The Things That Matter Most

I’ve spent the last year adjusting to a leadership position where there are so many little things demanding attention and so many trivial topics clamoring for discussion that it’s frighteningly easy to neglect the things that matter most.

I don’t yet know if most of life is like this.  I anticipate that this temptation is present everywhere, but I don’t have a clear way of knowing (from experience) if this is true, or how true it is in different seasons of life and other ministry contexts.  Maybe I’m just a fool who’s easily sucked into giving undue attention to small things.  Maybe I’m part of a subculture that’s particularly lively when it comes to batting around minutiae.  Perhaps this new position is viewed as much more of a campus-wide sounding board than my previous position (well, I know that’s true).  Maybe I’m a magnet for criticism, or more preferably (I hope) an approachable leader.  Maybe I’m just getting used to holding a position in a ministry that calls for a lot of administration at an institution with a number of policies with a student body that’s increasingly unapprised, dissatisfied, and vocal (at times legitimately, at times out of understandable immaturity).

Whatever the cause(s), this relentless convergence of small drops has tended to create quite a current of activity and conversation that continually threatens to sweep me (and I think others) away from the things that matter most.  Not that conversations about sweat pants and meal plans and prank guidelines and dorm policies and chapel sign-ins and exemption requests have nothing to do with anything important.  If I’ve learned anything, it’s that every detail of life revolves around the blazing center of Jesus Christ and finds its meaning and significance in that relationship.  So anything and everything holds a degree of importance, if only by implication and connection.  I’ve preached that sermon often, and I will continue to preach it.  There aren’t too many life lessons that are more central.  Likewise, I’ve always been a detail-oriented person (for better and for worse), and I’ve always believed that faithfulness in the small things is a strong indicator of integrity and maturity.

But there’s a difference between being dependable in little things and being distracted by them, between discussing them and being dictated by them, between airing an appropriate grievance and turning that grievance into a full-scale mission.

At the end of this first year, I find myself trying to revive my soul from this year’s long journey through the desert of ministry minutiae.  This is part of the reason why I’ve been trying to write more in the past week — to remind myself and others (mostly myself) of some brilliantly precious things that are easily overshadowed by the eclipse of detail.  I’m once again pursuing what’s begun to seem dangerously like an oasis — that place where glory and beauty and power and ultimacy and purpose and gospel and passion and mission and the things that matter most are displayed and discussed and deepened and delighted in, and where all of the details really and truly serve only as pixels that make up a tiny part of the picture.  I’m reminding myself that that place is not an oasis, and I’m journeying back there to enjoy it anew (and by enjoying it, to prove it).

I want to zoom out, to pull back, to rise above — to look out over (instead of overlooking) the breathtakingly beautiful and barren landscape of the world and to interpret it through the lens of Scripture’s great story of redemption.  And not just to see the story and its hero and its implications afresh, but to take it all in and to contemplate it deeply and proportionally and refreshingly.  In a few words: to meditate, to admire, and to marvel — and then to move into the fray with a confident and measured walk, ready to labor with a fullness of love that comes better from the burning motivation of a grand story than the harried agitation of an upcoming deadline.

I’m not looking for pity.  I think of single mothers and job-searching fathers and families of seven and overworked pastors and confused graduating seniors and dissatisfied businessmen and overwhelmed missionaries and lonely teenagers.  I write this for all of us who have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and have been adopted into the heavenly family and have been commissioned to reach the world with a glorious message of salvation whose glory is undiminished by the trivia or the to-do list or the trial.  May we all, in all our weakness, be about the things that matter most.

Closer Than a Brother

Tonight began the first of many end-of-the-year goodbyes to some precious people in my life.  These are people I love very dearly.  I am and will be deeply saddened to see them leave.

Over the past several years I have found myself often summarizing the Lord’s blessings on my life by saying that I am rich in relationships.  I have begun realizing that few people have even close to as many wonderfully meaningful friendships as I have, both near and far away.  And I have begun realizing that there are few greater kinds of wealth.

