Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Reader's Choice Award Winner "Why doesn't the Christian life work like I thought it would?" While we often start with good intentions, it feels like real transformation is elusive at best, and maybe even impossible. We deeply want to live in the freedom that Christ offers, but we are acutely aware of the gap between a transformed life and our reality. Having the Mind of Christ tackles the issues of lasting life change. When we feel some kind of inspiration or need to seek change in our lives, we start with behaviors: new to-dos, tactics, techniques, or spiritual disciplines that we hope will bring about the transformation we desire. While these behavioral changes can bear good results, they just as often fail to produce the lasting change we deeply desire. That's because transformation requires more than a change in practice – it requires a change in paradigm. Pastors Matt Tebbe and Ben Sternke share eight axioms that help reframe the way that we see God, ourselves, and others. By seeing through new lenses, we can open ourselves to the transformational change that God wants for our lives.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 323
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
To all the people who field-tested
and shaped these axioms in Gravity Leadership cohorts
and local discipleship groups: this book is for you.
CONTENTS
MATT’S STORY
I remember the moment I realized I couldn’t ignore my doubts and fears about my Christian faith any longer. I was seconds away from walking to the pulpit to preach as a pastor at a large church. As the time approached for me to preach, I felt more and more anxiety about whether I wanted to be a Christian anymore. It feels scandalous even to write that phrase at the beginning of a book about the Christian life! That morning these questions curled around the corners of my awareness and sought to set up shop in my heart: Am I still a Christian? Do I still believe the things I’m about to preach today? Do I even want to do all this anymore?
I did my best to muddle through my sermon that Sunday, while part of my mind played defense against questions and doubts. These concerns weren’t new for me. For a long time, I’d been discontent, restless, and increasingly uneasy, as the way I thought about and practiced my Christian faith slowly stopped working for me. My strategy up until that point was to deny that anything was wrong, push away the questions in my mind, and distract myself from my fear and doubt. I thought that by doing the work of God—distancing myself from my questions and restlessness with Christian activities—everything would be okay.
But by God’s grace something shifted and broke loose that Sunday. I got through the sermon, shook hands and smiled with congregants, traveled home for lunch afterward, and collapsed on the couch. As I stared at a football game on TV, I admitted to myself that I can’t do this anymore—something has to change because I cannot continue on like this.
When I was twelve years old, I made a promise with myself, a commitment that emerged from watching adults go through life listless and miserable in their jobs. If I ever find myself not enjoying what I’m doing, I promise that I will stop doing it! Seems like a reasonable deal for one to make with oneself, but in that moment on my couch I realized how much was at stake: If I face these doubts and stop avoiding this restlessness, will I have any faith left on the other side? If I stop pretending in order to hold everything together, will there be anything of that everything left?
BEN’S STORY
Like Matt, I had to wrestle with my share of internal doubts and questions about faith while serving as a pastor. But what really disoriented me was seeing the hypocrisy and lack of humility of those who were leading and mentoring me in faith and ministry. There was the youth pastor whose ministry changed my life, who later abandoned his wife and kids to run off with a teenage girl half his age. There was the pastor who preached against gossip but in staff meetings would slander anyone who challenged or disagreed with him. There was the ministry leader who had built an impressive organization that seemed to be helping many churches; behind the scenes he was controlling, arrogant, obsessed with his own image and legacy, and willing to lie at the drop of a hat to preserve his reputation as a godly leader. I’m grieved that my participation with and support of these leaders has likely caused harm to people; but when I was working with these leaders, I couldn’t see this clearly. Is this just how it is in leadership? I wondered. Am I being naive to think we should be held to a higher standard of integrity? Is this just “how the sausage is made,” and I need to sear my conscience and get used to it?
In these and other ways, we have been facing this phenomenon some call deconstruction for the better part of twenty years. Deconstruction might not be the perfect metaphor for this process, but it names a very real and painful experience of disorientation and disillusionment that more and more Christians seem to experience. We hear statements like these a lot:
“The things that go along with being a Christian in the United States—the culture, politics, and entertainment—didn’t used to bother me, but now they do.”
