Audience of One

Thinking about joy

Recently I’ve been reading quite a lot about the concept of joy in the Christian life. I guess it started back in October at the CU houseparty, with Mike Cain (not Michael Caine) speaking on Philippians 3-4. Unfortunately the talks weren’t recorded (successfully), so I can’t offer you a link to download them – however he gave similar talks which can be downloaded from his former church (free registration required). I was blown away by his first talk especially. In it, Mike challenged all of us to be confident in Christ, and not our own works. Standard Protestant theology then – but so easy to reel off and then forget.

Paul reels off a list of religious credentials second to none: a circumcised Benjamite Jew; a blameless Pharisee who persecuted Christians. He was part of the in crowd, the religious elite. Paul used to look to all of these things for his security. These were the things he thought made him one of God’s people – but now, verse 3 says that we “put no confidence in the flesh”, and that it is those “who glory in Christ Jesus” who are God’s people. Confidence in the flesh is looking to our own efforts to get us into a relationship with God: our assurance of his acceptance is based on our flesh – what we do.

Right at the start of the passage, Paul says we are to “rejoice in the Lord”. So why does he then go on to talk about “those dogs, those men who do evil”? He’s just told us to rejoice and suddenly gets angry, using really strong terms to describe these men. The answer is that putting confidence in the flesh, like these guys were, robs us of our joy. We rejoice in that which saves us, and if we put our confidence in what we’ve done, we won’t rejoice in God.

The truth is that God saves us despite what we’ve done. This is one of the most basic Christian truths – that it is by grace we have been saved. It’s unmerited favour on the part of God. We can’t do anything to deserve it, and so can have utter confidence that whatever we’ve done, whatever we do, if we’re trusting in Christ then we’re saved.

So when we start putting our trust in things other than Christ, our security goes out of the window. People in Paul’s day thought circumcision might help, or obeying the law (especially going above and beyond the law and making even more rules that God hadn’t given), or being born into the right family (a Jewish one). What do we put our trust in? Is it having the “right” view of baptism, or our Christian heritage? Is it our regular Bible reading, or our extensive Bible knowledge? Have we been to the right summer camp, or conference, or heard the “right” speakers? Is our Christian library extensive and all endorsed (or written) by the “right” authors? Are we involved in leadership in the CU, or actively serving our church?

A friend came up to me after Mike’s talk, and said, “If he’d put my name at the beginning of the list, it couldn’t be any more true of me”. I felt the same. I knew that many of these things described me. The Christian life starts with grace, but it also continues with grace. Just living an unexamined Christian life can lead to a drift into this kind of thinking – that we’re saved by grace, but as we progress in the Christian life, we start contributing a bit ourselves. We drift into thinking that helping with the CU, or not getting drunk, or reading the right books, makes us more acceptable in God’s eyes. We look down on others who aren’t as good as us. And all the time, we’re becoming more like the people whom Jesus criticised the most in his earthly ministry – the legalistic Pharisees. They thought, like the men in this passage, that what they did made them right with God, and better than others. The Bible tells us that it’s all down to Jesus, and never up to us. Christians are all equal in God’s sight.

As Mike said, “Jesus isn’t just the way into the Christian life; he’s the way on”. We’re not saved by grace, and then keep ourselves in God’s favour by doing the right thing. We’re saved by grace from first to last.

How does this relate to joy? Well, as soon as we start putting any kind of confidence in our own abilities and actions, we will start to lose the joy in God’s grace that we had. Being saved by grace from first to last means that we don’t worry about sinning, about not having a job on the CU committee, about not having been to the right conference. Our joy must be unrelated to what we have done; our joy must be in God and what he’s done. Only God is constant; our obedience goes up and down.

Interestingly, Paul’s comment about his list of religious credentials is that they are rubbish, that he counts them as loss – in other words, they’re a bad thing! The reason for this is in verses 8 and 9. Paul sees that all these things actually distract him from finding his confidence in Jesus. Applied to us, all our “Christian credentials” can be good in themselves, but if they distract us from Jesus and finding our joy and confidence in him, then they’re no better than rubbish.

Trusting our own righteousness leads to an up-and-down Christian life, where we relate to God on the basis of what we’ve done, and lose our joy as a result. So we must rejoice in the Lord! We must look to him for our security and our joy, because only in him can true joy be found.

Hopefully I’ll be continuing to blog through some of these issues in the coming weeks.

Matthew @ 19:13, January 29, 2008 to Discussions | Comments (0)