Let me share with you a brief paragraph from a letter that came recently from a woman in Southern California. She says, “ My husband is getting rather fed up with church.” (Now the church in mind here is a very prominent evangelical church in their city.) "He is from a very strong Christian family, and was a strong Christian himself. But now he says to get ahead in the world and make the kind of money he wants to make, you can’t be a full-time Christian because you either give up all you’ve got to follow Christ's claims, or you're not worthy. Since he's not worthy, why go half-way? I can’t make him see other wise." Now, that’s a tragedy. There’s a modern prodigal son who has chosen to go out from the Father’s house seeking the things he wants, and he doesn’t realize that what he really wants is to be found only in the Father’s house. He’s going to have to learn by going down into the pig-pen, or by drinking of the empty, unsatisfying cisterns of this world how barren and meager such an afair is. He’s going to have to learn the hard way, and this is the tragedy he must face. This man is choosing a dead-end street today, and when he gets to the end of it, there’ll be nothing to do but to turn around and come back. But though we pity his choice, we admire his honesty. This young man at least has seen that the Christian life is in sipid and tasteless if it’s only lived half-way. Let me bring you another quotation from another source. Here's a young man who writes very pene- tratingly about this problem: “ To sum up, the Christian’s vocation is to be in the world, but not of it; to represent Christ in it and to intercede on its behalf because it's under judgment (this is the Christian’s priesthood), to iden tify himself with its sufferings but not with its a tti tudes; to bring influence to bear upon the world's life without being corrupted by the world’s way; to stand on the frontier, holding forth the Word of Life, and so to love and obey that Word that he’s deliv ered from the evil one and sanctified in the truth. The man who submits to the world’s pressure and loses his distinctiveness as a Christian does not know the cross. The man who seeks to be in the world, as our Lord was in it, but shows that he is not of it because he's a Christian and in Christ, that man will
But we must make friends with them. We dare not shut ourselves away from the perils and the dan gers and the dilemmas of the world around us. Our Lord doesn’t want us to! We must be in the world, seek worldly friends, but we must not be like the world. You see, the word that we need to emphasize is not separateness; that’s not the word if you think of that as withdrawing, but the real word and best trans lation here is distinctiveness. We're to be distinct, different. Dare to be different. Be in the world as our Lord was— in it up to the hilt, but never live under false colors. We’re not to be thinking like the world; our a tti tude is different. Our thoughts are different. Yet we’re to be with them. We’re to be out-and-out Christians, distinct but not distasteful. We’re to be sheep among wolves, as our Lord says. That is, we're not to stay in the sheep- fold. We're disobedient if we stay in the sheepfold. He wants us out among the wolves, boldly out there. Well, you say, isn’t that dangerous for sheep to go out in the midst of wolves? Yes, it is. Of course it is. But that’s the thing that makes it gripping, vital, interesting, challenging, stimulating. It's this danger! The Lord wants us to live on a frontier where we’re constantly under danger, and we’ll be safe just as long as we’re loyal to the Shepherd and never begin to think or act like a wolf. When we do that, we're really in trouble. But as long as we think and act like a sheep, we’ re safe among the wolves. Well, you say, isn’t this difficult? Doesn’t it pre sent a lot of problems? Aren’t you constantly having to make adjustments and make decisions? Of course you are! Whoever said the Christian life was easy? That’s been the trouble with it. We’ve made it so easy that we have no problems any longer, and so we have no power. Now we’re to have problems. Our Lord wants us to have problems. He wants us to be constantly won dering what to do about this particular situation and thinking it through and testing it according to the Word and praying about it and finding the answer that satisfies and that works. He wants us to live that way. That’Swhat makes it challenging and interesting; without it life becomes dull and meaningless.
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