My life should have been exactly the opposite — lonely, and curving sharply back into myself in shy and silent selfishness.  I arrived at college on August 19, 1998 as a painfully insecure 17-year-old with a deep mental and emotional well and a small thimble of personality with which to draw it out.  I thought about everything and felt strongly about many things, but I did not know well how to know and be known.  I was too self-conscious and self-consumed for the brotherhood I so desperately needed.

To no credit of my own, God immediately blessed me with groups of friends during those first several years.  These relationships exposed my insecurities and coaxed me out of myself, and ultimately led me into the deeply meaningful relationships which have characterized my nine-year participation in Student Life.

To this day I have never been the outgoing extrovert, and have learned to be content with my minimal gifting in relationships and my natural bent toward the life of the mind.  Yet I have tasted the sweetness of intimacy and brotherhood and camaraderie, and it is unparalleled.  The taste of brotherhood is so sweet that I will forever refuse to live without it, except in those cases of providential and seasonal loneliness that a loving Father will give to test, refine, and confirm my trust in Him.

My time here has been a revolving door, yes, because we’ve served in an educational context where people come and go.  This is how we are so richly blessed with so many friends — the turnover rate is astounding!  But I have seen that the intensity and intimacy of these relationships only serve to make the relationships elastic, able to bend and stretch and maintain their shape as dear friends leave and cross counties and borders and oceans yet remain dear friends.

I see so many people who do not have these relationships.  So many are searching, looking to care and be cared about, perhaps wary of the kind of closeness that opens the door for hurt, perhaps beaten into half-contentedness by the disillusionment of loneliness, often waiting for the other person to make the first move (and many subsequent moves).  Many have joined the empty community of individualism and self-protection, a community easy to join but hard to leave.

By God’s grace I have been given so much more, and for this I am deeply, deeply grateful.  I say without a hint of hesitation or false humility that I do not deserve this, I did not earn it, and to this day I marvel at it.  By all human accounts, this should not have been me.  I, of all people, should never have experienced friendships like these.

Yet these brothers that I love, we have passed beyond even friendship and into brotherhood.  It is no longer a mere relationship but a bond, a union, an allegiance.  It has turned into Proverbs 18:24: “there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.”

If you do not have these kinds of friends, if you are not growing towards these kinds of friendships, if you are not cultivating these kinds of relationships, start today.  Seek to know and be known.  Choose vulnerability over self-protection, accountability over obscurity, the climb of togetherness over the gravity of aloneness.  Become an initiator and an inviter and a pursuer.  Fight for relationships, for sincere time together in the midst of busyness, for a diversity of shared experiences along with the late nights and the road trips and the the dinner tables and the living rooms and the ministry partnerships that weave together the tapestry of relationships.  Fight for them.  Because you can be rich in many things, but if you are poor in friendships, you are poor indeed.

A few days ago some friends and I were having a lighthearted lunch conversation about the last time each of us cried.  The last time I cried, I told them, was late last fall while listening to a student pour out his heart about the second anniversary of his grandfather’s death and the absence of a father figure in his life.  I haven’t tended to be a crier, I said, but that was the last time I cried.

This is no longer true after tonight.

The Love of Christ Controls Us

For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised  (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).

I think and talk often about having a passion for God, a passion for Christ, and a passion for the gospel.  And I hear and read often about having a passion for God, a passion for Christ, and a passion for the gospel.  For the past decade, “passion” has been the word of choice in my circles when talking about devotion to Christ.  But what does this mean?

Paul gives one major answer in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15.  He declares that “the love of Christ controls us.”  The verb is sunéchei.  The RSV, ESV, NAS, and NLT translate it “controls.”  The ASV and the KJV translate it “constraineth.”  The NIV and the NKJV translate it “compels.”  The NRSV translates it “urges us on.”

