5. Love, Believe, Live
5
Love, Believe, Live
Good faith Christians are a counterculture for the common good.
Given the challenges Christians face, from both outside and inside the church, living with good faith is our way forward into an uncertain future. We must be the people of God who, rather than being defined only by what we are against, are also defined by what we are for.
There are so many good faith Christians who often go unheralded. Consider how these Christians and organizations are living out good faith in their communities.
Lisa Jo encourages moms through her blogging and writing in Virginia.
Jim talks about Jesus in natural, unforced ways with his house-painting customers in Seattle.
Mission Year provides students with an opportunity to serve together for one year for the benefit of a city neighborhood and then to incorporate what they learn into their future lives.
Jeff teaches high school students in Denver to love C. S. Lewis.
Ruth brings her faith to work styling clients’ hair in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Simon and Marianne adopted two kids with learning and behavioral difficulties near London, England.
Southlake Church in Portland, Oregon, began a national Churches Adopting Schools program that is reshaping how Christians invest in local education.
Tarien helps teenagers create art and learn to design in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Lori lives and works among Muslims in a place she can’t divulge.
The New York communities of Trinity Grace Church support Sarah Frazier’s South Bronx–based House on Beekman, which serves children living under the poverty line.
Ben leads a team that rescues modern-day slaves, victims of human trafficking, in Manchester, England.
Josh has developed a reputation in Phoenix for encouraging his fellow college students to pray and study the Scriptures.
Jessica helps young families reimagine their quality time together in Boston.
In Sydney, Australia, Mike supports Christians enduring persecution in places where being a Christian isn’t just extreme or irrelevant but illegal.
Jill is the school sports photographer and prayer supporter and is raising three Jesus-loving kids in Ventura, California.
Rebekah is shaping three young souls too and writes books in Nashville, Tennessee.
(Disclosure: Jill and Rebekah are the best moms, and wives, on the planet.)
All of these people and millions more are faithfully doing the thing the Lord has put in front of them—whether big, small, or in between—regardless of whether they get credit or kudos. This is living in good faith.
We have covered much about our cultural context, problems, and areas of confusion in the previous chapters. Now we want to lay out a few big ideas to help Christians stake all of this conceptual stuff to the ground.
Talking about good faith is nice, but how do we know if we’re getting it right?
The Bible and Good Faith
Nobody debates whether “good” means something beneficial or whether “doing good” is a worthy aim. Everyone wants “good” in the world. But our individual definitions of good, and means of achieving it, differ by a wide mile.
To arrive at a Christian understanding of good, we start with the Bible. We want God to be the source of our notions about good, so we need a biblically grounded picture of what we’re shooting for when we say we want to be people of good faith.
You might be surprised to find that good is a common theme in the Bible. One of our favorite verses, and one that effectively captures the theme of this book, is from Hebrews: “Let us think of ways to motivate one another to acts of love and good works” (10:24).
But good goes back much, much further in God’s story. In fact, we find good at the very beginning—when the Creator surveys his handiwork and sees that it is good (see Gen. 1). We see in the biblical account of God’s earliest work in the world a picture of what he means by good: his creation is orderly and right, abundant and generous, beautiful and flourishing with life and relationships.
The New Testament echoes the theme that the people of God are to be agents of good. For example:
What does this brief overview show us? It ought to hit us between the eyes that good is for the benefit of others. Although these verses are from the New Testament, good is a theme as old as the covenant God made with Abraham: blessed to be a blessing (see Gen. 12). Gabe’s work in the last few years has focused a great deal on helping Christians understand our calling and responsibility to be restorers. In and through Christ, we are to be agents of restoration, putting right the effects of a broken, bent, and disordered world.
Living in good faith means helping the world and the people in it to be orderly and right, abundant and generous, beautiful and flourishing with life and relationships—just as God created them to be.
Good.
But this brings us to a second point about good according to Scripture: we have no real ability to be or to generate good on our own. “Whatever is good . . . is a gift coming down to us from God our Father” (James 1:17). This means that good works done with wrong motives can still have a positive impact. The effect of hot food on a hungry person doesn’t depend on our motivation. The road to irrelevance is paved with overthinking.
