stalking god.

a response to: sexy “christianity”

A few weeks ago the corpse of sexy “christianity” was exhumed from its digital grave. What was little more than a dormant diary-entry reawakened and some of my most profuse heart-leakage started seeping into the cracks of facebook. And while its meanderings seem to have struck a nerve, I have a dirty secret to admit:
 

I am book-reading-and-blogging boy.

I wrote sexy “christianity” plaid-clad with a side of skinny jeans and coffee in a local java shop. My tactless and messy pen strokes were an attempt at confessing my own martyr-complex, pharisaic tendencies, and shallow faith with resolve to move back to the epicenter of a simple overflowing love for my Murdered Savior.

It takes one to know one in a culture where one of the most ostentatious and perhaps trendy things a Christian can do is write a blog about spirituality. Often we share our messiness with the world hoping to feel a little less messy. But really, we end up smearing our mess into a mess that’s more nice-looking but no less messy. The blogosphere is an inch deep and a mile wide.

But then, life’s not about a blog… or a style… The depth of your deep-V is not a measuring unit for the depth of your spirituality. Torn up shoes can’t prove how far you’ve walked with Jesus. And a longer beard doesn’t particularly make you more Christ-like (sorry, white-Russian-bearded-baby-faced Jesus!).

You can look like you know God… you can know all about God… but that has no bearing on whether or not you actually know Him. 

When you know all about someone but don’t actually know them, that just makes you a stalker.

GOD DOESN'T NEED STALKERS, HE WANTS FOLLOWERS... 

Temptation lurks in the murky and shallow waters of trending Christianity. It would demand every Christian forget Christ but continue looking as if they knew Him. This is what the temptation of early trending Christian culture demanded of Ananias and Sapphira. When selling land for the Jesus’ sake became the trend, the couple sought to be trendy. They sold their land with hearts bent on looking the part and hoping to receive Peter’s praise. That heart condition cost them absolutely everything.
 

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven… I will declare to them, ‘Depart from me, I never knew you...’” (Matthew 7:21-23)

Whether you truly know God is between you and Him, but my resolve is to peel back the spiritual-looking behavior (regardless of whether it’s dressed in suits, sackcloth, or skinny jeans) and take a look behind the curtain, into the mechanism of my faith. My intention is not to take any one flavor of Christianity to the woodshed… My intention is to make war. To raid whitewashed tombs by releasing clarion calls to the Church – that each one of us would check our own hearts with a sense of ruthlessness towards any corrupted motives we may find there. Join me, I dare you to.

For Ananias and his wife there was this pervasive thing called “self” that weaseled its slimy little way into something beautiful and made it sickening to the heart of God. God will be the judge of acts that are truly righteous and acts that just look righteous. Man looks at the outward appearance, God looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7)… That said, the Consuming Fire that is our God has an incredibly direct way of burning through the dross of our showy spirituality and dragging our true intentions kicking and screaming to the surface.
 

“If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.” (1 Cor. 13:3)

“Quit your worship charades. I can’t stand your trivial religious games:
 Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings - meetings, meetings, meetings - I can’t stand one more! Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them! You’ve worn me out! I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion, while you go right on sinning. When you put on your next prayer performance, I’ll be looking the other way. No matter how long or loud or often you pray, I’ll not be listening...” (Isaiah 1:13-15 MSG)

 

...HE DOESN’T WANT A SHOW. HE WANTS OUR HEARTS. 

Want to be a radical Christian? Don’t look to trending Christian culture as a manual. You can’t pin radical Christianity like your favorite recipe or DIY. Look to Jesus Christ – the Author and Perfecter of your faith (Heb. 12:2).

Only the revelation of the glory of the Risen King Jesus will do if being consumed with passion is the end we seek. Only un-tinted, soul-altering, paradigm-shifting, idol-breaking, slit-side and nail-pierced-hands-feeling experience with Jesus will do. And to the one who has truly placed his hands in Christ’s side, and to the one who has truly put his fingers in the holes of Christ’s hands belongs a revelation that will not fail Him… yet it will destroy him, stripping him of all he owns. For that one, the one to whom Christ has revealed Himself, the only response that person will manage to muster is “here am I, send me!” For the one who has met Jesus face-to-face, worldly pleasures will be forsaken at the drop of a hat for the pleasure of Christ’s presence.

You can have works and not know God… But when you DO know Him – what a seriously blessed thought – works will inevitably, naturally, organically, flood out of you. A friend of mine recently put it this way: “When it comes to following Christ, good things are good only in so much as they are oriented by what is best, that is, a love for God.”

