Church on the Edge, Season 3 podcasts begin Tuesday, September 14.
I’ll be releasing these 5-10 minute podcasts twice a week. Each podcast will be a chapter from my upcoming book, Philemon: Reflections on Christian Maturity. The shorter length of the podcasts is designed to provide listeners with a daily devotional, complete with individual reflections, as well as group discussion questions.
Philemon is one of those often overlooked books of the Bible. In it, we encounter Paul, not as a theologian or preeminent apostle, but as simply a fellow believer, friend, and brother in Christ.
In my last post, I began sharing some thoughts on Christian maturity. I develop these thoughts more fully in my book and upcoming podcasts.
I need to be honest and tell you that from my perspective, the teaching and leadership in many of our churches today is misguided at best. My book, Prophets or Patriots: How Evangelicals Are Giving to Caesar What Belongs to God, received some severe criticism from many who never read it or read it and missed the point because their Christianity and politics have become so inseparably connected. I’m abundantly clear in the book that followers of Jesus should vote their conscience. At the same time, to allow our faith to be tainted by a zealous allegiance to worldly leaders whose ethics and morals reflect nothing of the Spirit of Christ does not promote God’s kingdom.
With this in mind, I want to share a second thought on Christian maturity with you —
Christian maturity is not seen in who we are in the world but who we are in Christ.
This phrase, “in Christ,” is found repeatedly in the New Testament. The diversity within the early church was astonishing. It served as a witness to God’s power to bring together, in Christ, groups of people who at one time were heartless and hostile towards one another. The very thought that slaves and freedmen, barbarians and Scythians, Jews and Gentiles could tolerate one another, much less worship together, was incomprehensible in the Roman world. The same is true in our world today.
As we mature spiritually by God’s grace, we identify ourselves less and less by things like skin color, nationality, culture, political affiliation, and Christian denomination and more by our relationship to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords and His eternal kingdom; a kingdom that will stand after all others have faded away. (Revelation 11:15)
In the church I served for almost twelve years in Seoul, we had, at any one time, twenty to twenty-five nationalities. Political ideologies and cultural identities were as diverse as it gets. But it didn’t matter - we came together around the person of Jesus and the kingdom of God. I’ll never forget a young army officer who committed his life to Christ while attending our church. I emailed him after he returned to the United States and asked how he was doing. He got back to me saying he was doing well but was confused. He loved his church, but in addition to his beliefs as a Christian, he felt pressured to conform to specific views on everything from politics to gun control, climate change, and immigration issues.
“We are Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”
Mature followers of Jesus reject this straight-jacket Christianity. One of the features of the New Testament and clearly seen in Paul’s letter to Philemon is the apolitical approach to slavery. As many as ten million slaves populated the empire, about forty percent of the population. Yet, the writers of the New Testament nowhere condemn the institution of slavery. Instead, they focus on the freedom all people experience in Christ.
In his letter to Philemon, Paul doesn’t order his friend to set his slave free. He pleads with him to receive his runaway slave, Onesimus, back as a brother in Christ. Interestingly enough, the church father, Ignatius, tells us this same Onesimus became the bishop of the church in Ephesus.
Instead of forced conformity through political and legislative campaigning, spiritually mature Christians understand that change must come from within. It’s a matter of the heart. It’s not about who we are in the world: our political affiliation, cultural identity, or any other worldly marker. It’s all about Jesus, our relationship to Him, and God’s power to bring even the most diverse and divided groups together in His Son.
In Christ,
Dan
Check out my podcasts from Church on the Edge and my books on Kindle.