At the same time, when it comes to maturing in good faith, motivation matters a great deal. If we are trying to “motivate one another to acts of love and good works” for the sake of our own reputation, to make ourselves look good, to generate positive publicity, or to make people like us more, we are getting good wrong. Our good works should cause others to praise the Father, not us. If we are trying to do good works to make ourselves worthy of God’s love, we are getting good wrong. Our good works should be a response of selfless love toward others in thanks for Jesus’s unconditional love for us.
With these biblical perspectives on good in mind, let’s turn to how we can make good our faith in Jesus.
Love, Believe, Live
If you are a chef, you know that to make a great dish you need the right ingredients. Ever tasted a cake missing a key ingredient? Ugh! It just plain tastes bad.
Good faith relies on three essential ingredients. Skip any of them and it goes sour. Unfortunately, a lot of faith walking around these days just plain tastes bad.
The secret recipe for good faith boils down to this: how well you love, what you believe, and how you live. If you don’t have all three, your faith isn’t good—it’s half-baked. This may sound judgmental or harsh to otherwise well-meaning believers, but we mean these words in the most caring way possible. We care about the Christian community and sincerely believe good faith in today’s cultural climate requires all three ingredients.
Love
Good faith starts with loving God and loving others—the great commandment. Jesus summarizes God’s law like this: love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind, and love other people as yourself (see Matt. 22:37–40). Our friend Steve Garber says Christians’ biggest challenge today is that we’ve learned to love the wrong things. So true! We need rightly ordered love to be people of good faith.
When we are missing the ingredient of love, we lack humility. We all know Christians who believe the right things and appear to live faithfully, but their arrogance is abrasive and off-putting. “I’m just telling the straight truth,” they say, as though truth needs an adjective. If we’re honest with ourselves, each of us who holds orthodox belief in high regard struggles with this from time to time. We must be wary of becoming like the self-righteous religious leaders of Jesus’s day who hijacked God’s revelation to suit their own purposes.
Thinking about our earlier definition of good, we might say that one indicator of a lack of love is a laser-like focus on good as orderly and right to the exclusion of the other equally important facets of biblical goodness. We may be orderly and right, but, as Paul says, without love we’re a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (see 1 Cor. 13:1).
Believe
The next ingredient of good faith is biblical orthodoxy. What we believe matters. The two of us are committed Jesus-followers, so it should come as no surprise that we believe the Christian take on reality represents “the most comprehensive life system that answers all of humanity’s age-old questions.”1 We believe Christianity makes the most sense of the beauty (God’s design) and the horror (the fall) of human experience. Understanding and believing the creation-fall-redemption-restoration story at the heart of Christian orthodoxy help us make sense of where we come from, what’s wrong, how we can fix it, and what our purpose is in this world. To people of good faith, theology matters. It allows us to identify and correct distortions in the world, in the church, and in our own thinking. (We are committed evangelicals and claim a particular theological tradition,2 but in this book, we aim to be as broadly orthodox as possible so that mainline, Orthodox, and Catholic believers can adapt and apply these ideas to their traditions as well.)
When we don’t believe rightly, we are confused or outright mistaken about God’s intent for human flourishing. We embrace distortions about God, humanity, or the world. To give an extreme example, many people sincerely believe that pornography is simply a normal expression of human sexuality. This belief is either true or it’s not. (It’s not.) Many people, even many Christians, honestly believe that sex before marriage is a healthy sexual choice. This belief is either true or it’s not. (It’s not.)
There is a difference between good beliefs (orderly, right, flourishing with life and relationships) and bad ideas.
Discerning the difference has nothing to do with loving people, and we must avoid the temptation to base our beliefs on how we think they might sound to others. Younger Christians, in particular, seem to be tempted in this way, to embrace a distorted truth in order to maintain a friendship. But good love and good belief can and do coexist. (This is where the third ingredient comes in.) In fact, without good belief, we can’t know for certain how to love people well.
Live
Finally, how we live our love and belief is the third ingredient of good faith. How do we translate our love and our beliefs into everyday living? Are our interactions with people a clear reflection of our love for God and others? Do we understand the implications of orthodoxy for how we live, work, and relate?
