12. The God Who Gathers And Transforms His People
12
The God Who Gathers and Transforms His People
In one of his more recent books, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, the articulate and very interesting atheist and critic of Christianity Christopher Hitchens argues that the entire record of religion—all religion—is toward war, hatred, and strife, whether it is the Protestant-Catholic strife of Belfast in recent decades, or Beirut between peoples of Christian and Muslim heritage, or Belgrade or Baghdad or Bombay. All around the world religion poisons everything. It has to be said that there is some truth to the charge. It is not for nothing that centuries back the Thirty Years’ War was at least in substantial measure a war of religion.
The reason that there is some truth to the charge Hitchens levels is that one of the things that religion does—all religion—is to treat some issues as matters of staggering importance. Today the current round of dominant terrorists are Muslims, and undoubtedly they would like to see Islamic culture and faith enjoy a bigger share of the world’s financial and cultural pie. But what makes their beliefs crushingly important in their own eyes is their conviction that they represent the mind of God himself.
Mind you, it has also been shown by Alister McGrath in his book on atheism[1]that if you do not have religion to transcendentalize things, you end up transcendentalizing something else. In other words, the act of making something out to be of transcendental importance is not exclusively a function of religion. It may be a function of human desire to control. In the twentieth century, the powerful movements of Nazism and Stalinism were not religiously driven. Some in the Nazi party laid claim to their reconstruction of Christianity, but the purpose was to domesticate Christianity and harness its energies. In reality, what drove the two movements—Nazism and Stalinism—were distinct visions of reality: on the one hand, the transcendentalizing of ethnicity, a sense of intrinsic Aryan superiority, a hate-filled blaming of Jews and of the Treaty of Versailles; on the other hand, a transcendentalizing of the state grounded in Marxist social and economic theory. So it is not as if religion poisons everything while everything else is good. The century characterized by the greatest bloodshed, the twentieth century, generated most of its violence in movements that were distinctly anti-religious. The world did not lose one-third of the population of Cambodia because of Christianity but because of communism.
Nevertheless, Christianity has had its fanatics. Still, the notion of fanaticism needs to be analyzed. Probably most people think that Christians can be placed on a spectrum between nominalism (Christians in name only) and fanaticism (Christians who are extremely intense about their beliefs and morals). On this scale, we might be most drawn to the middle of the scale, to the nice moderates. The problem is that the scale itself is mischievous. It assumes that Christianity itself is primarily about effort and moral improvement, so that the high-intensity end of the scale is peopled with self-righteous, over-confident, superior, condescending folk who are, at best, terribly off-putting.
Yet that is not what Christianity is about. Where one sees that Christianity is being lived out in a fashion reasonably faithful to the Bible’s emphasis on salvation by grace, on what God has done for us in Christ and not on what we have achieved, it ought to change everything. Tim Keller writes,
Belief that you are accepted by God by sheer grace is profoundly humbling. The people who are fanatics, then, are not so because they are too committed to the gospel, but because they are not committed enough.
Think of people you consider fanatical. They’re overbearing, self-righteous, opinionated, insensitive, and harsh. Why? It’s not because they are too Christian but because they are not Christian enough. They are fanatically zealous and courageous, but they are not fanatically humble, sensitive, loving, empathetic, forgiving, or understanding—as Christ was. . . . What strikes us as overly fanatical is actually a failure to be fully committed to Christ and his gospel.[2]
If you really do drink deeply from what we have been seeing in the Bible and see that ultimately our hope is in God’s grace, it changes everything. This is why biblical Christianity has always had within its heritage the capacity to challenge and reform itself: it returns to the grace of God. That is why, however ghastly and defenseless the Crusades were, it is the Christian heritage in the West that has apologized for them countless times. After all, Islam took over the Middle East first with equal bloodthirstiness, and there is no trace in the heritage of Islam of any apology for any of it.
