5: A Christian Style of Life: Managing our Labor, Leisure, Pleasure, and Treasure
5
A CHRISTIAN STYLE OF LIFE
Managing Our Labor, Leisure, Pleasure, and Treasure
Since the Second World War the West has grown affluent. Society practices and promotes spending rather than saving, self-indulgence rather than self-improvement, and amusement at all costs. (Amusing Ourselves to Death is the telling title of Neil Postman’s assessment of television;1 the same phrase might be used to describe the behavior that has led to the AIDS epidemic.) Evangelical Christians have responded by emphasizing work rather than leisure,2 activity rather than rest, and life commitments rather than lifestyle choices. Thus they have sought to tool themselves up to be salt and light in our dying culture. But on rest, leisure, and lifestyle as such they have had very little to say.
To note this comparative silence is to state a fact—not to offer a criticism. Indeed, criticism would be out of place here. For Christians to be preoccupied with living and working for God is healthy, just as a preoccupation with leisure and luxury is unhealthy. If, as it appears, leisure and luxury are becoming the main interests of the Western world, a deadly decadence has evidently set in, against which Christians ought to be standing with all their might, advocating and modeling something entirely different. Christians must see this decadence as a form of worldliness and invoke against it such Scripture passages as 1 John 2:15-16: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world” (NRSV). God forbid that paying attention to questions about leisure and lifestyle should have the effect of promoting in the church a worldliness like that of the modern West.
Yet if these questions are not discussed, evangelicals will be in trouble another way. All around the world, as capitalist consumerism and the market economy grind on, carrying all before them, leisure and lifestyle are becoming areas of entrapment for Christian people. Failure to see this as a fact, to perceive it as a problem, to think about it in biblical antithesis to the ruling secular notions, and to plan to operate as God’s counterculture in these areas would indicate that we were already falling into the traps or (to change the metaphor) being blown up in the minefield. My best hope for this chapter is that it might offer the makings of a mine-detecting survival kit.
We begin with definitions to make sure that we know what we are talking about. Leisure and lifestyle are the words with which we start. Leisure, like pleasure and treasure, is a familiar word, and focusing its meaning is not a problem. My copy of Webster defines leisure thus: “freedom from occupation or business; vacant time; time free from employment; time which may be appropriated to any specific object.”
Lifestyle is too recent a coinage for my Webster to take note of, but the contents of a junk mail envelope that arrived recently, with the words “Valuable Coupons Inside—Save on All Your Lifestyle Needs” printed on its front, give us the idea. Inside were coupons offering great deals on ornamental painted plates, the world’s greatest perfumes (that is what was claimed, anyway), scenic address labels, items of personal hygiene, carpet shampooing, a course in piano playing that focuses on leading singing at parties, wigs, baseball cards, a doll built for lifetime companionship, family photos, furnace cleaning, a machine for streamlining the female figure, videos featuring the late Victor Borge, the Encyclopedia Britannica, skin cream, book club membership, and deodorant.
All one’s lifestyle needs? Hardly, but the selection points to the definition. Lifestyle, or style of life, are evidently umbrella terms used to describe the way of living that we achieve by our choices among the various options that our affluent consumerist society makes available to us—choices of clothes, food, hobbies, vacations, places of residence, cars, clubs, careers, associates, amusements, and (of course) a church of our choice, as well as choices of luxury items such as those listed above.
“Lifestyle” is thus the label for both the ideal existence that our choices aim at and the actual existence that our choices produce. Our concept of our lifestyle hovers between being directional, stating how we want to live, and being descriptive, showing how we do live. In a day of multiple choices with regard to almost everything, we may well say: “By their lifestyle you will know them; by my lifestyle you will know me.” Where society sets us free to choose, our choices will show who and what we are, where we want to be, and where we are actually going.
Not all lifestyle choices are leisure choices, as we can see; but, as we can also see, all leisure choices are lifestyle choices, and they will say something about our view of life as a whole.
What sort of problems do we face in connection with leisure and lifestyle? There are three obvious ones, all with far-reaching theological, moral, and devotional implications.
