I am a person who believes that the Bible I read is true… Now that immediately summons to your mind either relief that I am not some leftist liberal or dread that I am a fire-breathing fundamentalist. If there is one thing that I abhor it is labels.
When I was in seminary, I hung out with everybody, which is saying something considering the time that I went to seminary. I arrived at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary shortly after Dr. Paige Patterson arrived as President. The transition between the seminary being a moderate, neo-orthodox school and a more conservative, fundamental school was in full swing. There was a mix of students and professors on campus. Now, let’s stop a moment and consider that only a few short years previously I was tending bar, hanging out with the guys and chasing the girls like many other twenty-somethings. I was pretty accepting of everybody and loved being around people.
Arriving at the school I quickly figured out that there were not just categories of people, but sides. If I had lunch with the “wrong” person, there were some in the school who felt it was their job to take note of such things and “mark” you. So when I would have lunch with a friend from class who some noted as a more moderate or liberal student, they would take me for a liberal– and I did have lunch with all of my friends, frequently. I worked at a church in Raleigh that I dearly loved with a pastor that i would consider my greatest mentor, but it had a reputation around campus of being a charismatic baptist church (which means we got real happy when we worshipped and we prayed fervently like we expected God to respond to our prayers). So in school I was a liberal charismatic…
Jesus dealt with this whole idea of labels. The Pharisees were fond of noting themselves as “sons of Abraham”, but Jesus wasn’t real impressed. John the Baptist even said that God could make sons of Abraham out of stones (Matt 3:9). Jesus was concerned with making sons of God who would have the life of God flowing through them. Now immediately people will ask, “what do you call these people?”. What do you call people who have the life of Christ flowing through them? In our form of writing, we need a noun to describe this group of people. We need the name of a person, place or thing… so that we can label something. See, it is important in the law to have labels. You have to be specific, be exact, name names. In a contract you have parties with labels, agreements with specific duties, amounts and warrenties. In court cases you have names, dates, testimony of places and times. That is the law and the law requires labels.
I however have come to believe that followers of Christ are less like nouns and more like verbs. We are not a static group that gets slapped with a label so that it can be identified and studied under a microscope. I know, we are Christians. But ask a thousand people to describe a Christian and you will probably get close to a thousand variations. Now don’t misunderstand, I believe there are standards. God calls us to a relationship with Him through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross and through His resurrection. But life that is in Christ, is active, dynamic, spontaneous and free… it is not a noun. It is flowing, moving, breathing, expanding, contracting, reaching, touching, sharing, holding, helping, giving, sacrificing, caring, crying, rejoicing, celebrating, kneeling… The Christian who is truly in Christ should be in constant motion, living the life of a person who is actively following the one who once was dead, but now is alive.
The Pharisees believed that the law was the way to pleasing God, in other words, you don’t have to follow God, just follow the rules. Keep the rules. Don’t get off the path. Stay within the boundaries. Don’t color outside the lines. Play by the rules… only they weren’t God’s rules. Jesus broke so many of the Pharisees’ rules, and He did not repent one time. He lived without sin, while breaking the rules of the Pharisees. He lived, truly fulfilling the law.
How about us? Are we stuck in the law? Not the Old Testament law, but the laws of modern Christianity or churchianity. Don’t say that, wear that, do that, try that, sing that, read from that version, hang around those folks, give to that person, go to that place… if you have been around church very long, you know the rules. I wonder how many of us, like the Pharisees, have stopped short of truly living life, because we simply obey rules. I am ready to run free, in the life of Christ, to experience all of God that I can. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about convention or tradition, but I don’t place my faith in it or trust in it for life. Jesus said that ‘I am the way, the truth and the life’- life that is abundant and free, fulfilling all the law of God while not being restrictive on who we love or how much we love or… you get the idea.
If I were wanting to live a life that is a ‘plus’, I beileve I would start with the life of Jesus in me rather than the rules of the Pharisees. Those rules may make a comfortable place for some, but Jesus wants us free to follow Him on a miraculous and glorious journey of coloring outside the lines.
