Pull apart the darkness while we can

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Originally published on The Urban Gospel Mission

A few weeks ago, my husband got back from bringing a group of his former students (and a couple other kids we’re close with) to an awesome camp in PA for inner-city youth called Citikidz.  At this camp the boys heard the Gospel multiple times a day, learned what it looks like to be a true man, how to compete for God's glory and with character…amongst many other things. Most importantly, at this camp almost all the boys gave their lives to Christ – and one of them was baptized at our church a couple weeks ago.

This was all possible because my husband and I seek daily to follow Christ with our whole lives. It’s not easy, and some days we fail, but that’s why we have to make a very intentional choice – and it is only by the grace of God and the Spirit in us that we are able to make this choice at all.  By His grace, we seek to deny our desire for what is comfortable, and explore what it truly looks like to love Him and His children as He has called us. Through investing in Stephen’s students outside the classroom, supporting single parents we’ve come into relationship with, and giving up evenings and weekends to invest in these relationships, pushing past cultural barriers to deal with some pretty intense stuff – Stephen and I prayerfully and intentionally seek to push past what is comfortable and live more like Christ in our world today.

I can say this next statement because I feel this struggle in myself personally: comfort is attractive to American Christians.  Everything around us tells us to live the comfortable lives that we deserve and have "worked hard for."  You know, because we've “earned it”.

And our Christian culture often implies that if we worship God during the "worship God" time we've boxed off during the week, don’t swear or drink, donate money to a good cause every once in a while, and do other good things, then we are living for Christ. And we believe it, because this is easier than actually living for Christ.  It’s easy to seek God in the comfortable places, to be satisfied with checking the box that we are anti-abortion, going to church, and giving a certain amount to charity.  And while none of these things are wrong in themselves, they make it easy for a lot of us Christians to live good lives without ever passionately following Christ.

In Isaiah 1:11-17, we see God’s anger as the Israelites go through the motion of worshipping – without actually worshipping. We see clearly in this passage the way God desires us to live, not going through the motions of a religion or conforming to the culture around us, but truly worshipping through loving God and others with our whole lives. In Christ, we see the ultimate example of the life God calls us to live: a life looking outside ourselves, loving radically, challenging the status quo. God hates it when we do what the culture around us does (even the Christian culture) just because it is the norm (again, see Isaiah 1; See also Romans 12:2) We are not to do good things with empty hearts, forfeiting true worship, love, sacrifice and intimacy with Christ simply because it is easier to say some words and go through some motions. Christ calls us to something more - “to pull apart the darkness while we can,” living lifestyles that challenge us and startle the world around us as it sees His love leaking through our lives. He calls us to walk the harder road to that narrow gate that Christ was talking about. So we must be intentional about living outside our comfort zones, letting God bring us to the challenging, heartbreaking, beautiful, full life where we love him more than anything and others more than ourselves.  Walking the narrow path of true worship will compel us to be in relationship with the hurting, investing in the vulnerable and the lowly so intentionally that it affects every part of our lives.

But it is easier to say I am “pro-life” and feel that I am doing my duty by voting for the "pro-life" candidate, rather than actually crossing over cultural and racial barriers and walking with the women who are considering abortion, to provide the support, guidance, and love they need. It is easier to say we are “pro-life,” advocate for abortion clinics to be shut down and walk away feeling we have done our duty, than to stay beside the women who are now going to have children most of them don’t want or cannot care for. Truly being pro-life is much, much harder. It’s harder to become involved in the lives of vulnerable children, ensuring they have the medical services they need and a good education and the home environment God desires for them. It is hard to give up plans with friends to spend time with these mothers and children after work, hard to become an advocate for our local schools to make sure these children receive the education they need to escape the poverty they were born into, hard to give our money to help start programs through our churches that will provide the counseling and education many of these mothers desperately need. It is easier to say we are against abortion and then forget about the lives we are supposedly “for. But unless we are willing to advocate the full life God desires for these women and children, not just for the life of the child while in the womb, then we cannot call ourselves pro-life.  It is a harder path, but the path of complete love to which Christ calls us.

Christ's radical love can so easily get lost in the comfort of our American traditions. But we are not called to choose the easy path. We are called to be holy, as He is holy. To love as He loved. Through His death on the cross Christ showed us that He is not safe – He is “not a tame lion.” (C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)  He is on the move.  So we should be as well.

Are we letting Christ’s love flow passionately out of us in our lives? LOVE is an ACTION. It is not a phrase or an opinion. The life Christ lived is an example of the life God desires us to live - a life full of sacrificial love, a life that challenges the status quo and puts aside what is easy for the sake of loving the broken.

Here in the city of DC, the Church is without excuse. Broken relationships, children without fathers, generations of abuse, and all kinds of material and spiritual poverty surround us on every side.  We can’t help but see it. And not just those of us who live in the city – everywhere we live there is pain and brokenness, if we do not shut our eyes to what God is showing us. And we, equipped with the Holy Spirit are the answer; Christ calls us to dream for and do more than we could ever ask or imagine. He calls us to move with Him, to walk the harder path.

And it will be harder to walk out love than to live inside the box we've made for ourselves. But Christ calls us to this because it is what is best for us - it is the fullest life we could have to truly follow in His footsteps, to experience His grace in the deepest way, to see His glory and be overtaken by His love in ways we never would if we stayed in our safe little box (Jim Martin, Vice President for Church Mobilization at IJM, puts it well here.)

We are all called to pull apart the darkness while we can - for the sake of those around us, and for our own sakes as well.