The first problem is idolatry, the worship of false gods. The basic biblical insights here are that whatever controls and shapes one’s life is in effect the god one worships and that human nature is so constituted that no one can avoid a personal subservience to some god or other. As Bob Dylan sang some years ago, “You’ve got to serve somebody.” Those who do not live to exalt the God of the Bible will inevitably be enslaved to some modern counterpart of the Baals and Molechs of the nature- and nation-worshiping cults that Scripture denounces. Then one’s god may be some human individual or group—one’s employer, perhaps, whose interests one devotes oneself to advancing; or one will worship and serve self directly, treating the gratifying of one’s desires as all that matters and seeing everything as a means to that end—a lifestyle in which one constantly falls victim to “greed, which is idolatry” (Col. 3:5). Greed, the mind-set that reaches out to grab things for oneself, becomes the liturgy of self-worship. In idolizing objects of desire, we idolize ourselves, the desirers; and so idolatry in this twofold sense becomes our life.
Regarding the matter in hand, we see that some people idolize work while others idolize play; some make a god of leisure activities (vacations, sports, hobbies, music, books, gardening, and so on) while others make a god of their bank balance and social position or of power; and others again make a god of their addictions (drink, drugs, sex, or whatever). Motivations and self-perceptions get very tangled here and need a lot of sorting out in particular cases. Yet the bottom line is always the same. To the extent that we are not actively living to God, for God, and in the presence of God, seeking to glorify and enjoy him in and through all we do, we have lapsed into some form of idolatry whereby we worship and serve created things rather than the Creator (cf. Rom. 1:25). But idolatry in all its forms must be avoided.
The second problem is hedonism, with which we may join, as its opposite, anti-hedonism. What is in question here is the place of pleasure in Christian living, a topic we have already touched. Hedonism means the enthroning of pleasure as life’s supreme value and therefore as a goal that one pursues directly. Hedonism says, in effect, that pleasure-seeking is the height of wisdom and virtue and that maximizing pleasure is the highest service we can render. Popular Western culture is largely hedonist, and modern Christians are constantly exposed to its brainwashing influences through the media and the relationships of life that draw them along the hedonist path. That God wants us all to be happy, right now; that total satisfaction is what Jesus offers, right now; that it is a good and godly thing to engage in genital homosexual behavior, if that gives you positive pleasure—all of these notions have become very familiar in the church in recent years. That leisure is entirely for pleasure and that improving one’s lifestyle means simply increasing one’s pleasures are unchallenged axioms in today’s advertising industry and unquestioned assumptions among many professed Christians. There is clearly a major problem here.
Recently the phrase “Christian hedonism” has gained prominence as a tag for the truth that the God who promises his people joy and delight in their relationship with him, both here and hereafter, does in fact fulfill his promise here and now.3 As a corrective of what we may call “Christian anti-hedonism” (the view that pleasure has no place in godly living, that God will always want us to do what we least want to do, and that the real Christian life on earth will always be, in Churchillian phrase, blood, toil, tears, and sweat—in short, sustained heroic misery), Christian hedonism speaks a word in season.
In itself, however, “Christian hedonism” is not a good phrase for its purpose; for it seems to say that rating pleasure as life’s supreme value is something that Christianity itself teaches us to do, and that is not so. Biblical Christianity does not teach that any pleasure or good feelings, or any form of present ease and contentment, should be sought as life’s highest good. What it teaches, rather, is that glorifying God by our worship and service is the true human goal, that rejoicing and delighting in God is central to worship, and that the firstfruits of our heritage of pleasures forevermore will be given us as we set ourselves to do this. But should we start to seek pleasure rather than God, we would be in danger of losing both. It is apparent that this is what the exponents of Christian hedonism do themselves think; so my difficulty is limited to their choice of words. But hedonism—real hedonism— must be avoided.
The third problem is utilitarianism, the view that the value of anything is to be found in the extent to which it is useful and productive as a means to an end beyond itself. Utilitarian thinking is very widely applied today in the realm of technology and business, but it has a radical built-in shortcoming: It overlooks the fact that what it values as a means to an end may have an intrinsic value, too, for the sake of which it should be promoted and preserved irrespective of how it rates in the means-to-end calculus. Leisure is a case in point. Utilitarianism says that the whole rationale of leisure and recreation is to “re-create” people for more of their productive labor.
