But you are a chosen people, set aside to be a royal order of priests, a holy nation, God’s own; so that you may proclaim the wondrous acts of the One who called you out of inky darkness into shimmering light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received it.
Beloved, remember you don’t belong in this world. You are resident aliens living in exile,[1] so resist those desires of the flesh that battle against the soul.
Live honorably among the outsiders so that, even when some may be inclined to call you criminals, when they see your good works, they might give glory to God when He returns in judgment. (1 Peter 2:9-12)
I’ve heard people say before that when people outside the church look at us oddly or think we are weird, that’s cool, because we are strange. That’s….not what this means J I mean, it could, but that’s not the primary point. It means we ought to feel like strangers in the sense that we don’t belong here. This world and this country is not our true, eternal home. We can feel it when we are in tune with the Holy Spirit. We know it when we are looking at the world through the lenses of the Bible.
I’ve sensed it in a practical sense before. Hazard County, KY and Costa Rica are two places I love but make me aware that I grew up in a different environment. The language, the food, the unspoken rules, the social etiquette, etc. I love them both – it's not a critique – I was just aware that I was different.
I’ve felt it strongly in a spiritual sense too, in places like New Orleans. As much as I loved soaking in the history and the Creole vibe, there was an uneasiness in parts of the city as I walked past the voodoo shops and the casual celebration of all kinds of sin.
I have also had revelatory moments over the years when God made it clear to me that I was living with clouded judgment. I was living my life in a way that reflected a great deal of comfort with the values and ideals of my culture. I was living as if I was very much at home in the world rather than an alien and stranger.
· My focus on stuff as much more important than it should be.
· My life priorities - what do I value most?
· The deception of Hollywood’s depiction of romance and love
· The inclination to think I needed accomplish things and build a reputation and resume even at the expense of nurturing relationships or building relationships. These aren’t inherently at odds, but they can be if we aren't careful.
· Working to be good enough, be perfect, to earn from God and others vs. surrendering my imperfections and failures to the grace of God and others.
· Fighting to win arguments thoroughly vs. fighting to love people profoundly.
· Thinking too much about what others owe me (rights) at the expense of considering what I owe you (responsibilities)
So God has given me plenty of opportunities to see the war that is being waged for my soul. When it comes to embracing our alien presence, I think we need to do three things to move more deeply into the holiness God has given us: CULTIVATE IT ( so we are always aware we are ‘set apart’), OWN IT (to avoid compromising our life and our allegiance) USE IT (to motivate us toward loving engagement.) Today, I’m going to talk about cultivating it. Next week, owning it and using it.
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CULTIVATE IT – SO WE ARE ALWAYS AWARE WE ARE ‘SET APART’
Believers "must cultivate the mindset of exiles. What this does mainly is sober us up and wake us up so that we don't drift with the world and take for granted that the way the world thinks and acts is the best way. We don't assume that what is on TV is helpful to the soul; we don't assume that the priorities of advertisers is helpful to the soul; we don't assume that the strategies and values of business and industry are helpful to the soul.
We don't assume that any of this glorifies God. We stop and we think and we consult the Wisdom of our own country, heaven, and we don't assume that the conventional wisdom of this age is God's wisdom. We get our bearings from God in his word.
When you see yourself as an alien and an exile with your citizenship in heaven, and God as your only Sovereign, you stop drifting with the current of the day. You ponder what is good for the soul and what honors God in everything: food, cars, videos, bathing suits, birth control, driving speeds, bed times, financial savings, education for the children, unreached peoples, famine, refugee camps, sports, death, and everything else. Aliens get their cue from God and not the world." (The War Against the Soul and the Glory of God :: Desiring God)
Christians in the early church were aliens (passing through) and strangers (not at home) in their Roman empire. This has remained true of every Christian in every empire, including us in ours. Our empire, in spite of all the good things in its history, has values that are not the values of our true home. I googled “American Values” and found a very consistent core identified by colleges and organizations prepping foreign students, visitors, or immigrants for acclimation to American culture.
It’s different than if you read a list of the ideals on which America was founded, but it’s prepping them for how America is to ease the real culture shock as they experience a new and potentially different world of values and priorities. Here’s what kept showing up over and over and over.[2] [3] Notice, most of these are neutral in and of themselves. What matters is whether or not they reveal the influence of Kingdom or Empire.
