The Gospel Coalition

(Here is the latest excerpt from my forthcoming (April 2009) book Unfashionable:How To Live Against The World For The World. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I welcome feedback.) 

We have been redeemed so that we might become instruments of redemption. This means that God’s ultimate purpose for Christians is not bringing them out of this world and into heaven, but using them to bring heaven into this world. Again, the Christian’s ultimate destination is not an ethereal heaven, but a new physical world, and God is ushering in this new world through his people. As we hallow God’s name and do God’s will in how we think, feel, and live, the power of Christ’s resurrection flows through us — and as a result, we bring heaven’s culture to earth. In this manner we continue the work that Christ began and will one day complete.

Michael Wittmer beautifully pictures this process:

Just as sin began with individuals and rippled out to contaminate the entire world, so grace begins with individuals and ripples out to redeem the rest of creation. We humans are the bulls-eye of God’s grace, the target of his redemption. But though salvation begins with us, the God who redeems us does not want us to keep redemption to ourselves.

God wants us to join him in redeeming peoples, places, and things. He wants Christians to transform their cultures to the honor and glory of God. We’re to fill the earth — every aspect of it — with the knowledge of God, our Creator and Redeemer.

This means that while evangelism remains a priority, the salvation of people is not the church’s only mission, as Steve Childers points out:

Churches are designed by God to be agents of Kingdom renewal in the world, not only renewing individual hearts but also renewing forms and structures in society, helping to make all that is crooked in our world straight.

Our mission involves both evangelism and cultural renewal. It is spiritual and physical, individual and communal. God wants us to involve ourselves in the rehabilitation of hearts and houses, souls and society. We’re to care about the renewal of both people and the environment. This requires both word and deed, both proclamation and demonstration. He is renewing human hearts and recreating all things through his church. This is our mission to the world.

To be sure, a transformational approach to culture does not assume an unrealistic optimism about what’s possible in our fallen world. Because the world will remain sinful until Christ returns, we know we can never achieve utopia here and now. “Heaven on earth” will become a universal reality only when Christ comes back. We are, however, to be faithful in executing God’s mission by seeking cultural transformation, not knowing (because the Bible doesn’t tell us) if things will get markedly worse before Christ returns, or if things will go on about the same, or if things will get markedly better. That’s not our business, but God’s. We are told to plant and water. But God alone gives the increase. Our task as faithful disciples is proclaimed by the Welsh poet, Ethelwyn Wetherald:

My orders are to fight;
Then if I bleed, or fail,
Or strongly win, what matters it?
God only doth prevail.
The servant craveth naught
Except to serve with might.
I was not told to win or lose —
My orders are to fight.

What we do know is that many Christians throughout the ages have sought cultural transformation and in doing so have had a huge impact on this world.  Real change for the better can and has happened. No Christian has ever “turned earth into heaven, or the world into the church. And sometimes they have made tragic mistakes. But they have also done a great deal of good.”

The good news is that Christ not only began the process but will also complete it. And by his Spirit, he now empowers us to carry on his work. Led by Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit, we thus have all that we need for our present task, which is the renewal of all things. In saving us, God has fully equipped us to carry out the cultural mandate he originally entrusted to us.

All of this provides the framework for why unfashionable living carries so much promise and power. The difference God has equipped us to make is neither small nor insignificant. Since God is on a mission to transform this present world into the world to come, and he is currently using his transformed people to do this, then our commitment to living “unfashionably” has cosmic implications. There’s no question that the call to live “against the world for the world” — the responsibility to live “unfashionably” — carries the power to effect real, lasting change to peoples, places, and things both now and forever. Unfashionable living can change the world, literally.

Have you ever wanted to spend yourself in something deeply meaningful? Have you ever wanted to play a vital role in something great and lasting, something big and with guaranteed success? If your answer is “yes,” than ask a further question: Will you faithfully refuse to “fit in”? Are you willing to be “out of style” by living in this world with the next world in view? Will you make a difference in the world by being different from the world? That’s where we all must begin.