Christianly speaking, this is part of the rationale of leisure, no doubt; after the Sabbath rest one goes back to work. But where utilitarianism urges that leisure and rest be kept to a minimum so that productive work may be maximized (hence the fearfully long working hours of the early days of industrialization and of some workers and workaholics today), Christian thinkers find intrinsic value in leisure activity that is, as Leland Ryken puts it, “nonproductive in the sense in which we ordinarily use that term. Leisure does not meet our needs of physical or economic survival. It does not put bread on the table or clothes in the closet. Leisure is a self-enclosed world that carries its own reward. . . . [As Lee W. Gibbs puts it,] ‘the purpose of play is in the play itself.’”4
The Christian work ethic has sometimes been misrepresented as a sanctified workaholism, but this ignores the biblical celebration of God as the one who “richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Tim. 6:17)—a divine generosity that requires leisure for its appreciation, as the exponents of the authentic Christian work ethic well knew. So Christians should value leisure as more than a periodic pit stop before further work, and they should resist the narrowing impact of the money- and manufacture-mesmerized mind-set that marks utilitarian social thinking. High though it rides as a public philosophy today, utilitarianism too must be avoided.
This identification of the three main problem areas in relation to leisure and lifestyle gives parameters for the rest of our study. We should not lapse into idolizing either work or leisure; it is not Christian to be either a workaholic or a drone. Nor should we lapse into hedonism, letting the pursuit of pleasure shape our lives, any more than we should lapse into anti-hedonism, censuring pleasure in Manichean style as a worthless and unhelpful distraction and treating pleasurelessness as an index of virtue. Nor should we lapse into utilitarianism, valuing work or leisure or any aspect of lifestyle purely as a means to an end beyond itself and not at all as a field of creativity or a means of expression or a form of enjoyment. So far, however, all of this has been negative; we have merely noted what we should not do. Now we have to ask, what positive principles of action should be guiding us in shaping the life we live? To answer this question is our next task.
Let us then stand back for a moment and look at the overall ideal of a redeemed sinner’s life in Christ, which is the frame into which biblical teaching on leisure and lifestyle fits. The redeemed life is commonly spoken of these days in terms of wholeness; fifty years ago it was thought of in terms of balance; Thomas Aquinas saw it as life in proportion; and John Calvin spoke of it as a life of moderation—and indeed it has all of these qualities. It is the life for which Jesus, himself the perfect man, is the model. Thomas’s four cardinal virtues— prudence (wisdom), temperance (self-possession), justice (fairness), and fortitude (stick-to-itiveness, resilience, and what we call guts)— are basic to it. His three theological virtues—faith, hope, and love— are central to it. And the ninefold fruit of the Spirit that Paul lists—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22-23)—constitute a character profile of it, just as they do of the Lord Jesus himself. It is a superhuman version of human life; it is our natural life supernaturalized by grace.
On what principles is this redeemed life lived? Four may be briefly mentioned.
First, it is lived as a life of duty to God, glorifying him by our obedience out of gratitude for his grace. The phrase derives from the Catechism in Cranmer’s first prayer book (1549): “My duty towards God, is to believe in him, to fear him, and to love him . . . to worship him, to give him thanks, to put my whole trust in him, to call upon him, to honour his holy Name and his Word, and to serve him truly all the days of my life.”
Second, this redeemed life is lived as a life of neighbor-love. “My duty towards my Neighbour,” Cranmer’s Catechism continues, “is to love him as myself, and do to all men, as I would they should do unto me.”5 Love seeks the well-being and advancement of the loved one in every way that it can; it is a matter of the mind and will more than of the feelings, and of sustained commitment rather than momentary intensities. The duty of love, to one’s neighbor as to one’s God, calls for discipline of life.
Third, the redeemed life is a life of freedom (cf. Gal. 5:1), in four senses: freedom from the need to work for salvation, freedom from the restrictions imposed by the typical enactments of God’s Old Testament law, freedom for the use and enjoyment of all created things (1 Tim. 4:4-5; 6:17), and freedom in the sense of fulfillment and contentment in working for God (“whose service is perfect freedom,” as Cranmer’s prayer book declares).6 Finally, the redeemed life is lived as a life of expectancy, as we look to receive both God’s Word and his gifts—including the providential gifts of leisure and pleasure, which are our special concern at present.