Thus the slavery that was enacted and developed in the West, in which Christians participated, was also eventually destroyed by Christians who were trying to become more biblical and who challenged the entire wretched enterprise. Thomas Sowell analyzes what took place under Wilberforce and other Christian leaders in Great Britain until first the slave trade across the Atlantic and then eventually slavery itself was abolished in the British Empire. He notes that what drove the abolition movement initially were evangelical Christians determined to put a stop to an evil, and eventually enough public opinion was mobilized over successive generations of government officials that the antislavery movement was pushed further and further to its logical conclusion.[3]
Despite revisionist arguments advanced to prove that abolitionists had discovered it was more economical to abolish slavery than to maintain it, the realities were very different. For example, when slavery was finally abolished, the British government undertook to pay all the great sugarcane farmers of Jamaica and elsewhere under the British crown the price of the slaves to free them. The promise was for half the national GDP, and they undertook it not because it was going to save them money but because of Christian influence regarding what is right and wrong. That does not justify in the slightest all the wickedness that was done beforehand, but it does remind us that although the Bible can be used in all kinds of shameful ways, it can ground followers of Jesus so deeply in the sheer grace of God that entire ethical systems are transformed. When you come across what the gospel is genuinely about, it is humbling. It does not make people arrogant. It transforms them.
In the previous chapter we saw how the cross of Jesus is the ground of our reconciliation. God propitiates himself. He sets aside his own wrath because he is the God of love. He satisfies his sense of justice in the person of his own dear Son and in grace reconciles ungrateful rebels to himself. The result is that they come to him humbly, not imagining for a moment that they are doing him a favor. Quite the reverse: they take hold of this reconciliation, this justification from God, by faith. We saw that this salvation is granted by grace alone and received by faith alone. This is true for Jews and Gentiles alike.
In other letters written by Paul, however, the apostle develops his argument in slightly different directions. What I shall do in the remainder of this chapter is a bit different from what I have usually done. Instead of focusing primarily on one short passage or chapter from the Bible, I shall cite a handful of passages at length and offer some brief comments along the way so that you can hear Paul’s argument with slightly different emphases, emphases that insist that the Good News about Christ and his cross, what the Bible calls “the gospel,” calls out people, gathers them together, and transforms them. Any so-called Christianity that does not incorporate this reality into its vision is not worthy of the name it carries.
Ephesians 2:1–22
Paul is writing to believers in the city of Ephesus, and he describes their conversion:
1As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air [that’s a way that Paul alludes to Satan, our old friend from Genesis 3], the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath [which is, of course, exactly what we discovered in the first two and a half chapters of Romans]. 4But because of his great love for us [despite the fact that we deserve the wrath!], God, who is rich in mercy, 5made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6And God raised us up with Christ [that is, Christ’s life is now ours] and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus [God now views us as acceptable in his very presence as Christ himself is; we are united to him; that’s the way God sees us, belonging to Christ and therefore enjoying free access to God], 7in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. 8For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith [that sounds like Romans 3]—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—9not by works, so that no one can boast [that again sounds like Romans 3]. 10For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.
Ephesians 2:1–10
In other words, Paul’s concerns are not restricted to seeing men and women legally acquitted before God and nothing more. Certainly the guilt must be dealt with. The ground of God’s wrath must be set aside. God himself must be propitiated. The sin must be expiated. But that still leaves me functionally a sinner. True, we need to be reconciled to this God; but we ourselves must be changed.
We witnessed this theme when we surveyed what the new birth is about (in chapter 8), but now we are discovering something similar, but with different terminology, in the writings of the apostle Paul. “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10, emphasis added). There must be transformation, for this is God’s very purpose in salvation, in his “handiwork.” This change, this new creation, this handiwork of God within us empowers us so that we will do good works—not because the good works have secured our place in God but precisely because they are the inevitable outcome of it.
In fact, if you recall, Romans 3 talks about Jews and Gentiles, both under wrath, both being saved by grace through faith. Paul now talks about Jews and Gentiles again. Observe what he says as he goes on in this chapter of Ephesians:
11Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (which is done in the body by human hands) [that is, the Jews]—12remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise [that is, the covenant with Abraham and the covenant of law with Moses; you Gentiles are not part of that heritage], without hope and without God in the world. 13But now [with the coming of Christ] in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ [that is, his death on our behalf].
