3 Keeping Going
3
I was still in junior high school, as I recall, when a teacher told me that the secret of effective writing is to know your ideal reader. It seems to me that for more than half a century I have been proving the truth of his words, and I am sure it will help us forward at this stage if now I say something more about my ideal readers than I have said thus far. So let me turn my telescope on them and be as explicit about them as I can.
The readers whom I am addressing, as I indicated at the outset, are Christian seniors in or near my own age group. They became Christians in youth or early middle age and have been believers for several decades. They appreciate that learning to live with one’s old age is a spiritual discipline in itself, and they are reading this book in hope that it might help them there. Throughout this chapter, in which I shall state in some detail what I am assuming about them, I shall address them as “you.”
S E N I O R B E L I E V E R S I N P R O F I L E
You Became Christians
You were not born Christian in any substantive sense; no one is. Each Christian in this world is a person who intentionally became one, as people intentionally become engineers or electricians. Maybe you had a conversion experience of some kind, in which you found yourself reckoning with the reality of the Lord Jesus Christ within a frame of crisis, choice, and decision. You became aware of his presence accompanying you and confronting you. You thanked him because he died for your sins, and you ceased to defy his claims on you. You trusted him as your Savior, gave yourself to him as your Lord and leader, and embraced him as your guardian, guide, and friend. You repented of particular transgressions, and resolved to live henceforth as his disciple, loving and obeying him as best you could. You committed yourself to daily devotional procedures (systematic Bible reading, a particular pattern of prayer, or whatever your routine was). You remember when this took place, and you could give the date of it if there were need.
Or maybe the coming of your present convictions about Christ, and your current commitment to him, was a gradual process over a period of time, about which all you can say for sure is that it certainly happened, and now you are a different person inside from what you once were, and what others whom you know well still are. But happen it did, and for decades now you have been practicing Christ’s presence, basking in the truth of his promise to be with you always, at all times, and in all circumstances (Matt. 28:20), while you yourself engage, more or less deeply, in the routines that in recent years have been singled out as the distinctive disciplines of the Christian life: Bible reading with meditation, prayer with praise, journaling with self-examination, corporate worship and fellowship, reading and learning, spells of silence and solitude.
You Have Served Christ
I see you as veterans of the war between the forces of Christ and those of Satan. From the start you knew that you were saved to serve, and that indeed is what you spontaneously wanted to do. Soon you learned, however, that you were going to be opposed all the way. By becoming Christians you walked into a war, Satan’s war against the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And that meant that whatever you set yourselves to do by way of service to your Lord, satanic forces would try, usually by indirect rather than direct means, to thwart or spoil. So your Christian life has been a long-drawn fight against the world, the flesh, and the Devil, and such it still is.
Nonetheless, you have lived full and varied lives. You married and brought up families, doing your best to nurture them in Christian faith. Following the lead of your circumstances, and of your abilities, and of the interests God has put in your hearts, you carved out careers for yourselves. Also, you joined local churches, where you sought to pull your weight as helpers, encouragers, givers, teachers, counselors, and friends. You sought to support the lonely and to stabilize those who in any way were feeling life’s strain and battling despair. You used your home for hospitality and group gatherings, and you kept your eyes and ears open for opportunities to share your faith.
Some of you were church officers, pastors even; maybe you invested yourself in parachurch ministries, reaching out for Christ in a way that the established congregations were unable to do. You labored to live intensely for Jesus in each present moment, asking him constantly in your heart, “Lord, what is the best I can do/say/give/take on for your kingdom and your glory, placed as I am right now?”—and you have known the gift of wise insight in answer to that prayer.
Such, then, has been your track record in serving Christ up to the present. You have lived, loved, and labored for him, not always with great success, but with constant faithfulness and zeal. Your faith has shown its genuineness by the good works achieved and the battles fought. Yes, you are veterans indeed.
You Sought Holiness
Each of you knows, as all real Christians do, that God’s grace finds us in a state of radical unholiness, which it calls on us to change. You know that God, who reconciled us to himself through the death of his Son, and justified us through faith, and adopted us as children in his family, now commands us to be holy because he is holy himself. You know that positionally and relationally we become holy through separation, consecration, and being set apart to God and for God, while in personal and subjective terms our holiness is a supernaturalized way of life in which obedience, love, praise, and the practice of visionary, God-honoring righteousness all flow from our purified hearts through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Knowing all this, and desiring its fullest fulfillment in your life, you set your face against the many forms of immorality, inhumanity, and dishonesty with which our culture surrounds us, and you worked hard both to keep yourself from acts of sin, expressing pride and self-will, and to keep at bay dreams of sin, which when welcomed befoul the heart, even though they are not acted out. You cultivated a sensitivity of conscience with regard to sin and formed a habit of watching and praying against it.