“When I first became a Christian, I couldn’t get enough of church; now, it’s hard for me to make myself go.”
“Sayings that used to ring true and bring comfort now seem trite and flimsy.”
“I used to get so much benefit out of prayer and reading Scripture; now, when I pray and read I have old memories of hurt and betrayal that come to mind. Spiritual disciplines are triggering for me, and I don’t know how to be close to God anymore.”
However, in facing these sorts of questions, Matt and I haven’t lost our Christian faith. In fact, we are more committed to Jesus than ever before. When everything else failed us, we came back to the one thing we knew: we wanted to be like Jesus when we grew up. And so, we decided to relearn, again and again, what it meant to be a Christian. This book is the fruit of over twenty years of unlearning and relearning from Jesus how to be a Christian. We are still unlearning and relearning as we go. But the fruit of our twenty years of wrestling is that we now have a way of reconstructing Christian faith as an agile, here and now, moment-by-moment awareness of God in everyday life, centered in the love of Jesus Christ. We want to share with you the shape of this ongoing reconstruction of faith.
OF PARADIGMS AND PRACTICES
The process of reconstruction can take many forms. But for us—and for the people we’ve worked with in discipleship and coaching—there has been a central component of reconstruction that undergirds everything else. It has to do with how we see, rather than what we do. It’s about our vision before it’s about our action. We need a new paradigm, not just new practices.
Often, when we want to change our lives, we start with behaviors: new to-dos, tactics, techniques, or spiritual disciplines that we hope will bring about the transformation we desire. The doctor tells me that my cholesterol levels are too high, so I start a diet and exercise regimen to lose some weight. I realize my bad temper is ruining my closest relationships, so I enroll in an anger management class. I ask someone whose character I admire about their spiritual rhythms, and I start implementing them in my life. It’s common sense that if we notice a problem, we ought to do something to fix it, and we often carry this general assumption into our faith as disciples of Jesus. We think it’s mainly a matter of adding “good” practices to our lives (prayer, quiet times, Bible study and meditation, silence, solitude, and so on) that will help us build or reconstruct our faith.
But while this impulse to jump right into practices often does bear good fruit in our lives, it just as often does not. After a few days or weeks of new behaviors, the excitement wears off, our energy wanes, and we find ourselves back where we were before. Except now we feel more discouraged than we were before, because the new tactics didn’t work. What once felt energizing to us now feels like a burden, and we wonder if transformation is really possible. What is going on in these situations when our new behaviors are hard to maintain, when we lose our willingness to stick with change?
There’s something at work under the surface of our lives that often thwarts our best attempts at reconstructing our faith: the hidden assumptions we have about who God is, who we are, and how life works. These hidden assumptions operate silently in our imaginations, hidden from conscious awareness, affecting why and how we engage in our well-intentioned practices, as well as the results we expect from them. In other words, one of the main reasons we so often fail in our efforts to adopt new practices is that we are still carrying around an old paradigm of reality that silently and invisibly works against us. A paradigm is a set of assumptions, concepts, and values that forms a way of seeing reality. Paradigms are stories, scripts, and constructs that determine how we understand and experience life. We all have a way of viewing the world that functions as a lens through which certain thoughts and actions seem obvious and others seem strange or impossible or are filtered out entirely. When we seek to implement new practices, then, many of us find that they don’t do the work we want them to do because our old paradigms remain in place. In some cases, the new practices may do the opposite of what we hoped they would, because of the old paradigms.
PARADIGMS AS CORRECTIVE LENSES
One of the main reasons we so often fail in our efforts to adopt new practices is that we are still carrying around an old paradigm of reality that silently and invisibly works against us.
This is a thorny problem because our paradigms are notoriously difficult to see, and this is where the metaphor of glasses and vision can do some good work for us. One of our friends told us the story of when he was in fifth grade, sitting in the back row of his class, and his teacher noticed he was squinting all the time to see what was happening in the front of the classroom. He didn’t even realize he was squinting. The day he got his first pair of glasses he was amazed. The whole day he kept lowering and raising his new glasses over his line of vision, comparing what the world had always looked like before with what the world looked like now with new lenses. “Everything was so sharp,” he said, “and colors so bold! It was wild. This world was right in front of me the whole time and I didn’t know it.”