14For he himself is our peace, who has made the two [that is, Jews and Gentiles] one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations [that is, we are no longer under that law-covenant that was only for the Israelites and therefore distinguished them from others]. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace [a new locus of the people of God made up of Jews and Gentiles, people drawn from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, a new humanity], 16and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross [that is, not only reconciling them to each other and thus making peace, but reconciling them to God and thus making peace so that his wrath does not rest on us; all of this the cross achieves], by which he put to death their hostility. 17He came and preached peace to you who were far away [that is, Gentiles] and peace to those who were near [that is, Jews]. 18For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Ephesians 2:11–18, emphasis added
“One Spirit.” I briefly introduced the theme of God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, earlier in this book. A little review will prepare us for learning a little more about him. Sometimes the Bible speaks of God sending his Spirit, but also of the Spirit talking. The Spirit is regularly presented not merely as an abstract power but as somehow like the eternal Word, like the eternal Son, the very self-disclosure, self-manifestation of God himself. Indeed, on the night that he is betrayed and then taken off to trial and crucifixion, Jesus talks at length of the Spirit whom he will send. He calls him the Holy Spirit; he also calls him another word that is harder to translate: parakletos in the original. We sometimes transliterate it Paraclete. It means someone who comes alongside and helps in a variety of ways. For example, in John’s Gospel the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, helps by bringing conviction of sin to people who are otherwise self-righteous. He comes also to be the very presence and manifestation of God now that the Son is going to the cross and rising again and returning to his heavenly abode. It is the Spirit who is poured out upon us as the presence of God himself among us. He is said to be the one who takes up residence in people’s lives, transforming them, giving them power.
Indeed, in Paul’s letters, the Holy Spirit is sometimes called—this is stunning—the down payment or the deposit of the promised inheritance (see 2 Cor. 1:22; 5:5; Eph. 1:14). This promised, ultimate inheritance that we are to receive is a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, along with transformed resurrection bodies, a perfect world. The down payment or deposit of that inheritance, according to Paul, is the Holy Spirit himself. It will take God’s immeasurable power to bring about the ultimate transformation on the last day, but already his formidable power, the same power that raised Jesus from the dead (see Eph. 1:18–21), is at work in us by his Holy Spirit to transform us, to begin the work of changing our hearts and minds.
So Paul talks about this new humanity that forms because of what Christ has done on the cross—a new humanity made up of Jews and Gentiles alike, with the Triune God at work to form it. For Christ came and preached peace to Jews and Gentiles alike (see 2:17), such that through him both groups have access to the Father by the one Spirit—Father, Son, and Spirit at work in this one new humanity. Paul adds:
19Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, 20built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
Ephesians 2:19–22
Here is a vision of Christianity that goes way beyond the individual: it extends to the church. The church is God’s “household.” In another metaphor, the church is a building that is put together to serve as “a holy temple in the Lord,” a building in which Jesus Christ himself is “the chief cornerstone.” In the Old Testament the tabernacle, succeeded by the temple, was the place where God met sinful human beings; we have already seen that in John’s Gospel, Jesus himself is the temple, the place where God meets sinful human beings. But the same language is now applied to the church: this is where the Good News of what Jesus has done is announced, where sinful human beings meet with God. As God displayed his presence in the Old Testament temple, so he does in the church, for God lives in this dwelling “by his Spirit.”
One of the marks of the old covenant believers was circumcision. So important was this sign that Paul can refer to Jews collectively as “the circumcision.” In this new covenant community that he describes, however, made up of Jews, Gentiles, and every other ethnicity, circumcision is no longer a decisive mark. Indeed, elsewhere the New Testament writers teach us that the public sign of becoming a Christian and joining together with other believers in the encouraging discipline of the local church is baptism. In the first century it was simply unthinkable that someone would become a Christian and not simultaneously join a local church and be baptized. For this community has been set free by Christ’s death and resurrection, and empowered by the Holy Spirit himself. This community, the church, is the matrix in which individual believers grow, flourish, are encouraged and admonished, and frequently become leaders themselves.
Something is disastrously awry when the word “church” refers to nothing more than a building, or when a local “church” is made up of many people who do not know God, do not trust Christ, know nothing of having their sins forgiven, and have experienced nothing of the power of the Spirit to transform their lives. That is simply not what the New Testament says the church really is. Imagine the impact on the world if local churches lived out the high privileges Paul here describes.
And Paul can get more practical yet, as we shall see.