Knowing yourself to be a new creation in Christ, united to and bonded with him by the indwelling Holy Spirit, you rejoice to think that the flesh—that is, indwelling sin, the sum and substance of all our skewed, self-serving inclinations—is no longer the dominant driving force in your life that it once was. Yet you have to admit that it is still there, operating in its deceitful and destructive way as a kind of satanic second self, dragging us down into at least the thought-world of misbehavior, even if not the actuality of sinning outright.
Again and again you have resisted the pull and the pressure of indwelling sin, and when at times you realized you had slipped spiritually (and who has not slipped on occasion?), you sought and found repentance, forgiveness, and recovery. So your years-long purpose of pleasing God daily remains intact as now you move into and through old age.
It is with this profile of you in my mind that I go on to say what I have to say about the distinctive temptation that we find raising its head against us all in our old age.
S E N I O R B E L I E V E R S U N D E R M I N E D
In the Bible, temptations are tests in which we are tried out, as the world would express it, to see what we are made of: what resources of wisdom, thoughtfulness, watchfulness, discernment, humility, consistency, trust, faithfulness, hope, and inward stability and strength are there in us to be drawn on when we are put under pressure.
The Devil and God both test us in this fashion. Satan and his minions do it in order to bring us down in flames, as Satan brought down Eve and Adam in Eden and tried to bring down Job in the land of Uz, and to bring down Jesus in the desert. By contrast, God does it as a training exercise, to strengthen his servants for their future role in his plans, as when he required Abraham to show himself willing to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22), and when he permitted Satan to ruin Job’s life (Job 1–2), and when the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the desert to undergo Satan’s temptations (Mark 1:12–13). Much here is hidden from us, but from time to time, in the same event, we can see both Satan’s malice in the foreground and the gracious purpose of God’s overruling providence in the background. Certainly, when Satan tempts, God is always present, just as when God blesses, Satan is never absent.
All we who are Christians are repeatedly put under temptation one way or another (C. S. Lewis’s classic Screwtape Letters will enlarge your insight into this), and the temptation always operates at a point where Satan sees us to be vulnerable. So we need to be constantly on our guard, for Satan’s first move whenever he tempts is to persuade us, one way or another, to lower our guard and for the moment forget that near us is a cunning Enemy who will bring us to spiritual ruin if he can. The revived emphasis on spiritual warfare in recent times, though not always well conceived and applied, was needed, and still is, not least by us seniors; for Satan’s war against each of us will end only with the end of this present life.
Luke records that Jesus, just before his betrayal, spoke to his disciples as “you . . . who have stayed with me in my trials” (Luke 22:28; the Greek word for “temptations” is used here). These words link up with Luke’s observation that following his threefold failure in the desert the tempter left Jesus “until an opportune time” (4:13)—opportune, that is, for renewing his attempts to divert Jesus from his Father’s plan: that he become the sin-bearing sacrifice by which sinners would be saved. When Peter, out of mistaken expectations and misguided good-will, tried similarly to divert Jesus from embracing the cross, Jesus responded, “Get behind me, Satan!” (Matt. 16:23)—for he saw that Satan was using Peter as his mouthpiece at this point. Getting Jesus to evade the cross was, as it would seem, the focus of Satan’s temptation during the years of Jesus’s ministry. And this leads on to the specific temptation by which Christ’s elderly disciples are nowadays assailed.
That temptation is one form of an allurement we have all been exposed to since our Christian lives began, namely, to conform without thinking to what is already taking place. We go with the flow, following the path that the secular community (and often too the institutional church to which we belong) is on already; and we identify with the standards and assumptions that we find dominating the culture around us. This is one aspect of what the Bible diagnoses as love of the world, or worldliness, though we rarely see it that way or call it by that name.
In the present case, society conceives retirement as a watershed event of great significance, because retirement takes one out of what we call the world of work. Whereas, hitherto, we have labored hard in our trade or profession and been accountable in terms of a system we had no part in creating, now we become our own masters and can set our own agenda. Retirement is seen as an invitation to relax, slackening the pace and thrust of our lives, and as such is envisaged as a wholly good thing. Guaranteed lifelong solvency by our pension or unearned income, we off-load our responsibilities and leave to others the organizing, facilitating, monitoring, and adapting of all the things that it used to be our job to manage.
Thus we view retirement as our warrant for taking it easy across the board and prioritizing self-indulgence for the rest of our lives. Billy Graham has observed from time to time that the word retire is not in his Bible; one sees the point he is making, and why he should make a point of making it.
In the churches, there are always some who rejoice when retirement comes, because then they have more time for Christian ministry. Yet the common expectation, undiscussed but unchallenged, is that retirees will not continue the Christian learning and leading that were big in their lives while they were at work. The most that the church will expect of them now is that they will continue to support from the sidelines, as it were, the modes of ministry in which others engage.