Hearts that are consumed by an encounter with the Risen Jesus Christ are hearts that will inevitably find their mission irreversibly intertwined with that of God’s. What breaks Him will break you. He breaks for bare feet and dirty water. He breaks for Africa and Skid Row. He breaks for impoverished coffee farmers and sweatshop laborers.

So in the midst of our social-justice-driven generation let the church bells resound with the thud of the question: “where’s your heart?” Wear your TOMS, drink your coffee fair-trade, and blog on your MacBook pro… but wear, drink, and blog because you’ve had an undeniable encounter with the grace of King Jesus. Not because you want people to think you did. Or because you want to think you did.

Take all that you are and offer it to all that He is. Steadily, faithfully, lavishly. With dogged resolve in valleys and green pastures. The life of radical abandon is one that has walked so steadily so long with Jesus that on a dime it would do anything Jesus asks. To ask the veteran Jesus follower to sell, give, or lose all is to ask little, for He has the supreme treasure of Christ. If he loses anything he has lost nothing.

God doesn’t want cookie-cutter lovers with no heart and soul. He wants you. Every piece of you - every flaw. So run to him. Take your cultural relevance with you, because you’ll need it… God will you use in any condition. All you have to do is run. – Jayson Schmidt

sexy "christianity".

My generation of believers loves the idea of radical Christianity. It’s edgy, compromises everything, it’s dangerously transparent, and it’s simple. Phrases like “I just want Jesus” are its slogan – its very breath. Verses are tattooed on our backs, and Greek words are penned into our wrists and biceps. Our sweatshop-free clothes are ripped and dirty. Our coffee is fair-trade. Our books are doctrine-heavy and well worn. And maybe we’ll even have a drink or a cigar here and there over a deep theological conversation. Today, most of us have made our pilgrimage to an African orphanage or held the hand of the dying somewhere in the third-world. We are not like our parents – who worry themselves that our bold-faith is going to leave us homeless and maybe dead.

It’s exciting to be alive today. The amount of resources we have at our fingertips is overwhelming. And it’s invigorating to be a part of a generation of Sons and Daughters that just wants to get back to the un-muddied basics: “the old, old story of Jesus and His love.” We want to live dangerously. And we would love the honor of being numbered with those in Hebrews 11 – Believers who lived so recklessly in homesickness for the love of God that the writer went on to say of them:

“They were put to death by stoning; they were sawed in two; they were killed by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated – the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, living in caves and in holes in the ground.”

Hebrews 11:37-38 (NIV)

Again, we read passages on the sufferings of Paul, like 2 Corinthians 11:23-28, and find our hearts stirring within us as if to say, “Ah! If I could just have that kind of faith! If I could just live with that kind of abandon! That is what I was created for!” Our generation has reached out in longing saying, “there has got to be more than this!” and is finding that heroes like Paul seem to have found it… It’s that variable on the back of our tongue when we hear the words “for me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” It’s Jesus. Untamed and unadulteratedly Jesus. Unpolluted by what the church wants to make Him… Unbound by what modern Philosophers want to call Him. We only want Jesus. And no less.

This kind of Christianity is dangerously cool. And that’s the thing… it’s dangerous. Here and there, it’s spot on; but my fear is that it flirts with the edge and settles for the empty satisfaction of a cultural ego-trip – thirsty to hear cool people say: “Wow! You’re doing great things for God!”… It says, “I’ve got style… and heart.” And when our “style” starts to get a little to close to our “heart” our faith begins to become as skin-deep as the skinny jeans we like to wear. It’s a TOM-wearing, book-and-Bible-reading, simple-living, guitar-playing, coffee-drinking, bare-footing, leaf-licking, justice-loving, short-term-missions-tripping Christianity. And it looks really good. It makes sure that everyone knows that we love homosexuals (which we really do) and have a real distaste for legalistic and hypocritical Christians (which we really do). This kind of Christianity is… well… sexy.

It’s the guy who sets his stack of theological books on the wooden table in that hole-in-the-wall coffee shop, pulls out his MacBook Pro, and begins to blog about the newest injustice right after tweeting about a great new band he came across. It’s the girl who, after riding her road-bike to town, sits down for a cup of tea or chai and ruffles her Ugandan-made beanie so it sits just right on her head, then pulls out a trendy journal from her Urban-Outfitter-style backpack and begins to write about how badly she misses her YWAM DTS and about how cute she thinks book-reading-and-blogging boy is. These Believers are sensational people. Often they’re well versed in the Bible and give color to their churches. They support missions and anything that will reach orphans and afflicted people – even if they’ve only got a couple bucks left in the bank. I could go on… but chances are you’ve got someone in mind.

