We as believers are aliens, complete and utter foreigners in this world.
It would have been all too easy to extend this book for countless chapters covering every detail of our human existence. It would also be too easy to offer solutions that might not fit every context. Instead, the aim was to awaken the awareness, to make a call for the search.
It still boils down to something as simple as Jesus’ comments about the two greatest commandments. Once you are committed to serving God with a whole heart, it’s awfully hard to run away from your duties to the rest of the world. We need help discarding a badly broken Western social mythology; we need a warning that it simply will not do. What Western Christians have been doing is ignoring how seriously they failed to claim their divine heritage on this earth. They won’t take it themselves and try to prevent others from having it. Not only is it relatively easy to see the failure, and to start fresh with something else, but the information on the proper path is staring us in the face. Once your feet are on that path, it’s hard to imagine God couldn’t or wouldn’t guide you from there.
Loving God is total abject surrender. It creates the fundamental assumption you deserve no good thing in this life. It removes silly notions about anyone else deserving anything in particular. We all deserve Hell. It’s not our duty to restore man’s dignity, show he can’t have any in the first place outside of Christ. Our duty is to call for repentance. Without repentance that sweeps away all of life and builds from God, there is no foundation worth any effort to build.
We have a very heavy layer of nonsense crushing us on the meaning of Christ-like love. Our Western social mythology prevents us seeing the truth. It’s not some silly niceness because feelings are not the primary objective. We can’t do much for anyone’s feelings when we can’t even fix our own. Emotions are a consideration with every other very real human weakness, but they cannot ever be used to steer things. Love is not an emotion; affection is a choice with emotional results.
Loving others is keeping one hand on the Cross and touching our world. It requires knowing who God called you to be, what He says your role is in His Kingdom and being ready for anything. You relinquish all hopes, dreams, plans, expectations and preferences and see what He places in your life. Your only accomplishment is keeping alive the desire to please Him. He is more than capable of guiding you in fulfilling the reason He called you to hang around this world. Your part is making room for Him to take full control, and that means alienation from the world, even as you pour out your life in it.
It’s not possible to find peace and joy in any other way. The greatest possible sense of fulfillment can only come by embracing His moral character in this world. We have run a short course here of contrasting some obvious differences between what is being sold on every street corner against what God alone offers from Heaven.
The justice of God is your divine heritage, but nobody can force you to take it. Surely it’s plain to see most Western Christians don’t even recognize it for the treasure it is, much less do they embrace it. Don’t settle for a cheap imitation. If it weren’t Western Civilization, it would be some other evil perversion dreamed up by evil men who reject God’s truth. There can be precious little revelation from God without the full package of ancient Hebrew intellectual assumptions. That is your divine heritage as a child of God.
Accept no substitutes for the whole revelation of God.
