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After a great conversation with a good friend today, I tweeted the following:
“There is nothing more deadly to a life of obedience to Christ than the status quo of the genuinely good Christians around us”
Like many things stated on Twitter, I felt that the space lacked the space and context to give my meaning its due. Therefore, I think it might be helpful to unpack what I mean (and don’t mean).
Most Christians want to live lives of obedience to Jesus. We want to, in all things, seek His kingdom first, trusting that everything else we need, God will provide. We want to be more like Jesus- truly loving God and loving others with our whole lives.
We want to, but we rarely ever do. Why?
There are many reasons, but one critical one is that most of us find ourselves in the comfortable equilibrium of the Christian status quo. This is not something others do to us, but something we participate in and co-create- I say that in order to make it clear that I am not suggesting anyone’s mediocrity (including my own) are anyone’s fault but their own. When I consider the status quo, I can think of two central dangers that we face, one obvious, the other subtle (and thus more dangerous even than the first).
The first reason is obvious: settling for the status quo is just that- settling. We only go so far as to do what is most commonly accepted by most people. There might be those who are “exceptional”, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. We use their very “exceptionality” to justify our own mediocrity.
The second reason the status quo is deadly is more subtle precisely because it uses the status quo as the standard by which “exceptionality” is measured. In other words, we can justify our mediocrity (which is a fancy word for disobedience/sin) by simply being better than the status quo. We can convince ourselves that we are doing enough because we are doing more than most other Christians. We are never to compare ourselves to other Christians. If we want to use comparisons to evaluate our righteousness, then there is only one person to whom we can compare: Jesus.
Jesus calls us- no, He command us to seek His kingdom first and foremost. All the excuses and concerns we have to justify mediocrity, He promises that He will take care of all the necessary details.
What mediocrity are you justifying in your life? Where is the kingdom waiting to take over in your life that you’ve not yet given God permission to have?