Our glasses don’t change anything about the world, they simply allow us to see the world more clearly. Corrective lenses give us visual access to the stuff that’s right in front of us, so we can move through the world without stumbling over ourselves or missing important things. As our eyes grow and mature, it’s normal to go back to the eye doctor to test our vision and find out what’s changed (“Which is clearer, number one or number two?”), and to get a new pair of glasses. There’s a lot at stake in getting these eye prescriptions right. Our safety, health, vocational opportunities, and relationships are all profoundly affected by our ability to clearly see the world around us. A good pair of glasses allows us to see the other vehicles on the road we’re driving on, the words on the page of the book we’re reading, and the faces of loved ones across the room. Having the right pair of lenses makes all the difference in our experience of the world.
Most of our paradigms are like a good pair of glasses: the lens is not supposed to obstruct vision by drawing attention to itself. (If you’ve ever had a really dirty pair of glasses you’ll know what we’re talking about here!) A good paradigm, like a good pair of glasses, permits one to look through it rather than at it. Good paradigms give us access to the world by remaining invisible while at the same time shaping, framing, and “storying” everything we’re looking at. Because of this, we’re not normally aware of how our paradigm shapes the way we see reality. Most of us, especially those who live as part of a majority culture, must work really hard to see what we look through.
We (Ben and Matt) are both big fans of science fiction; some of our favorite books and films are from this genre. When done well, a science fiction story helps us “try on” a new paradigm to see our existing world in a new way. It also, then, enables us to name and describe our current dominant paradigm and assess the work it’s doing in our lives. In the 2016 film Arrival, Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks, who is trying to communicate with mysterious alien life forms that have appeared on earth. (Spoiler alert!) After she learns their language, it changes the way she experiences time to such a degree that she can see into the future. The alien language isn’t just new content that Louise knows now, it has become a new paradigm that allows her to see time in an entirely new way, from a totally new angle. It’s not only new information, but also new perception: a new way of seeing.
NOT JUST LOOKING THROUGH OUR GLASSES, BUT LOOKING AT OUR GLASSES
The truth is that we’re all wearing paradigm glasses of one kind or another. We all see the world not as it is, but from our own perspective. We are finite, embodied beings with specific histories, relationships, knowledge, and social locations. None of us see the world objectively because, by definition, we see the world from one place (social, historical, geographical, and so on). Nobody sees anything from everywhere (we’re not omnipresent, after all!); everyone sees only from somewhere. We see whatever we see from wherever we are. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” as the old maxim says.1 This doesn’t mean we don’t believe in truth, or that there’s no such thing as reality. It just means we all must practice a measure of humility, realizing that none of us is “just seeing it like it is,” and that we all have lenses through which we see everything. We are constantly interpreting the ongoing experience of our lives, making meaning, fitting events into categories and stories that make sense to us, filtering out everything that doesn’t fit. This happens all the time, mostly unconsciously, every moment of every day.
Now here’s why this paradigm stuff is so important: we are using paradigms to access our Christian faith as well. When we read the Bible, for instance, we do so through a lens and from a particular perspective. When we attend worship services, we do so with unspoken assumptions about why we are there and what is happening. When we engage in the practices of spiritual transformation, we do so from within a paradigm that makes sense of what we’re doing.
The deconstruction process we mentioned earlier often boils down to a paradigm crisis: long-held stories and assumptions about God and the world no longer work. For the authors, this was at first frightening and disorienting; it’s scary when things that used to be clear are now blurry. But this caused us to back up and look at our paradigms: What hidden stories and assumptions about God were we carrying around? Painfully, we discovered that many of the lenses we had been using were deficient: they weren’t from the Scriptures or Jesus but had been constructed by our experiences in our Western culture.