Within this framework I now offer brief reflections to indicate the specific positives that should guide us through our perplexities about these matters. Giving myself the pleasure of tidy titling, I shall arrange my matter under four headings: the call to labor, the role of leisure, the place of pleasure, and the use of treasure.
THE CALL TO LABOR
In this chapter I use labor and work as synonyms. My concept of work thus includes not only the idea of obligation (work has been defined as whatever you have to do when you would like to be doing something else), but also the idea of effort (for labor signifies work that is hard and demanding—laborious, in fact). Work is thus both a strenuous activity, one that exhausts you however much you enjoy doing it, and a required activity, mandated not just by society but by God himself. That people should work is an imperative of the order of creation (before the Fall, Adam was put in charge of the Garden of Eden and the animal kingdom) and also of the order of redemption (see how Paul scallywags nonworkers and thieves in 2 Thess. 3:6-12; Eph. 4:28). The command to labor is the frame within which our reflections on God’s gifts of leisure, pleasure, and treasure must be set.
There are many kinds of work in today’s world—manual and intellectual, agricultural and manufacturing, productive and distributive, educational and caregiving, managerial and menial, casual and contracted, stipendiary and voluntary, and so on. There is teamwork and solo work, schoolwork and research work, homemaking and breadwinning, the work of artists and craftsmen, the routine of a “hand” (telltale word!) on an assembly line, the labor of communicators and salespeople. The variety is enormous.
There were many different kinds of work in the ancient world, too. But what the Bible teaches about work applies to all of them— namely, that everyone should be involved in some form of productive and beneficial labor; that to be a worker is one facet of the image of God in which mankind was made; that whatever work we choose to do or find ourselves set to do (I think here of slaves, soldiers, and all subordinates who live under orders) should be done with creative concentration and to the best of our ability; that good work of whatever kind glorifies God as well as benefiting others; that our skills are gifts of God, for which we should thank him as we use them; that work itself is a gift of God, without which we would be in a permanent state of discontent and unfulfillment, the nemesis of people with no outlet for their God-given creativity; and that the world of work is a training ground and display ground for Christian character (personal integrity, responsible stewardship of resources, compassionate altruism and fidelity, practice of the Golden Rule, passion for excellence, patient persistence in well-doing, and more). Work, of whatever kind, is more than a means to an end (e.g., survival, money-making, personal or professional advancement). Work is service of God, and it should be offered to him and done in a way that honors him at every point. George Herbert hit the nail on the head when he wrote:
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see;
And what I do in anything
To do it as for thee.
All may of thee partake;
Nothing can be so mean
Which, with this tincture, “For thy sake,”
Will not grow bright and clean.
A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine.
Evading work through idleness, laziness, or sloth displeases God and blights one’s own life. The world has always been inclined to think that freedom from work is as near heaven on earth as one can get. But the Bible writers knew that, whatever frustrations we may meet as we work in this fallen and twisted world, not to have tasks that we perform creatively as service to God and others is itself a frustrating of our humanity, a condition in which emotional maturity becomes impossible and selfish irresponsibility grows while true human dignity withers. Work that exposes us to boredom, stress, and exploitation is still better than no work at all. If such work yields little satisfaction, being unemployed and idle yields even less, as surely we all know.
Embittering circumstances abound in the world of work today, making it hard to receive what I have just said. Lack of job security, as firms shed their long-term employees and hire part-timers on a contingency basis, meaning no benefits and no guarantee of continuance; forced choices between early retirement and demotion, and sometimes early retirement with no choice; the tyranny of rat-race professionalism, whereby one’s time, energy, enthusiasm, attention, and focus are increasingly claimed by the need to maintain one’s status and not be passed over or tossed out as insufficiently competent or motivated; demands from above for moral corner-cutting that benefits the firm or institution at the expense of the public; having to accept unacceptable policies as the price of one’s career—these are just some of the realities working people today face, and it is no wonder that sometimes they see their work as more of a curse than a calling. To work in a way that honors God in a world like ours is a challenge to faith at every turn. But the call to labor—to work, and work hard, one way or another, for God and for other people—remains, and we must never lose sight of it.
Assuming, then, our acceptance of that call, we now move on to think about the managing of leisure according to the will of God.
