[5] Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.
[12] Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. | Colossians 3:5, 12
The Bible contains this idea of putting off and putting on; giving up one thing in order to take on something else. Dying to ourselves to live with Christ. While many of the commands are given as physical imperatives, things to stop doing and others to start doing (the Law), it is not these acts that are primary to God. What God is most concerned with is us turning from a way of seeing and understanding the world as a system that operates apart from Him to one that He is in control of. Even more than that, He is concerned with us seeing His goodness, trusting it, and living a life for His glory. What this requires is for us to step into God’s World.
In one way we all exist in God’s world, physically we are all present in the world that He created, sustains and will one day redeem. Yet it is possible to live within that story without acknowledging it; we can even acknowledge the story without identifying with it. What this creates is people with a general idea of who Jesus is without any of the details that actually make Him Savior. While you can like that Jesus; you cannot trust and love Him, you certainly will not sacrifice for His glory. It is because you haven’t really stepped into His world.
I will give you a very earthly idea of what this looks like: professional football. Here in the northwest, Seattle Seahawks fandom is intense, but there are still some who see nothing other than overpaid grown men playing a game with a ball. If you take that view, you will never learn the rules, you will never back a team, you will never ride the wave of a winning season or the heartbreak of losing the Super Bowl on a last-second interception. The draft seems like an odd thing to care about, fantasy football is a waste of time, and you love February where it all disappears for a while. You have every right to think all of these things, but you are judging it from a place of ignorance (you have every right to WANT to stay ignorant of football); you don’t really understand what you are belittling. You have, like many who reject God, decided to view it from outside and to use your preconceived ideas about it to form your opinion. This isn’t a big deal when what you are choosing to judge is football; it is a huge deal when the object of the universe is the all-powerful God.
The question then is: how do we step in, and go from being people who acknowledge Jesus to those who identify with Him? How do we truly step into His world? The good news is that we don’t have to look too far. The practices of the Christian faith (pray, obey, and go to church as I summarized Jude) are given specifically for this purpose: to move us past viewing the gospel as something we exist WITH to something we exist IN.
I want to focus on that last one (go to church) for a second because it is both the one that gets the most pushback and because I don’t feel like I connected the dots as well as I could have Sunday in the sermon. I took the command ‘GO TO CHURCH’ from Jude’s statement:
waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. 21b
The action that Jude calls us to is waiting. Waiting seems like a passive action, like sitting on a bench for a bus, or leaning against a wall while your child finishes soccer practice (or, my kids would argue, in the car while dad talks). The perseverance that Jude talks about in the section that this verse is taken from, is not just passing the time until Jesus comes again. Instead, it is a growing anticipation for the coming of Jesus and the New Heavens and the New Earth that He brings. The reason why I connected this to church is because it is in the gathering of the saints to: retell the story of God’s mercy, sing His praises, and to come into His presence, where we are practicing what eternity will be. While we are aware that in this life it will always fall short (His presence is still in a sign/seal, His saints are still impure, and the story isn’t finished), the lack is what builds our anticipation. Our Sunday service is a time when our lives are infused with HOPE to carry us through the disillusionment of this life.
To live in God’s world requires a remembrance of what He has done, a connection to what He is doing, and faith that He will complete what He has promised. I go to church because I know that without others I forget the story I am part of.