When everything unraveled years ago, the process of reconstruction began with naming our lenses, being curious about why we had them, noticing what work they did for us, and bringing them to Jesus to see if he had anything to say about them. This is how crisis turned into growth for us, and this is how we continue to make faith-growing paradigm shifts even today. To undergo a paradigm shift, then, is to:
1.Realize that we’re wearing glasses (not just “seeing the world as it is”).
2.Notice the ways our glasses shape our perception of reality.
3.Appreciate how other people (past and present) see the same world through different lenses.
4.Be curious about the limitations of these lenses and to what degree our current lens is true or helpful or faithful.
5.Experiment with other lenses that may help us see from a different perspective that could bring more clarity, so we can better navigate the world as people of faith.
Deconstruction can seem scary, but we’ve found it can also be an indicator of faithfulness and an opportunity for growth. So if you find yourself experiencing the unraveling of faith, or apathy and disorientation, or frustration and fear, you’re in good company: this was a main experience of Jesus’ disciples as they went through the paradigm-shifting journey of following him, and it’s been the experience of many other Christians since then, including us. The good news is that what you’re looking for really is right in front of you! All that’s missing is a way to access it. You just need a new pair of glasses. Our goal in this book is to help you begin to see your current paradigm and open yourself up to the possibility of “trying on” a new one. We’ve found that before new practices can be effectively implemented, we must encounter and embrace a new paradigm of reality, rooted in the gospel of the kingdom of God, that makes those practices sensible and doable (“a reasonable act of worship” as the apostle Paul called it), and thus makes possible a truly transformed and transforming life. In other words, we’re going to strip our spiritual house down to the studs for a remodel.
HAVING THE MIND OF CHRIST
Where does one turn to discover such a paradigm? Well, Jesus. This is the obvious answer, of course (what did you expect from a couple pastors?), but it really is the best Christian answer to most questions. Those of us who grew up going to Sunday school might remember that if the teacher asked a question and you didn’t know the answer, “Jesus” was correct a large percentage of the time.
When our lives were unraveling and our faith paradigm stopped working, we looked to Jesus for new lenses to aid the reconstruction of our faith. We returned to the Gospels, paying attention to not only the words of Jesus, but also his actions, to discern underneath all of it the paradigm of Jesus. We were helped in this process by reading ancient and modern writers who looked at Jesus through different cultural lenses than we do: the early church mothers and fathers, Black pastors and theologians, feminist and womanist Christians, and Latino/a scholars. And what we found was incongruence! Our default paradigm conflicted with those of Jesus. We had made assumptions about the world, other people, and God that Jesus didn’t make. But what if we named and tried on the paradigm of Jesus like a new pair of glasses?
This is how we have the mind of Christ—operating with his paradigm and assumptions in the world.
Almost a decade later we can attest that learning to see how Jesus sees has been transformational. And in this book, we will begin to frame how Jesus saw and experienced the world; we want to see God and the world like Jesus does. This empowers our participation in God’s life, and our ability to grow in love. This is how we have the mind of Christ—operating with his paradigm and assumptions in the world—and it unlocks our capacity to be steadily transformed into the Christlike love of God by the power of the Spirit. To put it conversely, if we have paradigms that differ from Jesus’ we won’t be able to have the mind of Christ and we’ll misunderstand what he’s doing and misapply his teaching.
We don’t uncover the paradigm of Jesus by locking ourselves in a library and scouring the Gospels for tidbits of information we hadn’t noticed before. Why? Because we’re still reading the Gospels through our old paradigms—so what we see, and what we can’t see, and how we see will be determined by the lens we’re looking through. In tandem with paying attention to the way Jesus saw the world, we must also become more aware of our own lenses and how they may be aligned or misaligned with the paradigm Jesus shows us. We must learn to pay attention not just to what we see but to how we see. This can be hard to learn to do, but we’ve observed over and over that hard work in this pays off. Those who want to see how they see will discover that it is possible.
JESUS DEALS WITH PARADIGMS IN THE GOSPELS
This work we are inviting you into happens frequently in the ministry of Jesus. On every page of the Gospels, Jesus acts in ways that seem odd or puzzling to those around him:
He doesn’t set up revival tents to capitalize on his sudden popularity in Capernaum. Instead, he quietly leaves town the next morning while everyone is frantically looking for him (Mark 1:35-39).