THE ROLE OF LEISURE
What is leisure? We have already cited a dictionary definition, but more needs to be said.
Leisure is one of a pair of words, the other of which is work. Work, as we have just noted, means not just one’s wage-earning employment but everything that one must do as a matter of obligation, whether one enjoys it or not. Jobs and commitments out of the house, jobs that need to be done in the house, necessary studying, fulfilling promises one has made—all of these count as work because of the sense of “having to” that attaches to them. By contrast, leisure means time that is ours to use for our own pleasure on a discretionary basis.
Some leisure time we fill with things we choose to do for their own sake, just because we want to do them; these are the activities of absolute leisure. Some leisure time we spend doing things we both want and ought to do, from joining in public worship and fulfilling volunteer roles at church or in a club to looking after pets and reading to keep informed; these are better called activities of “semi-leisure.” All leisure, including semi-leisure, is a gift from God that, when used wisely, “provides rest, relaxation, enjoyment, and physical and psychic health. It allows people to recover the distinctly human values, to build relationships, to strengthen family ties, and to put themselves in touch with the world and nature. Leisure can lead to wholeness, gratitude, self-expression, self-fulfillment, creativity, personal growth, and a sense of achievement.”7 So leisure should be valued and not despised.
What Bible truths bear on our use of leisure? At least the following:
1. The duty of rest. In the quasi-liturgical, quasi-poetical, highly stylized narrative of Genesis 1:1—2:3, God the Creator presents himself as setting the world in order in six days, after which he rested on the seventh. Whether the six days should be understood as 144 of our hours, as six vast geological epochs, or as a pictorial projection of the fact (the what) of creation that gives no information about the time (the when) or the method (the how) of creation is an interpretive question that need not concern us now.8 What matters for us here is that on the basis of this presentation God directs that each seventh day— each Sabbath, that is—be kept as a day of rest from the labors of the previous six (Exod. 20:8-11; 31:12-17). The day is to be kept “holy”— that is, it is a time of semi-leisure, to be used for honoring God the Creator by worship, as well as for refreshing human creatures by the break from otherwise unending toil.
This prescribed rhythm of work and rest is part of the order of creation and should be upheld as such, whether we take the disputed older view of Sunday as the Christian Sabbath or not. (Bible students go both ways on that question.) Human beings are so made that they need this six-plus-one rhythm, and we suffer in one way or another if we do not get it. The leisure, or at least semi-leisure, of a weekly day for worship and rest is a divine ordinance that our work-oriented Western world ignores to the peril of its health. In today’s community as Christian faith fades, society’s standards fall, and economic competition becomes more cutthroat, the historic function of the Christian day of rest as a bulwark against employers’ demands for a seven-day week is being increasingly circumvented, and the outlook is somewhat bleak.
2. The goodness of pleasure. This has already been discussed, so here I merely quote the pregnant words of Ecclesiastes 8:15: “I commend the enjoyment of life,” and move on.
3. The rightness of festivity. The Bible is full of feasts. In Leviticus 23 six “holy convocations,” at which work was prohibited, were prescribed for Israel each year; they are called “appointed feasts.” In John 2 Jesus is found at a wedding feast, miraculously creating extra wine. The fact that his critics were able to dismiss him as “a glutton and a drunkard” (Matt. 11:19) shows that such festal celebrations were a recurring part of his life. All through the Bible the feast table is the place and the emblem of refreshing, celebratory fellowship—a very proper leisure activity and certainly one to encourage.
4. The reality of stewardship. We are stewards of all the time God gives us, of all the abilities and skills that are ours, and of all the opportunities offered to us. We are also stewards of our own bodies and of this earth. Stewardship means responsibility for managing, caring for, and making the most of the resources God commits to our trust, and doing it in a way that squares with his known wishes. That does not in any way diminish our freedom to make use of created things for our enjoyment, but it does mean that in doing so we shall take care not to seem to approve what is immoral and demoralizing, nor to expose others to unhelpful influences, nor to play with fire ourselves. The Puritans closed theaters not because they did not enjoy drama but because the theaters of their day were immoral and demoralizing places.
