fail to give them equal emphasis to the first in our evangelism, we end up with misshapen Christians living out a misshapen Christianity.

• “Christ is risen” reminds us that all power in heaven and on earth has been given to him. We can be set free from the sins that entangle us, not just forgiven for our entanglement. And we can move and act boldly without fear of those who can harm the body. It is this present earth, not only a future heaven, that Christ holds in his hands.
• “Christ will come again” reminds us that the remainder of our lives is to be devoted to preparing for his return. His return influences whether we marry, what job we do, how we do it, the kind of holy lives we live, and the content of the conversations we have. The wellspring of action for the Christian is not “I’m forgiven” but rather “Behold! He is coming soon!”
• Leave out or subvert the proclamation of Christ’s present reign and you get forgiven but woefully anemic Christians who continue to submit their bodies to sin even as they assure themselves that this is simply proof of God’s amazing grace that we need do nothing to earn our salvation.
• Leave out or subvert the proclamation of Christ’s return and you get Christians whose earthly hopes, dreams, goals and visions are virtually indistinguishable from their non-Christian counterparts. Worse, you get Christians who are ill-prepared for the acceleration of persecution that the Scriptures warn will attend the coming of the end of the present age.

That is why Paul insists in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 that the gospel is always to be proclaimed “according to the Scriptures.” Absent a robust, tripartite proclamation that puts equal emphasis on each 1/3rd of the gospel–“Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again”–we leave even those who receive our truncated message trapped until death as forgiven sinners in an endless evil age.

In a guest column for the Christian Post cleverly titled Cheap Law,  Tullian Tchividjian warns:

In Matthew 5, Jesus shows unambiguously that the greatest obstacle to getting the gospel is not “cheap grace” but “cheap law” – the idea that God accepts anything less than the perfect righteousness of Jesus…

But, there are some who seek to escape their need for grace and deceive us by lowering the cost of God’s righteousness. They preach a cheap law that sells indulgences to those who pay with the appearance of sanctification.

Problem is, Tchividjian’s stern rebuke ultimately convicts a null set. His concern is for those who, having received salvation solely as the gift of God, are tempted to “trust in some personal display of good fruit to save [their] seat.” He refers to such individuals as “self-sanctifying little sovereigns” who “let the flesh pervert sanctification into the process of needing grace less and less.”

Here, though, a study of the Scriptures indicates that Tchividjian’s concern is misplaced. When Paul, for example, castigates the Galatians for “turning back to those weak and miserable forces” (Galatians 4:9), he portrays this not as a sanctification problem but rather as a justification problem, i.e., they didn’t embrace the gospel of grace in the first place, or they betrayed and abandoned the gospel because they failed to understand it. Witness his passionate exclamation in Galatians 4:19, “My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…”

Translation: When you see someone misunderstanding and manhandling their sanctification, you actually have a justification problem–a “first principles” issue. The problem isn’t that cheap law has crept in to bespoil sanctification. It’s that (Calvinist version) grace never really supplanted sin in the first place or (Arminian version) somebody’s been backsliding. So it’s back to childbirth we go.

And that’s why Tchividjian ultimately succeeds in binding the straw man, not the strong man. Ask yourself: Have you ever met anyone who really embraced and understood and vibrantly lived the justifying gospel according to the Scriptures who viewed sanctification as a process of divesting himself of the need for grace? Talk to such a person and it will quickly become apparent to you both that he failed to fully grasp or put into practice or preserve what you taught him about salvation, and you’d best be bent over double in childbirth on his behalf until Christ is actually and genuinely formed in him.

But all of this is phrased negatively (which, in my view, is one of the problems with Tchividjian’s post and other posts of this type). Let’s flip it around positively and call it “The Justification/Sanctification Postulate”:

When justification by grace occurs in response to a proclamation of the gospel according to the Scriptures, a healthy and biblical practice of sanctification by grace will flow as a matter of course from a healthy and biblical practice of  justification by grace.

When I was saved in my late teens, I turned to the person who had just led me through the sinner’s prayer and asked, “So what do I do now?” My guide responded (as Tchividjian does here), “Well, that’s the great thing: You don’t need to do anything.”

That response is true, but trivially so. If I had been asking, “What do I need to do now to maintain my salvation?”, the guide’s response would have been brilliant. But that is not what I was asking. I fully understood that I did not now need to earn what ninety seconds earlier I had clearly received as a gift. What I was asking was, “Now that I have given my life to Christ, how then do I live?”

In response to that question, the guide was seriously unhelpful. I wasn’t seeking to “be a replacement for his Beloved Son,” in Tchividjian’s terminology. Instead, I was simply taking seriously the gift of new life I had just received and wanting to live by it.

Want to avoid an errant practice of sanctification? Then avoid imparting an errant or incomplete understanding of justification. That’s the strong man that really does need to be bound: many churches today don’t know how to proclaim the gospel according to the Scriptures. They conflate the gospel with a testimony, a plan of salvation, or a fire insurance policy, or they prize justification over sanctification, viewing one as necessary and the other as optional. They do not know or embrace or place equal emphasis on each elements of the tripartite formula:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

This month we’ll be talking about proclaiming the gospel according to the Scriptures. In so doing we’ll be removing the bifurcation too often placed between justification and sanctification. That they are distinct theological processes is undeniable. That you can get one right and yet wildly mess up the other is one of the grave errors of our modern church age.