“Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit living in us.” (1 Timothy 1:14)
What does Paul mean when he writes, “Guard the good treasure entrusted to you?”
Does he mean, “Keep thinking the right things about the Gospel and the work of God in Christ?” Probably. Paul definitely thought how we understand the Gospel mattered. Time after time he writes to the churches in the Mediterranean about what they should believe.
Was he arguing that Timothy should take issue with those who disagreed with Paul? Probably. Paul was certainly not opposed to naming heresy where he encountered it. And when he did, he could be really pointed about it.
But I am certain that when he urged Timothy to “guard the good treasure,” he also meant, “Live into the truth of the Gospel. Let it take shape in your life. Be fearless in the way that you live.”
Should that matter?
Of course. From beginning to end, the biblical notion of truth is not that it is just something credible and believable. It has to be a truth that we live into. After all, if it doesn’t change your life, why talk about the Gospel at all?
But what we believe is also clearly important because it makes a difference – not just in our own lives — but in what people experience of us, as witnesses to the vitality of our faith.
When that isn’t apparent, the results are predictable. I no longer remember how many people I have heard say, “I am not a Christian because they aren’t different from other people.” Or, “I am not a Christian because I have watched Christians do things they say are wrong.” Always, when we fail our faith the bottom-line is the same: “Christians are just hypocrites.”
Now, I know, there are real problems with this complaint. One, no ideal – Christian ideals or any other ideal, for that matter – is rendered illegitimate because its advocates don’t live up to the standard. If that were the case, there isn’t any ideal that we would endorse: Mother love, fatherhood, honesty, integrity. You name it, and I’ll give you an example of someone who has failed that ideal.
And, the other problem with the hypocrisy complaint is that everyone is a hypocrite, if you what you mean that is that we fail our ideals. All of us can name occasions when – if we are honest – we would be forced to admit, “Man, I dropped the ball.” “I could have been better.”
That said, living into the call of God on our lives matters. Yes, church is a hospital for sinners. It isn’t a resort for the sinless. We won’t always get the Christian journey right.
But, at the same time, we can’t hide behind our status as forgiven sinners. If you went into the hospital and went out the front door with the same illness, the same broken bones, the same bruised body, you would be reporting the hospital to the authorities. And, similarly, if recovering sinners aren’t making progress morally and spiritually, then something is wrong.
This means, then, that the journey to Christian maturity requires a fearless moral inventory. Don’t get me wrong. I not encouraging you to be perfectionists, undone by every misstep you take. To use an older term for it, I am not endorsing scrupulosity – the tendency to rake over our lives time and time again, looking for shortcomings.
What I am talking about is an honest conversation with Jesus about the depth of our commitment. That interior conversation that allows us to ask, “Am I fearlessly following Jesus or are we holding back?” And the kind of conversation that allows us to step into deeper water.
To answer that question, especially as it applies to moral formation, we need to ask ourselves, “What do I think that my walk with Christ requires and why do I believe that way of behaving is important?”
To answer that question, it is helpful to know that there are three levels at which we can live.
The first – and the level at which far too many people live – is the meme level. You see this level constantly on social media:
“At this house we believe in love and science.”
“If you feel sorry for unborn babies, why don’t you care about the victims of gun violence?”
“My rights don’t begin where your feelings end.”
You can tell just what little reflection that this level of moral formation requires. Memes are never much more than 10 to 15 words. They leave you asking basic questions, “Like what do any of these words mean?” And they aren’t really reasons for a particular kind of behavior.
More often than not, they are actually designed to infer that other people are stupid for not believing what we believe; and they are designed to imply that we are enlightened and that people who disagree with us are not.
The problem with living on the meme level, though, is that you can’t stay and follow Jesus. Jesus isn’t interested in what you think about other people. He isn’t interested in your ability to make fools out of them or in our clever attempts to make ourselves look smart.
And when people realize that they are living on the meme level, they often struggle to get to level two: “The reason for the meme.” When people get there, they say other things:
“All you need is love.”
“We need to respect the dignity of other human beings.”
This is definitely a deeper level of reasoning and people who live here usually end up using more words than I have provided here. And in a world dominated by memes and snarky images, we should be thankful that at least some people do enough moral assessment to get a bit deeper.
But “the reasons for the meme” level leaves too many questions unanswered: “What is love? “What is dignity?” “Who says human beings have dignity?” After all, there are civilizations and millions of people who don’t believe either love or dignity.
It’s then, if we are listening, that the questions, “What?” and “Why?”, take us to the third level, where we ask foundational questions. And, for Christians, those foundational questions are the God-given reasons for what we believe and why we live the way that we do.
When people get to that level, the reasoning is very different: We believe in love because God is perfect love. Love would not exist without God. He creates in love. God’s love is an unconditional commitment to our well-being and healing. He creates to foster relationships with himself and with one another.
We deserve to be treated with dignity because we are created in God’s image, and what God has created in his image is inherently deserving of care, respect, and nurture. That is true no matter what other people think. It is written into the very fabric of creation.
This is where what AA describes as a “fearless moral inventory” should take us: It should take us to God-given reasons for what we believe. And we should engage Jesus in a conversation about the depths into which those reasons can take us.
We should be prepared, though, to accept that those God-given reasons will leave us living in tension with the world around us.
- Some people will act in the ways we feel compelled to act. But they won’t share our reasons. But we need to know what our God-given reasons are, we need to live out their grounding in our experience of God, and we need to witness to that experience.
- No one’s politics will conform perfectly to the will of Jesus for our lives. The will of God is lived out in the body of Christ, not in the politics of our country. And our politicians have no inherent obligation to either own or understand our faith. And here is the hard truth: For that reason, you cannot look to partisan politics to provide you with moral guidance as a Christian and if you are, then you are living in shallow water.
- And, as much as we love the country and the culture in which we live, if we are on that spiritual journey, we will always be uncomfortable in one way or another with what our culture offers by way of any reason for doing things.
But that tension isn’t the point – though it may suggest you are moving in the right direction.
The reason for thinking about our motivations for why we live is this: If we believe that there are God-given truths out there to guide us, if we believe that morality isn’t what you make it, then a courageous moral inventory is meant to lead us into the heart of God.
Now as I reflected on this subject, I worried that some readers would conclude, “So, you are telling me that I need a degree in moral philosophy.” But that isn’t the case. In fact, that kind of study might not do you any good.
What you need we have been given.
We have been given the guidance of Scripture. The inspiration of the church’s tradition. The witness of the church over the millennia. The guidance of the Holy Spirit. We have been given the church’s sacraments and the prayers of the people. And we have been given the church, the body of Christ.
One of the errors of Protestantism — and particularly American Protestantism — has been an emphasis on the individual. Not in that it emphasized the importance of choice but in that it implied that we can make the journey into spiritual maturity alone.
We can’t. We need God. We need one another. We need a hospital for sinners. And there we can find all we need and we will be able to guard the treasure we have been given.
Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash
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