Or we could put her dilemma this way: intellectual honesty or Jesus?
How many times have you seen this? I can’t tell you the number of people in their late teens or early twenties I know, or those I have been told about, who experience truth outside the boundaries of their religion and abandon the whole thing because they think it’s a choice (which is a fatal flaw in thinking we’ll address in a moment). They are experiencing truth in all sorts of new ways, and they need a faith that is big enough to handle it. Their box is getting blown apart, and the faith they were handed doesn’t have room for what they are learning.
But it isn’t a choice, because Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life.” If you come across truth in any form, it isn’t outside your faith as a Christian. Your faith just got bigger. To be a Christian is to claim truth wherever you find it.
It’s not truth over here and Jesus over there, as if they were two different things. Where we find one, we find the other. Jesus is quoted in the book of John saying, “I and the Father are one.” If Jesus and God are one, if Jesus shows us what God is really, truly like, and God is truth and all truth is God’s truth, then Jesus takes us into the truth, not away from it. He frees us to embrace whatever is true and good and beautiful wherever we find it.
To live this way then, we have to believe in a big Jesus. For many, Jesus was presented to them as the solution to a problem. In fact, this has been the dominant way of explaining the story of the Bible in Western culture for the past several hundred years. It’s not that it is wrong; it’s just that Jesus is so much more. The presentation often begins with sin and the condition of human beings, separated from God and without hope in the world. God then came up with a way to fix the problem by sending Jesus, who came to the world to give us a way out of the mess we find ourselves in. So if we were to draw a continuum of the story of the Bible, Jesus essentially shows up late in the game.
But the first Christians didn’t see Jesus this way, as if God were somewhere else and then cooked up some way to solve the sin problem at the last minute by getting involved as Jesus. They believed that Jesus was somehow more, that Jesus had actually been present since before creation and had been a part of the story all along.
In the first line of his gospel, John calls Jesus the “Word.” The word Word here in Greek is the word logos, which is where we get the English word logic.
Logic, intelligence, design. The blueprint of creation.
When we speak of these concepts, what we are describing is the way the world is arranged. There is some sort of order under the chaos, and some people seem to have a better handle on it than others. Some understand math, some the human psyche, and others can speak clearly and compellingly about the solar system. When we say someone is intelligent, we are saying they have insight as to how things are put together.
And the Bible keeps insisting that Jesus is how God put things together. The writer Paul said that Jesus is how God holds all things together.9 The Bible points us to a Jesus who is in some mysterious way behind it all.
Jesus is the arrangement. Jesus is the design. Jesus is the intelligence. For a Christian, Jesus’s teachings aren’t to be followed because they are a nice way to live a moral life. They are to be followed because they are the best possible insight into how the world really works. They teach us how things are.
I don’t follow Jesus because I think Christianity is the best religion. I follow Jesus because he leads me into ultimate reality. He teaches me to live in tune with how reality is. When Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” he was saying that his way, his words, his life is our connection to how things truly are at the deepest levels of existence.10 For Jesus then, the point of religion is to help us connect with ultimate reality, God. I love the way Paul puts it in the book of Colossians: These religious acts and rituals are shadows of the reality. “The reality . . . is found in Christ.”11
Labels
It is dangerous to label things “Christian.” The word Christian first appears in the Bible as a noun. The first followers of Jesus were called Christians because they had devoted themselves to living the way of the Messiah, who they believed was Jesus.
Noun. A person. A person who follows Jesus. A person living in tune with ultimate reality, God. A way of life centered around a person who lives.
The problem with turning the noun into an adjective and then tacking it onto words is that it can create categories that limit the truth. Here’s what I mean: Something can be labeled “Christian” and not be true or good. I was speaking at a pastors’ conference several years ago, and a well-known pastor was going to be speaking after me. I thought I’d stick around when I was done because I wanted to hear what he had to say. It was shocking. He essentially told the roomful of pastors that if their churches weren’t growing and they weren’t happy all the time and they weren’t healthy and successful, then they probably weren’t “called and chosen by God” to be pastors. I can’t imagine the messages his talk put in the hearts and minds of those pastors who were listening. I couldn’t begin to understand how he made those verses mean that. And it was a Christian pastor talking in a Christian church to other Christian pastors. But it wasn’t true.
This happens in all sorts of areas. It is possible for music to be labeled Christian and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled clichés. That “Christian” band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren’t a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a “Christian” movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft. Just because it is a “Christian” book by a “Christian” author and it was purchased in a “Christian” bookstore doesn’t mean it is all true or good or beautiful. A “Christian” political group puts me in an awkward position: What if I disagree with them? Am I less of a Christian? What if I am convinced the Christian thing to do is to vote the exact opposite?
Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.
I was playing in a punk band a few years ago, and we were playing clubs and bars and festivals and parties. People would regularly ask us if we were a Christian band when they found out I was a pastor. I always found the question a bit odd. When you meet a plumber, do you ask her if she is a Christian plumber? I realize now why I chafed against the question.
My understanding is that to be Christian is to do whatever it is that you do with great passion and devotion. We throw ourselves into our work because everything is sacred. I love how Paul put it in Colossians: “Whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.”12 He is teaching people to live as Christians, and then whatever they do will be sacred, holy work. Music already is worship. Music is praise. Music is sacred. Music is good. Creation doesn’t need a label to make it sacred or acceptable or blessed. When God made the world, God called it “good.” Now obviously anything can be corrupted and desecrated and used for purposes other than those which God intends, but making music is sacred enough. Paul put it like this: “For everything God created is good.”13
This is why Jesus wouldn’t have blessed the food before he ate. He blessed God for providing the earth, which provides the food. The food is already blessed, because it comes from the earth, and “the earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.”14
This is why it is impossible for a Christian to have a secular job. If you follow Jesus and you are doing what you do in his name, then it is no longer secular work; it’s sacred. You are there; God is there. The difference is our awareness.
This