He heals people and then tells them not to say anything to anyone about the miracle (Mark 1:40-45).
He tells the disciples somewhat nonchalantly that they’ll do greater things than he did, and that they can have anything they ask for in prayer (John 14:12-14).
He talks about dying instead of winning (Matthew 16:21-23).
He won’t let his disciples violently resist his unjust arrest (Luke 22:47-53).
He won’t defend himself in front of clearly false accusations by jealous, vindictive leaders (Luke 23:1-11).
He claims the rich will have a very hard time entering the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 19:23-26).
He tells parables designed to confuse people and calls it a day’s work (Matthew 13:13-15, 34).
Everyone who encountered Jesus misunderstood him, not because they were stupid, but because he operated from a different paradigm than they did.
People are consistently confused by Jesus, missing the point, thinking he’s saying one thing when he’s actually saying another. This is what happens when old paradigms no longer work, when old wineskins can’t hold the new wine and burst (Mark 2:21-22). And Jesus doesn’t seem to try to avoid this; rather, he purposely instigates it! Jesus seems to think that catalyzing a paradigm crisis is necessary if people are going to be saved and find life in God’s kingdom. In almost every story we have of Jesus’ life and teaching in the Gospels, we see people’s preconceived notions about how the world works, who God is, and the purpose of humankind being challenged. We see this in the response of the disciples, the crowds, and the religious leaders. Everyone who encountered Jesus misunderstood him to some degree, not because they were stupid, but because he operated from a different paradigm than they did.
Jesus repeatedly confronts and opposes the paradigms that are insufficient for understanding who he is, what he’s saying, and what he’s doing. In calling people to repentance, then, Jesus wasn’t inviting people to just change what they thought but how they thought as well. The call to repentance was Jesus’ invitation for others to examine their paradigms so they could see reality in a whole new way. This was especially true of those with status and power: the fundamental problem wasn’t that they were sinful or stupid, it was that they were certain they were seeing clearly and had nothing to learn. They were rigidly committed to the way they saw the world, unwilling to give up control of their version of reality. It’s those who refused to examine their paradigms who ended up convinced that killing Jesus was a faithful and pious decision.
HOW THIS NEW PARADIGM EMERGED FOR US
Today we have the same invitation: will we let the words and actions of Jesus disrupt our patterns of seeing? Those who accept this invitation find themselves on the threshold of a lifetime of beautiful growth in holiness; those who reject this reality double-down on a particular paradigm that limits their vision and growth in the kingdom of God. The choice is between familiarity and disorientation, between certainty and unlearning, between staying the same and changing. It can be terrifying to realize this is our choice.
Reckoning with our old paradigms and relearning from Jesus how to see anew has been long, slow work, and the “Jesus paradigm” outlined in this book comes out of decades of ministry, failure, repentance, and growth. Initially, in our pastoral work of making disciples in the local church, as well as our coaching work of training leaders, we mainly focused on tools that helped people embrace new practices and tactics of discipleship and leadership. But we kept bumping up against a problem: people experienced vastly different results from using the same tools and doing the same practices. Some people were seeing their lives change dramatically, deeply transformed in love, but others remained spiritually as they were. As we pondered the reasons for this with those we were leading, we found that a multitude of Christians were having the same questions, coming to the same frustrations, realizing the limitations of how they framed the Christian life. They all had to do with unspoken, assumed assumptions—paradigms—about who God is, who we are, and what reality is like.
So we decided to name the new assumptions that had helped us and crafted little “experiments of trust,” where we sought to act as if it were true that, for example, the Christian life really was all about love, that God was simply present and at work in every situation, and that there was no need to convince God to “show up” with a passionate, heartfelt prayer. Instead of looking for evidence of God’s presence, what if I just assumed God’s presence and acted accordingly? And what if God wasn’t mad or disappointed with me, but instead was extending mercy and compassion in every moment? How would I behave if I really believed that? And what if it was okay for me to be a mess with God because God would meet me in whatever state I was in? And what if it was possible to live in this way and grow into Christlikeness by taking small, embodied steps of trust, allowing God to transform me from the inside out?