Ephesians 4:17–5:10
17So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord, that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their thinking [that is, the Gentiles in their pre-Christian days]. 18They are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts [that sounds like Romans 1: suppressing the truth in unrighteousness]. 19Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, and they are full of greed.
20That, however, is not the way of life you learned 21when you heard about Christ and were taught in him in accordance with the truth that is in Jesus. 22You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; 23to be made new in the attitude of your minds; 24and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Ephesians 4:17–24, emphasis added
“Created”? The power of God in creation in Genesis 1–2 is now being displayed again in a new creation that is every bit as real as the first creation—not yet consummated in the transformation of the ultimate creation but already working out in the lives of believers. Here is a picture of lives transformed by the gospel.
25Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body. 26“In your anger do not sin”: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, 27and do not give the devil a foothold. 28Those who have been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with their own hands, that they may have something to share with those in need.
29Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen. 30And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God [which presupposes that the Holy Spirit is a person; you don’t grieve a power], with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.
Ephesians 4:25–30, emphasis added
“Sealed for the day of redemption” means marked out as God’s because he is already within you, he has already come as the down payment of the promised inheritance. You are set aside for him—so if you live as if none of this has happened, you grieve God as he has disclosed himself by his Spirit within you.
31Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. 32Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.
Ephesians 4:31–32, emphasis added
So we are again back at the cross.
Biblical Christianity does not come along with a lot of pre-packaged rules, as if that were the essence of Christianity. We who are Christian pastors and preachers sometimes get this wrong ourselves. Perhaps we think we discern signs of decay in our culture, and if we are not careful our very first instinct will be to say, “Don’t do that. Do this instead,” and give the impression that we can fix things by imposing a fresh set of rules. You will show how righteous, good, and disciplined you are if you adopt all of these rules in your life. And after all, this text certainly talks about things we should do and should not do: for example, speaking the truth and getting rid of bitterness and malice. Of course there are some moral structures there.
And yet the fundamental Christian motivation is not adherence to more rules. Rather, we are told, “Forgive each other as God in Christ has forgiven you.” God’s Spirit transforms us by bringing us back to the cross so that all of our morality is first and foremost a function of gratitude to God for what Christ has already done. If you begin to see just how much you were forgiven by what Christ did on the cross, how on earth can you possibly nurture bitterness toward others? If you see what is still in store for the future, that you have already received in part by the down payment of the Spirit who strengthens your moral resolve and gives you vistas of a new heaven and a new earth, how can you possibly be locked into the agonizing, painful, limited concerns of a world that will pass away? You are destined for eternity with God Almighty. That changes everything. When there is a moral slide in the church or in the broader world, what we must have more of is an accurate, thick, rich understanding of the gospel, for it transforms us. The Holy Spirit whom Jesus sent empowers us to live in a way that is different from the way we lived before. Everyone who has this life in himself does not live the way he or she used to live. Like the mysterious wind whose effects we can see but whose mechanisms are frequently obscure, we might not understand the mechanisms of the Spirit, but we see the results. So it is with those who are born of God.
So we read:
1Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children 2and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Ephesians 5:1–2
Do you see this intermingling again of God’s love and Christ’s love? “Follow God’s example [who loved us so much he gave his Son] . . . just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (5:1–2, emphasis added). You cannot have one without the other. They are together. And because we have received so much from God in Christ Jesus, and we are the objects of such love, how can we not also love? Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant sacrifice and offering to God.
But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for the Lord’s people.
Ephesians 5:3
That is, it is not simply improper because it is against the law, though doubtless that is true. It is improper because you have been bought with a price. You are the Lord’s people. To play with sexual immorality is to dishonor the Lord, the Lord who loved you even to the death of the cross.
Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place, but rather thanksgiving.
Ephesians 5:4
Thanksgiving is the underpinning of all Christian morality, not least Christian speech.
For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
Ephesians 5:5
Isn’t this statement remarkably penetrating? Greed is idolatry because what you most want becomes your god. What you most urgently pursue becomes your god. Idolatry does not require some little figurine made of stone or clay or pottery or some giant figure of a god somewhere carved out of a mountainside. Idolatry is anything and everything that displaces God, that makes me try to find my identity and place in the universe by appealing to something or someone other than God. Thus greed itself establishes who our real gods finally are. But for Christians? They have been reconciled to God by the death of Christ and have been exposed to something of God’s spectacular glory and grandeur—not least in the cross.