This verb is used twelve times in the New Testament — once by Matthew, twice by Paul, and nine times by Luke (often quoting others).  And while it would be the height of exegetical fallacy to read the entire semantic range of sunéchei into Paul’s usage in 2 Corinthians 5:14, a survey of NT usages of the verb is instructive.

• The crowds brought Jesus those who were oppressed by demons and he healed them (Matthew 4:24).
• Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law who was ill with a high fever (Luke 4:38).
• The Gerasenes were seized with fear after Jesus cast a legion of demons out of a deranged man and allowed them to enter a herd of pigs (Luke 8:37).
• Crowds surrounded Jesus and pressed in on him (Luke 8:45).
• Jesus is distressed at the thought of his impending suffering (Luke 12:50).
• Jesus predicts that threatening enemies will one day surround Jerusalem (Luke 19:43).
• Jesus was held in custody the night of his trial (Luke 22:63).
• The enraged Jewish leaders plugged their ears when Stephen testified his vision of the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:57).
• Paul was intensely occupied with preaching the message of the gospel in Corinth (Acts 18:5).
• Publius’ father lay sick with fever and dysentery when Paul and his companions providentially shipwrecked on the island of Malta (Acts 28:8).
• Paul was hard pressed between his desire for fruitful apostolic labor on earth and his desire to be with Christ in heaven (Philippians 1:23).

Again, the point is not that Paul is picturing all of these actions or activities when he uses the verb sunéchei in 2 Corinthians 5:14 to say that “the love of Christ controls us.”  It’s simply bad exegesis to cram the broad semantic range of the verb into this single usage.  However, these other occurrences of the verb do indicate that this verb has a semantic center — the idea of being controlled, compelled, constrained.  People are constrained when they’re demon-possessed or seriously ill or seized with fear.  They’re compelled when they’re physically surrounded or emotionally distressed or under arrest.  They’re controlled when they’re intensely occupied with an activity or squeezed between the rock and hard place of two desirable options.

This is the effect that Christ’s love had on Paul’s life.  He and his missionary companions were “controlled” by the incarnate, self-sacrificing, atoning agape love of the God-Man Jesus Christ.  Paul found himself hemmed in on all sides by this love; he was inescapably directed and channeled by this divine, cross-bearing love.  The faithful, sacrificial, unchanging, atoning, covenantal love of the Son of God motivated him, constrained him, and even restricted him.

True gospel passion is more than this, but it is never less.  To be controlled by earthly ambitions, no matter how religiously deep or missionally broad, is not true gospel passion.  To be penetratingly insightful and intellectually deep is not true gospel passion in and of itself.  To be accurately critical and articulately relevant can be very useful in God’s purposes, but these are not in the same foundational category as a sincere gospel passion.  Even the desire for ministry, the wild-eyed pursuit of radical living, and a full schedule of spiritual activities — while often being wonderful things — do not inherently spring from the genuine, undiluted spring of true gospel passion.

I do not mainly want to be perceived as passionate, or thought to be spiritual, or reputed to be dedicated to the gospel and the church.  Nor am I content to be identified according to my ministry position or personal gifting or degree of experience.  At times (hopefully most of the time) these will be reflections of a true affection for Christ and a sincere devotion to Him, but they are not necessarily so.  Most of all, above all, and in all, I want to be controlled, gripped, and unquestionably driven by the love of Christ.  May it be so, though it take a miracle each day.  May it be so for us all.

Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike

Make no mistake: if he rose at all
It was as His body;
If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,
The amino acids rekindle,
The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
Each soft spring recurrent;
It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the
Eleven apostles;
It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes
The same valved heart
That — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then regathered
Out of enduring Might
New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
Credulity of earlier ages:
Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
Not a stone in a story,
But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of
Time will eclipse for each of us
The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb,
Make it a real angel,
Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in
The dawn light, robed in real linen
Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed
By the miracle,
And crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike

HT: Justin Taylor