When Phoebe, from the sitcom Friends, was asked if she would like to help on a small community project, she said something quite profound: “I wish I could but I don’t want to.”  So simple, so honest, so sadly wrong. Phoebe is perfectly content with her deadened conscience, innocently untroubled by the needs of those around her. If the Spirit does not ultimately prevail over the world, the flesh, and the devil, Phoebe’s words may be mankind’s dying words: “I wish I could have honored God’s Christ, but I didn’t want to.

There has never been a revolutionary in the league of Jesus of Nazareth. To Phoebe and all mankind Jesus says, “Take up your cross and follow me. There is no other way.” Jesus doesn’t say this to rob us of happiness: he came to give us fullness of joy, something that will outlive this world. He came announcing the Kingdom of God and to facilitate its expansion through our abdication. Jesus is saying, “I have come to give you life and that abundantly; to receive it, you must willingly die to your rights to your life.”

While mankind is fully committed to looking out for itself, Jesus is fully committed to saving us from the folly of the enterprise. He knows where it leads. Individuals and nations together are at war with one another securing what they think is required to make life work out the way they want it to. Is this how the story of humanity will end? Those brave enough to look at the trends admit this is more than plausible. It’s not “if“, it’s “when.”  Yet Resurrection Life Himself continues to call from our crossroads, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. All those who will come to me I will give eternal life.”

Paul is the ultimate kingdom emissary.  He understands what Jesus said. His life and teaching demonstrate the gospel of the kingdom. To the Phoebe within every man Paul says:

 Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others.  Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus

I have come to the present idea that the Christians we read about in the New Testament said “Yes” to a different gospel than the one that has been presented to most of us in contemporary western culture. The gospel we’ve heard seems to allow for us to invite Jesus into our hearts so that we can avoid hell and gain heaven. However, when it comes to actually following Jesus, our collective and well-documented response is: “I wish I could but I don’t want to.”

I doubt that the idea of abdicating your personal throne was strange to early Christians. It was an assumption embedded in the kingdomgospel they responded to. Believers came into the kingdom with the fundamental idea that their lives were no longer their own. They, and every disciple of Jesus since, have lived with this fundamental premise that they were bought with a price and that their lives were no longer their own. That we too might have fullness of joy and that the kingdom would grow, Jesus, the ultimate revolutionary, continues to make claims upon our personal kingdom agendas. This exchange, His Life for our own, is the ebb and flow of life in Christ.

Every disciple is brought to this place of surrender and abandonment. Initially, and throughout the disciple’s life, he is intentionally brought to this crossroads where his Lord shows him where he is clinging to or is entangled with this world. He then poses to him the ongoing and humanly impossible pathway. Paul said it like this:

 Do all things without grumbling or disputing; so that you will prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I will have reason to glory because I did not run in vain nor toil in vain. But even if I am being poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrifice and service of your faith, I rejoice and share my joy with you all. You too, I urge you, rejoice in the same way and share your joy with me.

Through Jesus’ disciples, the Word is progressively en-fleshed. I believe this harrowing process of dying to ourselves and finding Christ expressing himself through us is what prompts Paul to say:

 Work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. 

I believe it was Paul’s expectation that Jesus’ resurrection life would be progressively expressed among saints so that, ultimately, every tongue would confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 

Father, as you intended and as Paul taught, may we progressively lose the battles we fight to sustain our own kingdoms. All for your glory forever and ever. Amen.

 

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