Right now you might be thinking, “Wait, I thought that maybe this kind of Christianity is where our Christian leaders were encouraging us to go...” And I admit that the whole idea might be a little unclear right now. But this is what I want to communicate: That when Radical Christianity is popular, as it is becoming for my generation of Believers, then we must ask ourselves: “is the sense of abandon I have for Jesus costing me anything, or actually just making me more popular in the eyes of the people who I would like to be perceived by as more popular?” If at the end of the day I was kicked out of my family, homeless, friendless, moneyless, and hated… would Jesus still be enough? Because Sexy Christianity feels pretty good until someone throws a stone at you… or starts a thread of gossip about you… or sends you hate mail… or bullies your kid.

Our culture has high-jacked our faith, given it a make-over, and has begun selling it for cheap.

See, for Paul it wasn’t about the church making much of him. It was about him making much of Jesus… And for all he cared, he and all he did was worthless compared to simply knowing Jesus. For us, a two-week trip to the third-world to share the gospel is generally a culturally accepted thing – it’ll get you applause and maybe even a newspaper article if your town is small enough. Yet for the early church they had no choice but to become missionaries, right after Stephen’s death such a great wave of persecution arose because of their “Radical Christianity” that the believers fled for their lives to other nations, carrying the Gospel with them. They didn’t plan their trip, make a budget, or take little bottles of hand sanitizer with them… they only took the Gospel… and they took it into every place they went – even as they were running for their lives. Their attitude was captured in Peter and John’s bold statement to their persecutors:

“Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot help but speak of what we have seen and heard.”

Acts 4:19-20

They were not interested in joining popular justice movements, environmental preservation clubs, or wearing anything that made them seem trendy… they had one track minds: Jesus’ death and resurrection for the redemption of all nations and the glorification of God. That was it. And they were so compelled to tell the Good News that they proclaimed it to men in power who were threatening to put them to death. The Gospel was the hill they would literally die on, and there was nothing cool about it. The world hated them for it.

Here is where “Sexy Christianity” starts to crumble. When a believer is more interested in the idea of loving Jesus than actually loving Jesus, then that is not Christianity. And we ought to wage a war of wrath upon it – mortifying, dismembering, and crucifying it, and then putting it in a tomb where it belongs. We ought to react in unconcealed hatred for it because it steals praise from God and puts it upon men, even if only in the most subtle and unassuming ways. Jesus told His disciples to “Beware the leaven of the Pharisees.” That is, to beware of the subtle poison of the flamboyant religion of the Pharisees… because it would destroy the whole body. Just as a Pharisee would make much of their tithes and their theological knowledge, so today many seek the glory that comes from spiritual-looking behavior.

As Martin Luther once said,

“A religion that gives nothing, costs nothing, and suffers nothing, is worth nothing.”

See, these secondary actions – loving the afflicted, visiting orphans in Africa, caring for God’s creation, etc. don’t cost us anything if we do them seeking a paycheck in the form of man’s praise. If our motivation is to roll with the most modern trend, then our actions are all eternally useless (James 2:17; 1 Corinthians 1:1-3)… unless they are done out of a simple overflowing love for Jesus… A response, if you will, to having been eternally atoned for on that day at Golgotha. And that love will quite possibly cost us the reputations we so desperately try to keep polished behind the P.R. of cultural normality.

I wonder, after being a “Radical Christian” goes out of style, how many radically committed Christians will remain in our high schools, colleges, and work places? And right after American culture moves on from Africa, humanitarian aid, human rights, and issues like the AIDS epidemic and human trafficking crisis, as I promise it will soon, what will our radical faith look like? When being a “sold-out follower of Jesus” and “living simply so that others might simply live” loses its cultural lackluster, what will be next? What happens when stones start being thrown at people who identify themselves with the dead man? I have no doubt that there will be a faithful remnant, but I also acknowledge that they might just be hated and persecuted just like Jesus promised. Who will remain and what will it take to stick with Jesus until the end?

I believe A.W. Tozer has said it far better concerning his generation than I may be able to concerning mine. But regardless, I find his observation to be curiously relevant:

"I do not recall another period when ‘faith’ was as popular as it is today. ‘If only we believe hard enough we'll make it somehow.’ So goes the popular chant. What you believe is not important. Only believe... What is overlooked in all this is that faith is good only when it engages truth; when it is made to rest upon falsehood it can and often does lead to eternal tragedy. For it is not enough that we believe; we must believe the right thing about the right One."