In this way we found that the paradigm operating under the surface of our actions was what made all the difference. We discovered that naming these paradigm shifts as directly as we could was a jarring and powerful way to help people begin the process of making lasting, transformational changes in their lives.
LANGUAGE AS A LENS
The way we will try on these new glasses is through language: simple, easy-to-remember phrases that carry the new paradigm like genetic material in a cell. Naming this new paradigm is crucial: without language that names the reality, we struggle to see that reality. For example, no ancient language had a distinct word for the color we now call blue. The evidence suggests that without a specific word for the color blue, ancient peoples may have not been able to readily identify it and distinguish it from other colors.
Researcher Jules Davidoff put this to the test by going to the Himba tribe in Namibia, who have no word for “blue” in their language.2 While Western languages have eleven color categories (that is, green, blue, yellow, red, and so on), the Himbas only have five color categories. Davidoff found that the ways colors are organized in our languages influences the way we perceive colors. His findings demonstrate that the Himbas had difficulty distinguishing between green and blue. But people from cultures with a word for “blue” can easily spot the difference. Also, because of the way colors are organized in their language, the Himbas have more words for shades of green than we do, and thus they are more easily able to distinguish between two shades of green that look very similar to Western eyes.3
When something is given a name, we are able to see it. Like a good pair of glasses, language helps us see and work with what’s right in front of us. New language enables us to name experiences we are already having but couldn’t see clearly before, just like ancient peoples and the Himbas couldn’t readily identify the color blue when they were looking straight at it. Language can give us access to realities hidden from us in plain sight.
EIGHT AXIOMS FOR A NEW PARADIGM
This book presents the new paradigm as eight axioms. An axiom is a self-evident truth, a universally accepted principle that is assumed, upon which one can act or argue. Someone once asked us if these should really be called axioms, since he was wrestling with whether some of them were true or not (and thus they aren’t all “universally” accepted truths). The point in naming these as axioms is that we believe that Jesus operated in these paradigms. They seem to be axiomatic to him. And the way we test them is to try them out as axiomatic for ourselves. What would happen if we began to access reality from the same paradigms as Jesus? Would we see things differently? Would we see things we couldn’t see before? Would we find things to be true that we wouldn’t have otherwise? We think so.
These eight axioms aren’t meant to be a perfect, exhaustive articulation of everything that needs to be said about God and the world for everyone for all time. The list is very much a “living document,” that went through several iterations as we developed it. In fact, in the process of writing this book, we added an entirely new axiom that we realized we needed to name! (The new axiom is Axiom 7: God’s love always reckons with power.)
Additionally, we are writing as white, Christian men born and raised in the relative affluence of late modernity in the United States. We own that the axioms that seem important to us are conditioned in part by our social location and life experience. As you read, notice the degree to which your social location and background are different from ours. Your existing lenses and paradigms will be distinct, and so the shift God is inviting you to make may be particular to you. As you read, notice which axioms resonate the most with you. What is missing that we can’t see? What should be added or redacted for you or for your context? How is your starting point different—and how does that change what you’re able to access about how Jesus sees the world?
Finally, as we continue to follow Jesus and learn from him, no doubt the axioms that need to be named will grow and change. This is the nature of a paradigm shift; it isn’t a one-time experience with a defined time frame and parameters. It’s an ongoing, often surprising journey that feels more like a deepening spiral than completing a task on a to-do list.
So, with those caveats, here are the eight axioms for a new paradigm—eight key assumptions about our world and life with God that we learned from Jesus and that can change everything for us:
1.God is love, so it’s all about love.
2.God is always present and at work.
3.God is just like Jesus.
4.God meets us in our messy reality.
5.God cares about (all of) it more than we do.
6.God does the same work through us and in us.
7.God’s love always reckons with power.
8.God transforms us through embodied participation.
