Living in a New Reality

But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who in his testimony before Pontius Pilate made the good confession, to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he will display at the proper time—he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen." (1 Timothy 6:11-16, ESV)

While I know better, I always implicitly think that sanctification is all about me doing things better. I am a gossip, and in order to live a more Godly life, I have to stop lying. This in itself is not misleading. It's true...in order to be more Christlike, I need to stop gossiping. But if that's all I get, then I've got it wrong. As it were, to borrow from a friend, I'm just stapling on fruit of the Spirit to a body that really isn't more sanctified than when I started. While doing things better and living by the law is certainly a desired result of sanctification, it isn't the mechanism by which we get there.

So what is? How do we become more Christ-like? Well, I don't have all the answers, but this I know is integral to the whole enterprise: living in a new reality. By acknowledging the kingship of Jesus, we also acknowledge that the world we now live in runs by different rules and realities. In the above passage from 1 Timothy, Paul exhorts Timothy to be good: to pursue righteousness, love, faith, godliness, and to fight the good fight of the faith. But attaining these things doesn't simply mean we try harder next time we fail. That's legalism and self-righteousness. What informs, drives, and fuels our quest towards sanctification is actually our love towards Jesus and what He's done for us. It means living in the new reality that He's given us.

Notice what Paul says. Immediately after telling Timothy to be good, he then tells him to take hold of the reality of his eternal life, provided for by Christ. The Greek here indicates that to "take hold" of eternal life means to posses it or own it. I don't know about you, but being told that you will live forever in peace with God and man has a way of changing one's perspective on life. If you really rest on the promise of eternal life, then you start living a different way. You begin to live as a subject of the King Who has both graciously saved you and Who will judge you as well. That changes things. For example, if I know that I have eternal life and that God in Christ is making all things new, then the things of this world grow strangely dim. This new reality begins to eradicate the old idolatrous one that kept telling me to gossip. Someone who truly understands the big picture of God's redemption doesn't gossip anymore because gossiping begins to seem like a silly thing to do when God's grace is so much better. It loses its appeal.

Again, notice that Paul calls Timothy (and us) to live in the new reality that Christ is coming again (verse 14). The problem with you and me and our indwelling sin is not that we haven't tried hard enough to get rid of it or that we're not sorry enough for it. The problem is really only that we don't fully believe and trust the promise that we have eternal life and that He is coming again. We don't fully believe that He is the only God, Who has saved us. It's not a matter of effort, but a matter of trust.

My own immediate personal reaction to this is actually dangerous. If I'm told that I don't have enough faith or trust, then the first thing I want to do is to try really hard to get more faith and trust. But that's actually just me trying hard again and relying on my own power. What I really need is to hear the old, old story again. I need to be told of God's steadfast covanental love over and over again, in sermon and song and book and sacrament and relationship. And through these things, God through His Spirit begins to change my heart into one that trusts His. And then we start to look more like Him. And we shouldn't worry too much that we never have enough faith. Sure, it is sin, but the promise of Scripture is that we don't become perfectly like Him until we get into the New Creation. Rather, our honest cry should be that of the father in Mark 9: "I believe; help my unbelief!" He died for that too, and He'll bring us home in spite of it. We would do well to remember that.