180 degrees...

180 South

I watched this documentary on Netflix last night, and I loved it. Personally, I don't consider myself much of a risk-taker... I'm pretty lazy and afraid of things that have a great potential to hurt... but I really love the thought of throwing-caution to the wind and doing something huge.

Yesterday this documentary was especially kick-in-the-butt because I'm in the middle of writing a leadership curriculum, and so much of leadership is about taking a risk and doing something. Leadership involves going somewhere. But also, and more importantly, following Christ means going somewhere... and leadership is just following, anyway.

Lesslie Newbigin wrote this great book, Proper Confidence: faith, doubt, and certainty in Christian discipleship. Essentially, he's looking at the effects of modern thought (read: post-scientific revolution, post-enlightenment), which makes certainty the highest value and therefore doubt the highest virtue, on Christianity. This thought puts Christianity on the defensive, makes us hesitant to act on our beliefs, drives us to create formulaic theology that does not give room to a living and active God (think Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe here... certainty leads us to want a God that is safe) - this neutralizes us into a passive life. All that to say, after setting all of this up, Newbigin presents a bit of a Christian response... how we should actually engage the scriptures and the world.

Newbigin says, "But, as alwyas, the essential question is this: on the basis of what assumptions are the critical questions being asked? From within the Christian tradition, the answer to that question is that the critical questions are asked on the basis of the fact that the word of God is Jesus Christ. On this basis, the reading of the Bible involves a continual twofold movement: we have to understand Jesus in the context of the whole story, and we have to understand the whole story in the light of Jesus...

There is no way by which we come to know a person except by dwelling in his or her story, and in the measure that may be possible, becoming part of it...

We grow into a knowledge of God by allowing the biblical story to awaken our imagination and to challenge and stimulate our thinking AND ACTING (emphasis added)...

The truth surely is not that we come to know God by reasoning from our unredeemed experience but that what God has done for us in Christ gives us the eyes through which we can begin to truly understand our experience in the world."

(I promise, all this relates to 180 South...)

Reading again this morning in Devotional Classics, this time from Douglas Steere, this struck me:

"There is nothing greater than this constant fidelity. 'The world goes forward,' wrote Harold Gray... 'because in the beginning one man or a few were true to the light they saw and by living by it enabled others to see.' Holy obedience to the insights, the concerns that come, that persist, and that are in accord with cooperation with God's way of love is not only the active side of prayer, but is the only adequate preparation for future prayer."

All this comes together here (I wrote this in my journal this AM): every part of our spiritual life should be propelling us forward, into action. There is nothing we do in prayer/study/etc. for which our response should be to go back to our lives and do what we were already doing. Each encounter with the real, living, active God should change me in some way. Each day that I put myself before him ready to be taught, to get to know him deeper, I should come away having seen a bigger part of the picture that alters my skewed view of reality and prompts me to both further my seeking and change my behavior.

At the end of the documentary, the narrator talked about how trips like his - dropping everything and going off to climb a mountain in Patagonia - are most valuable for the perspective that they give, for their ability to prompt life change (in his case, conservation).

I am far too conservative in my life - I'm too passive - I resist the heart change and therefore the life change that God has for me... this line sticks with me: "Holy obedience to the insights, the concerns that come, that persist, and that are in accord with cooperation with God's way of love is not only the active side of prayer, but is the only adequate preparation for future prayer."