5No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. 6Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. 7Therefore do not be partners with them.
8For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light 9(for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) 10and find out what pleases the Lord.
Ephesians 5:5–10
Here again the change of heart and life that is part and parcel of being a Christian cannot be overlooked. The change of heart has come about such that we want to please the Lord, and we are eager to find out what pleases him. Biblical transformational Christianity gathers men and women together in the church, these people who have been called out—Jew or Gentile, it doesn’t matter—and under the lordship of Christ they look back to the cross and look forward to what is still ahead. By the power of the Spirit and because of the change in their lives, they want to find out what pleases the Lord.
God help us! We who are Christians are still painfully inconsistent in these matters. We still await the final transformation that lies ahead of us. But we look back and see that we are not what we were. The point was well made by John Newton. His name might mean something to you if you saw the film on William Wilberforce, Amazing Grace. John Newton was the old slave trader who had become a preacher of the gospel. Looking back on his life, he estimated that he had transported twenty thousand slaves across the Atlantic. He said that in his nightmares he could still hear them scream. At some point he was genuinely converted. He became a Christian, and his life changed. Eventually he became a pastor. In his senior years, he declared,
I am not what I ought to be—ah, how imperfect and deficient! I am not what I wish to be—I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good! I am not what I hope to be—soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection. Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, “By the grace of God I am what I am.”[4]
“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light (for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth) and find out what pleases the Lord” (Eph. 5:8–10).
Let us look at one more passage with a similar contrast.
Galatians 5:13–26
Much of the argument in Galatians parallels some of what Romans explains: what justification is, what the cross achieves. As soon as you emphasize such things, however, you must also talk about how people need changing. It is not enough for us to stand acquitted before God and be reconciled to him. We must also be transformed. So in Galatians we read:
13You, my brothers and sisters, were called [that is, called when you became Christians] to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another humbly in love. 14For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command [it points in this direction]: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 15If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.
16So I say, walk by the Spirit [the Spirit who has been poured out upon us because of what Christ has achieved], and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. 17For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. 18But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law.
Galatians 5:13–18
So now Paul distinguishes for us the acts of the sinful nature and the fruit of the Spirit. The former are listed first:
19The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like [which pretty much covers it!]. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Galatians 5:19–21
But now over against the acts of the sinful nature stands the fruit of the Spirit. After all, God is the God who not only gathers his people into one community but also transforms them. In one old Christian hymn we sing, “He breaks the power of canceled sin and sets the prisoner free.” That is, he cancels sin through what Christ has done on the cross, but he also pours out his Spirit and enables believers to live differently: he “breaks the power of canceled sin.” So we read,
22But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. 25Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
Galatians 5:22–26
In other words, Christ by his Spirit so begins the work of transformation in the hearts and lives of his followers that two things follow: (1) we are given incentive to “keep in step with the Spirit,” to pursue conduct and attitudes in line with the Spirit of God; conversely, (2) where no transformation at all is evident, there is scant reason for thinking the person is a Christian.
Take Up Your Cross
Another way we can get at this broader theme of God’s gathering and transformation of his people is by considering how he tells his followers to take up their cross. Many New Testament passages adopt expressions like this. One of the most striking comes from the teaching of Jesus himself. After announcing very clearly that he himself must be crucified, he says to his disciples that if they want to be his disciples they “must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Matt. 16:24, emphasis added). Today when people hear expressions like “We all have our cross to bear!” the image is no longer powerful. “Ohhhh,” someone complains, “this horrible toothache! But we all have our cross to bear!” So bearing the cross becomes nothing more than some minor irritation—or a nasty in-law, perhaps. But in the first century no one ever made jokes about crucifixion. In the first century crucifixion was viewed with such horror that in handbooks of conduct parents were told not to talk about crucifixion to their children. If a crucifixion site lies on their route, they should lead their children around that site by taking some other route. You could no more joke about crucifixion in the ancient world than you could joke about Auschwitz today. It was simply unthinkable.