· Personal Control Over Our Destiny. Is this about the importance of personal responsibility, or an insistence that we can do whatever we want with no thought of others?
· Freedom. Are we free from any restraint or free to live in the Kingdom as God intended.[4]
· Change. Does this mean we value innovation and creativity, or that we want to dismantle traditions? As the saying goes, we might want to know why a fence was built before we tear it down.
· Control of Time/Schedules. To what ends? What will I do with the time I can control?
· Equality and Informality. Does this mean we are looking to ‘level the playing field’ in pursuit of justice and rightfully honoring people just because they are people, or is this a refusal to grant proper deference or respect to rank, position or authority?
· Individuality and Privacy. So that we can’t be manipulated or coerced, or because we want to hide? So that we maintain our autonomy, or because we don't want to have any responsibility toward the groups in which we live?
· Self-help/self-reliance. This could be a call to being good steward of what we have been given, or an arrogant claim that anyone who needs help is a loser.
· Competition and Free Enterprise. These things can bring about better products and businesses. They can also lead to valuing competition more the cooperation.
· Future Orientation/Progress. Being forward looking and hopeful are good things. Devaluing the past and being unconscious of the present aren’t.
· Action/Work oriented. ”Doing” is not a bad thing. It can be if it distracts us from “being.” “What I do” is not the only thing that matters; “who I am” is a big deal too.
· Directness. If this means we need to be truthful and honest when truth and honesty is required, awesome. If it means no concern about doing so with grace, or maybe even finding virtue in being avoidably offensive, that’s a different thing.
· Materialism. Money and matter aren’t inherently bad; valuing things more than people is. A material mission unhooked from the Great Commission is going to be a problem.
So here’s the reality of every day living in the United States: I enter a work world that is influenced by empire ideals… I watch the news on a TV influenced by empire ideals… I turn on a radio influenced by empire ideals… I enter an economy, I teach a class at a school influenced by empire ideals, I read current events, I parent my kids, I relate to my wife, I use social media, I think about my money, I watch a TV show, I vote for politicians or support parties steeped in empire ideals.
We ought to feel like aliens and strangers everywhere we go. Our problem is that it feels like home to us.
Gallup and Barna: “evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general. Every day, the church is becoming more like the world it allegedly seeks to change…" African Christian and famous missions scholar Professor Lamin Sanneh told Christianity Todayrecently that "the cultural captivity of Christianity in the West is nearly complete.”[2]
We have to cultivate our sense of being strangers.
· Every time we go through the checkout line at Meijers and see the magazines that objectify women and men and insist that money =happiness and thrive on salacious gossip, we should feel like strangers. If we don’t, we have to think about it: “Bodies are not objects to display like meat; gossip is a sin; a mansion in Malibu is not what my heart should long for.”
· When we turn on the radio and notice a song that celebrates sin or the culture in which it thrives, that should make us feel like strangers. When a song with, “The club isn't the best place to find a lover, so the bar is where I go,”[5] that should feel strange. When I hear that I’ve got my mind on my money and my money on my mind, or praises how good revenge feels when someone cheats on you, we should feel like we are listening to the music of an alien culture.
· When we hear language that is casually vulgar and demeaning, that kind of conversation should feel like a clanging cymbal.
When I was watching the halftime show of the Superbowl a couple years ago, the artist started out his set beneath the stadium. While this was the most modest show in years, by the time he made it into the stadium he had posed with multiple women in seductive poses. One person with us kept muttering, “Not your wife…not your wife.” There was a person in the room reminding us we are exiles and strangers. I think we need more voices in our ears muttering, “Not you home…not your home.”
What ought to feel like home to us are the values of the kingdom of God. I am going to use list in from the Evangelical Alliance[6], a HUGE outfit in the UK that also helped to found the World Evangelical Alliance that represents 600 million Christians. This is summary of biblical values called “Eight Core Christian Values” (ethos.org.au).[7]
Grace – giving people more than they deserve irrespective of the cause of their need and without regard to national, cultural or religious boundaries… grace is, by definition, an undeserved gift offered to someone who is in need. The gospels present Jesus as one who brought good news to all who would listen (the crowds) but especially to those who lived on the periphery of their society: lepers, slaves, the demon-possessed, a paralytic, a tax collector, a young girl, and the blind. A life of grace means a life lived with those usually ignored or rejected by others.
