Between the Two Ponds
One passage. One idea. A few quiet minutes. Short devotional readings for people being formed by grace, written from a small chair beside still water in Falcon, Colorado.
Pull one up. Read slowly. There is no hurry here.
What It Is Built On
And there are people on the outside preaching Christ specifically to make his imprisonment hurt more. Rivals. Men using the gospel as a weapon against a man in chains, out of envy, out of ambition, hoping to afflict him while he cannot answer back.
"What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice." (Philippians 1:18)
Paul writes this from prison, and it is worse than prison, because there are men on the outside preaching Christ precisely to make his chains hurt more. Rivals. Men using the gospel as a weapon against a man who cannot answer back, out of envy and ambition, hoping to afflict him while he sits helpless. And what does he say about them? He says Christ is being preached, and I rejoice.
It should stop us, because most of us cannot do it. Someone takes a shot at us and we carry it for a week. Someone builds himself up by pulling us down and we rehearse the conversation in the shower for days. But Paul looks straight through their motives and finds Christ standing behind them, and that is enough for him. Actually enough.
Comfort has become so treasured a thing in our faith that we can scarcely grasp that faith might be uncomfortable, that it might cost, that the way forward might require us to see past a whole cloud of unfairness and misrepresentation, find Christ above it, and keep walking. Paul could do that because his life was not built on being treated fairly. It was built on Christ, and Christ was not going anywhere, and so neither was he.
The question is not whether you will be treated unfairly. You will. The question is what your life is built on underneath the unfairness, because a life built on fair treatment collapses the first time the treatment is unfair. What is yours built on? You will find out the day it is taken.
When the Comfort Goes
We live in a culture that is deeply and unashamedly committed to comfort.
"Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ." (Philippians 1:27)
We live in a culture unashamedly committed to comfort. Get better things. Build a bigger house. Book the next vacation before this one has ended. Maximize the safety and minimize the friction. From every direction the same dream is pressed on us, a life without friction, and it seeps so quietly into faith that we seldom say it out loud. So say it out loud and test it. Does following Christ lead to your ultimate comfort in this life? Is being a Christian a promise of an easier road?
If we are honest, that is close to what many of us signed up for, whether we would admit it or not, and it is the unnamed assumption beneath a hundred small disappointments with God. Here is the part that should sober every one of us. A person can have a good family and good standing, a nice house and a healthy retirement, real knowledge of the Bible and genuine belief in Jesus. A person can come on Sunday when it is convenient, feel the hair rise on the back of the neck during a song, take the sacrament, serve on a team, do every good thing the faith offers, and still not have a life centered on Christ. The mind knows. The heart has never recognized.
And the only way any of us ever finds out which one we are is when the comfort goes. Comfort insulates the question. Loss exposes it. When the house, the health, the standing, the ease are stripped back, what remains standing is what was actually at the center all along. So do not wait for the stripping to find out. Ask now, while it is easy, whether you are following Christ or following comfort, and move him to the center on purpose, before loss does it for you.
Two Sides of the Same Gift
Read that verse again slowly, because there is a word in it that most of us skip.
"For it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake." (Philippians 1:29)
Read the verse slowly, because there is a word in it most of us skip. Granted. It has been granted to you, given to you as a gift. And what has been given? Two things, joined in the same sentence and handed over in the same act: not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for him.
We have no trouble with the first half. Faith is a gift, we can preach that in our sleep. By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God. But watch what Paul has done. He has taken faith and taken suffering, laid them side by side, and called them both a gift. They are two sides of one coin.
Consider what that means. A coin has a head and a tail. It can land either way up and it is still the same coin, still worth the same, and no one holds one up and says, this one landed tails, so it is worth less. Whether you are believing or whether you are suffering, you are holding the same coin. It is all one life of faith, all the same gift, given by the same hand.
This is not said lightly or from a comfortable chair. But it changes the question we bring to God in the dark. We are forever asking why the coin landed the way it did, as though suffering were proof the gift had been taken back. It was not. It is still the coin he gave you, still faith, still grace, still his. Stop demanding to know why it fell as it did, turn it over in your hand, and see that it is the same gift on both sides.
Believing and Surrendering
There is a flaw that can hide inside the way we share the gospel, and I have fallen into it myself.
"For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain." (Philippians 1:21)
There is a flaw that can hide inside the way we speak about faith. You ask someone about theirs, and they tell you they believe in a higher power, and you say what you have said a hundred times, you have to believe in Jesus, and they answer, I do believe in him. And there we stop, satisfied, certain something has happened. But there is a difference between believing and surrendering, and the whole of the Christian life is lived in the gap between them.
Believing is the first step. It acknowledges that Jesus is real, that he existed, that he is who he said he was. That is something. It is not nothing. But it is not yet enough, because belief has a second step to take, and the second step is surrender. To place your faith in Christ is not merely to be persuaded of him. It is to hand yourself over.
For most of us it begins in the mind. Who is the way, the truth, the life. Jesus. And then, slowly, what the mind holds about Christ works its way down out of the head and into the depths of the heart, where affection actually lives, and faith moves from believing in Christ to living for him. That is Paul's whole sentence. For me to live is Christ. Not, for me to be convinced of Christ. To live is Christ.
Even the demons believe, and tremble. Belief that costs nothing and changes nothing is not yet the thing that saves. So ask yourself the question plainly, the one that goes underneath mere agreement. Do you believe in Jesus, or have you given him your life? A great many people can answer the first. He is asking the second.