Yet here Jesus has the cheek to say to his disciples, in effect, “Unless you take up your cross, you cannot be my disciple.” Taking up the cross in those circumstances did not mean taking up your particular little bit of suffering. It meant that you pick up the cross-member, the horizontal piece, and carry it out to the place of crucifixion where you will suffer and die. It meant death to self-interest.
Most of us are not going to be crucified in a literal sense, but we follow a Master who was crucified literally. It is as if Jesus now says, “If I have been crucified, don’t you understand? If you are to be my disciple, you must be crucified too”—not, for most of us, in the same physical way he suffered, but in death to self-interest. We are to take up our cross and follow him, coming under his lordship as he himself obeyed his own heavenly Father perfectly.
That is why Paul in another of his letters can say, “For it has been granted to you [Christians] on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for him” (Phil. 1:29). The assertion is stunning. It has been granted to you (that is, as a gracious gift, a grant) not only to believe (faith is a gift) but also to suffer for Jesus (equally a gift!). You take up your cross, and in Christ’s way of looking at it that is a privilege. In the perspective of the earliest Christians, it was such a privilege that when the apostles were first beaten up it is reported of them, “The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” (Acts 5:41).
Amy Carmichael, missionary to India where she rescued hundreds of orphans amidst much suffering, wrote this poem:
Hast thou no scar?
No hidden scar on foot, or side, or hand?
I hear thee sung as mighty in the land;
I hear them hail thy bright, ascendant star.
Hast thou no scar?
Hast thou no wound?
Yet I was wounded by the archers; spent,
Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent
By ravening beasts that compassed Me, I swooned.
Hast thou no wound?
No wound? No scar?
Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,
And piercèd are the feet that follow Me.
But thine are whole; can he have followed far
Who hast no wound or scar?[5]
The insight in this poem springs from a life that abounded in compassion and was ready for self-sacrifice, a life that carefully avoided nurtured self-pity. This is merely the mark of a normal, transformed, Christian life.
Not long ago I read the following paragraph in a journal:
In April 1942, Jacob DeShazer was a bombardier in the Doolittle raid over Japan [that’s the raid that basically turned Tokyo into a furnace]. With four other crewmen, he bailed out. Two of them were executed. The others spent the rest of the war—three years and four months—in prison camps. They were beaten, tortured, and starved. At some point, DeShazer asked for a Bible.
They brought him one, allowing him to keep it for three weeks. “I eagerly began to read its pages,” he later wrote. “I discovered that God had given me new spiritual eyes and that when I looked at the enemy officers and guards who had starved and beaten my companions and me so cruelly, I found my bitter hatred for them changed to loving pity.” He survived, and dedicated his life to missionary work in Japan. One of his converts was Mitsuo Fuchida—the lead pilot in the Pearl Harbor attack. Fuchida became an evangelist. Jacob DeShazer died in Salem, Ore., age 95. R.I.P.[6]
This is a God who gathers and transforms his people.
I must include one more quote. It was written by a self-confessed atheist, Matthew Parris. Parris was born in Nyasaland, now Malawi. He returned after 45 years, and came to a conclusion which, by his own admission, confounded his own atheism:
It confounds my ideological beliefs, stubbornly refuses to fit my world view, and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God. . . . I’ve become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good. . . .
We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world—a directness in their dealings with others—that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
At 24, travelling by land across the continent reinforced this impression. . . . Whenever we entered a territory worked by missionaries, we had to acknowledge that something changed in the faces of the people we passed and spoke to: something in their eyes, the way they approached you direct, man-to-man, without looking down or away. They had not become more deferential towards strangers—in some ways less so—but more open.
This time in Malawi it was the same. I met no missionaries. . . . But instead I noticed that a handful of the most impressive African members of the Pump Aid team (largely from Zimbabwe) were, privately, strong Christians. . . . It would suit me to believe that their honesty, diligence and optimism in their work was unconnected with personal faith. Their work was secular, but surely affected by what they were. What they were was, in turn, influenced by a conception of man’s place in the Universe that Christianity had taught.[7]
Listen: The God who is there, the God who has named himself supremely in Jesus, gathers and transforms his people. Without this transformation so-called Christianity is no Christianity at all. For this God gathers and transforms his people.