Hope – Hope is the conviction that God will always be with present with his people. Hope is an encouragement not to overlook the many good and positive aspects of life, to believe that good will come, to live confident that God is at work.
Faith - Faith is an attitude of trust in God, with the accompanying assurance that He works in us and in others. In other words, it is trust that God who does good work in us does good work in others. Also, it involves letting go of faith in ourselves and trusting that God who carries us will carry others.
Love – Its most fundamental characteristic is that it seeks the good of the other. It is contrary to all selfish, self-centered attitudes. Love involves choosing to love the unlovable, including one’s enemy, and reaching out to one who does not, or is not able, to love in return.
Justice – Justice is often interpreted in terms of seeking rights for oneself or one’s own group (‘we demand justice’) when biblically it is really an action on behalf of others… ‘Justice’ is not for ‘just me’. Biblical justice refers to very practical, down-to-earth actions which ensure that the weak, the poor and the socially disadvantaged are cared for, that the weak are protected from abuse, that the poor have provisions, that the stranger is shown hospitality and that the disadvantaged are cared for, even when this means giving them what they do not ‘deserve’…
Joy – Joy also comes from participating in God’s ministry in the world and from seeing lives being positively changed and relationships enhanced (as long as it is not at the expense of others).
Service – The call to serve one another in love stands in start contrast to the normal human desire for position and preference. The notion of service calls individuals to lay these things aside for the needs of others. Meaning is found in service rather than in self-centeredness.
Peace– The peace which Jesus gives is nothing less than his own presence in our lives. Consequently, his peace can permeate our lives, and he calls his people not to worry or be concerned about material things, for God knows our needs. This peace manifests in the practice of peace-making, bringing reconciliation between groups who have not been at peace.
God will be faithful: He will transform us by the renewing of our mind (Romans 12:2). Meanwhile, we commit, with God’s help, to learning to see the world through the lenses of the holy. We pray for God to help us; we practice actively thinking through what we see and hear; we read the Bible to continually remind us what the Kingdom of God looks like, and what should feel like home. My challenge: use this list this week to think through your day. Did you approach your day from this mindset of Kingdom values?
· When did I feel like a stranger in exile today?
· Did I watch the news through the lenses of Kingdom values?
· What valued did that show/movie/song/book portray? Did I laugh and grieve appropriately?
· Did I learn Kingdom or empire values at school or work?
· Did our family interaction/expectations confuse cultural and kingdom values?
· Has my presence in CLG’s church community brought the values of my temporary home or my true home?
· Did my use of time and money reflect empire or kingdom?
Take a week to purposefully live as a stranger and alien. Next week we will talk about how to OWN IT (how it can move us deeper into holiness) and how to USE IT for engagement with our culture to the glory of God.
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[1] John 15:18-19 "If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.”
John 17:16 "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.”
Philippians 3:20 “For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Hebrews 11:13-16 “All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.”
1 Peter 2:12 “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”
Ephesians 2:19 “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”
[2] The first three sites I found are the following. Everything I found after that added nothing new. The Six Basic American Cultural Values(vintageamericanways.com); “U.S. Values,” (Andrews.edu); ‘The Values Americans Live By,” by L. Robert Kohls, a primer for foreigners coming ot the US (The Washington International Center)
[3] Also “Key American Values” (International Student and Scholar Services, University of Missouri-St. Louis.
[4] Look just at one no the list that looks good – the idea of freedom. The Bible says we are freed from sin into the ‘perfect law of liberty’ so we can be who God says we ought to be in Christ; American freedom is freedom from any constraints to be what we want to be. Even a discussion of freedom – a case where the language of a biblical value and a cultural value overlap - ought to create a sharp feeling of strangeness in us because we mean very different things.
[5] Ed Sheeran
[6] (“What Does the Bible Say About Christian Values and Christian Life?” christianbiblereference.org)
[7] Also “Christian Values” at stahopebarrington.durham.sch.uk.