This ingredient is crucial, the one that ties the whole recipe together.
When we don’t have a coherent pattern of living, one that expresses both good love and good belief, we lack confidence that faith matters in the world and feel incapable of bringing love and orthodoxy to bear on everyday life. You probably know Christians who seem to lack the language or the tools they need to engage the world around them. They genuinely love others. They believe the right things. But they don’t know how to channel their love and belief from heart and head into their daily lives.
No one can have good faith without this recipe.
How well we love + What we believe + How we live = Good Faith
When we combine the perfect mix of all three, our faith is good.
Good Faith Is Countercultural
When communities of Jesus-followers commit to living good faith, the results can be summed up like this: Christians are a counterculture for the common good. Being countercultural, in this definition, is not only about addressing age-old issues from a gospel-centered perspective. It’s not about raising our voices to drown out dissenters or making laws to make everyone behave nicely. It’s not about plastering Jesus’s name across billboards and T-shirts or creating a “Christian” alternative to every secular product or service. While some well-intentioned believers take these approaches, by “countercultural” we mean something different.
Being countercultural means bringing good faith—a vision for what is orderly and right, abundant and generous, beautiful and flourishing with life and relationships—to the broader culture. This vision is not just an individual pursuit; it is best expressed in communities of faith where believers love and care for one another well and then invite others in to experience the same grace.
Christians and churches that live this way find not only that their faith becomes more alive but also that their collective impact on their communities is deeper. In our research, the results of which are shown in the table, large majorities of practicing Christians, especially Millennials and evangelicals, report two confident attitudes. They feel they are “a force for good,” and they feel they are “essential.” In other words, if they were to go away, their communities would notice.
This is the fruit of living good faith.
Good Faith in Society
Thinking about your faith, how do you feel, personally, in society today?
% “very” + “somewhat” accurate
% US Adults
% Evangelicals
% Practicing Christians
% Practicing Christian Millennials
% Other Faiths
A force for good
88
98
93
91
88
Accepted
81
57
78
74
61
Essential
75
93
86
77
76
Empowered
69
71
78
81
76
Distinctive
60
86
76
73
72
Countercultural
31
42
40
62
31
N
base: people who consider themselves a “person of faith”
Interestingly, countercultural is the word Christians identify with least among the options—yet even still, 42 percent of evangelicals, 40 percent of practicing Christians, and a whopping 62 percent of practicing Christian Millennials say this is a “very” or “somewhat” accurate description of their feelings related to their faith in society. We fervently pray that these numbers will grow during the next decade as more Jesus-followers understand that being countercultural doesn’t mean condemning but offering a better way, as we described above.
Jesus offers us a vivid picture of being countercultural in his parable of the good Samaritan recorded in Luke 10:30–37. (He didn’t give the story its title, by the way.) After two thousand years of Christians reading, preaching, and telling this story to children, it has morphed from a countercultural shock wave into a nice morality tale about being kind to others. But the day he told it, in response to the question “Who is my neighbor?” it was nothing less than a category-redefining mind shift for his listeners.
Minds were blown.
Jesus’s response to the question was a far-fetched tale of two men divided by race, religion, and politics brought together when one of them came with the biblical idea of good to the side of the road where the other lay dying. He got off his donkey and started restoring the broken, bent, and disordered man in the ditch. Which is all very wonderful and life affirming and made-for-TV-movie . . . except the good man is not us.
The one who brings orderly, right, abundant, generous, beautiful, and flourishing goodness to a broken man is the person we would least expect. To a Christian audience of today, Jesus might have said the good Samaritan is a bisexual, atheist, burlesque dancer with one of those Darwin-amphibians-eating-a-Jesus-fish bumper stickers.
And the broken man is us.
It’s really not a very nice story.
Before we can run around doing good, we must acknowledge our need to be healed and restored. That kind of humility is at the heart of good faith. Loving well, believing rightly, and living out our love and belief start here. If we can get that right, we’re ready to tackle the tricky, treacherous issues that threaten to derail good conversations when people of faith live at the intersection of good love and right belief.