In personal terms, this winding down may seem natural enough. Not only has the world pensioned them off; they are starting to feel that their bodies are running out of steam, so that reducing the demands they make of themselves is appropriate self-care. By moving us to think this way, however, Satan undermines, diminishes, and deflates our discipleship, reducing us from laborers in Christ’s kingdom to sympathetic spectators, and as such passengers whom the congregation carries by means of the exertions of others.
Still taking their cue from the world around, modern Western churches organize occupations, trips, parties, and so forth for their seniors and make pastoral provision for the shut-ins, but they no longer look to these folks as they do to the rest of the congregation to find, feed, and use their spiritual gifts. In this they behave as though spiritual gifts and ministry skills wither with age. But they don’t; what happens, rather, is that they atrophy with disuse.
S E N I O R B E L I E V E R S I N M I N I S T R Y
So eldercare in the churches, while rightly taking account of increasing bodily infirmities among the aging, should at the same time seek to cherish and continue to harness the ministering capacities that these Christians displayed at earlier stages of their lives. And elderly Christians themselves should press on in the worship and service of God, and in pastoral care for others, up to the limit of what they still can handle in terms of learning and leading, as they used to do earlier in their lives.
A word, now, about each of the two activities just mentioned, both of which involve more than is sometimes appreciated.
Learning
Lifelong learning, both of the truths by which Christians are to live and of the way to live by them—also of how these things are taught in Scripture and how they are misstated, misunderstood, and misapplied in the modern world—is every Christian’s calling. In former days this enterprise of teaching and learning in the church was labeled catechesis, but that word is unfamiliar today, principally because the thing itself is not being done.
The Pastoral Letters in the New Testament all indicate, one way or another, that the church must expect to be constantly infected by misbelief as well as misbehavior. And congregations in every age must see themselves as learning communities in which gospel truth has to be taught, defended, and vindicated against corruptions of it and alternatives to it. Being alert to all aspects of the difference between true and false teaching, and of behavior that expresses the truth as distinct from obscuring it, is vital to the church’s health.
It must be said with greatest clarity that alongside devotional Bible study that feeds faith and prompts prayer, something with which most Western Christians are already familiar and in which they are currently engaged, there is equal need of catechetical Bible study, without which well-intentioned minds and hearts will repeatedly go off track, and with which most Western Christians are at present unacquainted.
Leading
It must also be said with equal emphasis that everyone is leader to someone, whether pastoral persons to those they guide and teach, or parents to children, or spouses to each other in complementary ways, or friends to friends. I speak of leadership in a broad sense to include the full reality, informal as well as formal and unconscious as well as intentional, of influence: a relational force shaping some aspect of someone else’s life. To shrink the idea of leadership so that it only covers institutionalized forms of primacy, as in the armed forces or political parties or business organizations (a shrinkage commonly practiced nowadays) is in my view to ignore its most potent mode.
In close and affectionate relationships there is always an element of leadership, certainly operating one way if not both ways, and thus leadership responsibility becomes a reality that needs to be recognized; for, willy-nilly, we are going to have something of a shaping influence on others, and if we do not impact them for good, we shall be in danger of leading them astray, malforming them, as one might say, and who wants that?
Christian wisdom alerts us to be always aware of the reality of influence via intimacy and to seek always to give good leadership to those to whom we are closest. The Bible shows us that this leadership relation may operate intergenerationally (as with Moses and Joshua, or Paul and Timothy) and looks for it to function in family contexts, where fathers and father figures address young men as sons whom they seek to instruct (so in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes).
But to think of Christian retirees as exempt from the twin tasks of learning and leading, just because they do not inhabit the world of wage and salary earning any longer, and for aging Christians to think of themselves in this way, as if they have no more to do now than have fun, is worldliness in a strikingly intense and, be it said, strikingly foolish form.
G O D ’ S P A T H F O R A G I N G B E L I E V E R S
Several times in the New Testament we find the Christian life vividly pictured as running a race. “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus” (Heb. 12:1–2). Similarly, Paul reasons with the undisciplined Corinthians:
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. . . . So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. But I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. (1 Cor. 9:24–27)
The apostle’s image works by “as if” logic; it calls for running as if you were competing and so had to go as fast as you could in order to beat your rivals. Paul uses “run,” with these overtones, again in Galatians 2:2 and Philippians 2:16 as an image of his life of serving God. Finally, as an old man (Philemon 9) facing martyrdom, he says: “The time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight” (the image is probably from wrestling), “I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness” (counterpart of the victor’s laurel wreath in Greek games) (2 Tim. 4:6–8).