In a positive sense, recognition of our stewardship—both its privileges and its responsibilities—should incline us to choose the leisure activities that bring us closest to God, to people, to beauty, and to all that ennobles. “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Phil. 4:8). We should not let the mediocre become the enemy of the good in leisure activity any more than we should let the good become the enemy of the best.
THE PLACE OF PLEASURE
A quick review of what was spelled out in the previous chapter is all that is needed at this point in our discussion. What is pleasure? As was noted earlier, Webster defines it as “the gratification of the senses or of the mind; agreeable sensations or emotions; the feeling produced by enjoyment or the expectation of good.” Like joy, it is a gift of God, but whereas joy is basically active (one rejoices), pleasure is basically passive (one is pleased). As God himself takes pleasure in being God and in doing what he does,9 so he means human beings to find pleasure in being his.
God values pleasure, both his and ours, and it is his pleasure to give us pleasure as a fruit of his saving love. In the order of creation, pleasures as such are meant to serve as signposts directing us to God, which is why we must appreciate them rather than renounce them. Being greedy for pleasures is ungodly, but being grateful for pleasures is one aspect of reverence and worship. Calvin and the Puritans, as we saw, were clear and strong in this. It is supremely ironic, and pathetic and tragic too, that after two millennia of Christian culture, the West should now be plunging back into a self-defeating hedonism horribly similar to the barbaric pagan lifestyle of the first century, and that it should be doing so in the belief that the Christian religion is basically anti-human because it does not set up pleasing oneself as life’s highest value. But Calvin’s wisdom about pleasure remains basic to authentic Christian living in this or any age.
THE USE OF TREASURE
Should I apologize for dignifying our money with the label “treasure,” when the word suggests something of enormous value, even though I know firsthand that I—and I suspect most of my readers—do not rate among the world’s wealthy? Not necessarily. One does not have to have a lot of money for it to become “my precious,” as Gollum constantly calls the fateful ring in J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic, and for it to affect one as Jelly-Roll Morton sang that jazz affected him—“The more I have, the more I want, it seems; I page old Doctor Jazz in my dreams.”10 Small sums of money are almost more effective than large ones in grabbing the heart and setting one dreaming and scheming about ways of getting more.
In his wise and searching book, Money, Possessions and Eternity, Randy Alcorn quotes Cyprian’s description of the affluent of his day: “Their property held them in chains . . . chains which shackled their courage and choked their faith and hampered their judgment and throttled souls. . . . They think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned; enslaved as they are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.” Alongside this Alcorn sets the testimony of John Wesley, whose word to his preachers and society members was: “Gain all you can, save all you can, give all you can. . . . Money never stays with me. It would burn me if it did. I throw it out of my hands as soon as possible, lest it find its way into my heart.”11 From these quotations the impossibility that Jesus announced—that of serving both God and mammon (money)—becomes plain (Matt. 6:24). A conscious refusal to serve money is therefore a necessary part of the Christian lifestyle, as the following quotations show:
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. (Matt. 6:19-21)
Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share. In this way they will lay up treasures for themselves as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of the life that is truly life. (1 Tim. 6:17-19)
The point is plain. Money is for giving, and it is to be used to do good. Since all the money we have is God’s gift to us, it is not to be loved and hoarded or laid out for purely selfish purposes. Rather, it is to be stewarded for the service of God and one’s neighbor. So generosity linked to frugality, rather than conspicuous consumption, must mark the Christian. If that means that he or she cannot keep up with the world’s wealthiest Joneses, well, so be it. There are in any case more important things to do.
COUNTERCULTURAL
In a post-Christian era such as ours in the West, an authentic Christian lifestyle—with its built-in balance of work and leisure, worship and witness, self-denial and self-giving for the glory of God and the good of others—is bound to seem countercultural and implicitly censorious. That is what happened in the pre-Christian world of first-century Graeco-Roman paganism and in the pre-evangelical world of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, where the Puritans sought the conversion of their country and became highly unpopular for doing so. Some unpopularity is inseparable from the practice of consistent Christianity, and we had better brace ourselves to meet it; for as things stand now in the West, it can only increase. But as Jesus has told us, “wisdom is proved right by her actions” (Matt. 11:19). The motto of the first institution at which I taught was “Be right and persist”; that is a word in season for all who would honor their Lord by their lives today.