These eight axioms are not isolated, self-contained concepts, but rather catalytic, mutually reinforcing, self-replicating “genes” that can spread a new paradigm throughout a culture, person by person, through repetitive use. We’ve found that these things need to be named as axiomatic, because even though most of us would mark them as the “right answer” on a test, most of us don’t live our lives as if they were true. So, as you read, there will be suggestions called experiments of trust at the end of each chapter to help you try on this new paradigm. Pay attention to what you notice from this new way of seeing.
One more note before we dive in: as you read, be open to being surprised, confused, bewildered, and even frustrated, sad, or angry. The experiments of trust are designed to help you move toward whatever you are experiencing and find God there. If you sense disorientation or confusion, take heart, and stay present to those unpleasant emotions: Jesus often provoked these kinds of reactions in those who listened to him and followed him, so it’s all very normal in a life of discipleship. You can trust that God is present with you in the midst of those reactions, and God is working to grow your capacity to receive and give love.
If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
I(MATT) LIVED THE FIRST FIFTEEN YEARS of my Christian life without taking love seriously. I mean, of course I thought love was great, as far as it goes, but when it came down to it I was much more interested in angelic tongues and gifts of prophesy and understanding mysteries and powerful displays of faith and pious sacrifices of valor than I was in love. Knowledge and power are impressive, get things done, make people money, and gather a crowd; entire economies run on the allure and accumulation of knowledge and power. Paul writes his first letter to the Corinthian church in response to conflict and division caused by prioritizing knowledge and power at the expense of love. It seems like this has always been a temptation for Christians: to privilege knowledge and power at the expense of love.
Ben and I once confronted a prominent ministry leader about the lack of love in his organization. He had created a tool to analyze spiritual maturity in a person’s life, which was measured by one’s “wisdom” and “power.” In a discussion about this tool I asked, “If Paul says that all wisdom and all power without love are worthless (1 Corinthians 13), how does love factor into this tool that only measures wisdom and power?” His response was to assert that love is “assumed” in both wisdom and power. We had worked with this organization for a few years by this time; it imploded shortly after this conversation. We experienced the painful cost of an organizational culture that didn’t prioritize love as a nonnegotiable core value: people paid for it in hurt and trauma. A culture built on knowledge and power that takes love for granted—just assuming love exists in the pursuit of knowledge and power—will become impatient and caustic, a breeding ground of competition for acclaim and authority. It will keep a record of achievements so as to accrue honor and position. It will reward loyalty and competency, using relationships for their utility, and eliminate weak or unimportant people. It took experiencing the dire relational, emotional, and spiritual harm caused by noisy gongs and clanging cymbals for us to get clear on what’s at stake if love is absent in the Christian life:
Without love, knowledge and power use and hurt people.
Without love, knowledge and power are weaponized to divide and conquer.
Without love, knowledge and power are unhinged from the cross of Christ.
It’s time to reclaim love as the necessary, nonnegotiable foundation of our Christian faith.
KNOWN BY LOVE?
This experience crystalized for us what the Scriptures state over and over: it’s all about love. During the last meal with his disciples, Jesus gives a final command that sums up his teaching. After washing their feet, embodying how they are to live out this command with one another, Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35). Jesus demonstrates what love looks like, taking the place of the lowest servant, washing their feet—a sacrifice in preparation for his sacrifice on the cross—commands them to live in this love with one another, and tells them that their love will be a sign to everyone that they are disciples of Jesus.
The rest of the New Testament bears witness to the centrality of love for those who follow Jesus:
Love is the principle on which all the law and prophets hang (Matthew 22:34-40).
Love summarizes the entire law (Galatians 5:14).
Love fulfills the entire law (Romans 13:8-10).
Love is the goal of all instruction and training (1 Timothy 1:5).
Love is how faith works itself out, and the only thing that counts (Galatians 5:6).
Love is the way we know we’ve passed from death to life (1 John 3:14).
Love is the way we are filled with all the fullness of God (Ephesians 3:19).
Love is who God is (!), and our love is evidence we are becoming more like God (1 John 4:8).
And again, love is the way that everyone will know we are disciples of Jesus (John 13:35).
The essential quality by which a follower of Jesus is known is love. Scriptures are clear about this and our experience testifies to why this matters: without love, nothing else really matters.