Put positively, the apostle’s race image clearly combines these four notions: first, clearheaded goal orientation (you run to win); second, purposeful planning (you think out how you should run the race, pacing yourself and preparing for the final burst); third, resolute concentration (you put everything second to training for and then running and hopefully winning the race); and fourth, supreme effort (you run flat out, putting everything you have got into what you are doing). Thus Paul conceives the faithful Christian life; the believer runs, as did he.
Granted, this is not Paul’s only perspective on the Christian life. In terms of its theology and the revealed truth that shapes it, it is a life of gratitude for grace received, a matter of being moved and motivated by the overwhelming glory of God’s redeeming love to a person as naturally unlovable and unacceptable as oneself. “I appeal to you . . . by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1). And in terms of its temper and the need for steady persistence in it, the Christian life is for Paul a walk, a matter of keeping on keeping on along the set path and declining to be distracted from it. “As you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving” (Col. 2:6–7).
But, as we have just seen, the image of running was central to Paul’s understanding of his own life, and I urge now that it ought to be the central focus in the minds and hearts of all aging Christians, who know and feel that their bodies are slowing down. The challenge that faces us is not to let that fact slow us down spiritually, but to cultivate the maximum zeal for the closing phase of our earthly lives.
Why zeal? Because it is zeal that will keep us running. But what is zeal? Rarely do we hear the word or use it ourselves these days, so it is no wonder if we are less than clear as to its meaning. But Nehemiah 3–6 tells us how, against all odds, in fifty-two days Jerusalem’s able-bodied inhabitants rebuilt all two miles of the ruined city wall, which is a classic display of zeal in action. And then early in John’s Gospel we read of Jesus cleansing Jerusalem’s commercialized temple with awe-inspiring ferocity, and we are told, “His disciples remembered that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’ ” (John 2:17, citing Ps. 69:9).
Zeal for his kingdom is a character quality of God himself, as he has revealed himself (Isa. 9:7). So zeal for God’s cause, his kingdom, and his glory, all of which the temple symbolized, is one element of the image of God in his incarnate Son—the image in which, so we are told, Christians are to be renewed, and actually are being renewed, by the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18; Eph. 4:20–24; Col. 3:10). Nowhere does Scripture suggest that this divine renewing process is programmed to go on hold as we age, however true it is that we can clog it up at any point by our own follies and wrong attitudes.
It follows, then, that as zeal for God and godliness and God’s honor was integral to God’s image in Christ, so it should be in us, and we should cultivate zeal, along with the rest of Christian virtues, up to the ending of our lives on earth—or at least, for as long as we can consciously focus and direct our thoughts. (As we all know, various kinds of heart failure and dementia, along with the palliative techniques of modern medicine, may involve for us extended spells of comatose or semicomatose existence near the end of earthly life, but these are outside our present concern.)
So again we ask, what is zeal? Zeal means priority, passion, and effort in pursuing God’s cause. In the second half of the nineteenth century J. C. Ryle, “the best man in the Church of England,” according to the Baptist C. H. Spurgeon, produced the following classic statement on the subject:
Zeal in religion is a burning desire to please God, to do his will, and to advance his glory in the world in every possible way. . . .
A zealous man in religion is pre-eminently a man of one thing. It is not enough to say that he is earnest, hearty, uncompromising, thorough-going, whole-hearted, fervent in spirit. He only sees one thing, he cares for one thing, he lives for one thing; and that one thing is to please God. Whether he lives, or whether he dies—whether he has health, or whether he has sickness—whether he is rich, or whether he is poor—whether he pleases man, or whether he gives offense—whether he is thought wise, or whether he is thought foolish—whether he gets blame, or whether he gets praise—whether he gets honour, or whether he gets shame—for all this the zealous man cares nothing at all. He burns for one thing; and that one thing is to please God, and advance God’s glory. If he is consumed in the very burning, he cares not for it—he is content. He feels that, like a lamp, he is made to burn; and if consumed in burning, he has but done the work for which God appointed him. Such a one will always find a sphere for his zeal. If he cannot preach, work, and give money, he will cry, and sigh, and pray. If he cannot fight in the valley with Joshua, he will do the work of Moses, Aaron, and Hur, on the hill (Ex. 17:9–13). . . . This is what I mean when I speak of “zeal” in religion. (Practical Religion [Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 1959], 130)
Maintaining zeal Godward as our bodies wear out is the special discipline to which we aging Christians are called. Realism requires us to remember that memory, particularly short-term memory, will weaken; logical tightness of speech will loosen; powers of concentration will diminish; physical exhaustion will overtake us sooner or later, and energy levels will keep going lower. Zeal, however, should be unflagging every day, all day, and all the way. But if this is to happen, zeal must be fed by hope. That is the final point that I have to make, and as was the case before, it too is a theme requiring a chapter to itself.