I’ve often seen and heard A. W. Tozer’s powerful line quoted in sermons & books, ‘What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.’

It’s a simple but sharp wake-up call for us to examine the connection between our ‘theology’ (whether conscious or unconscious) and everything else about our lives.

And I’ve used that quote myself many times. In my experience, it helps people take a step back and reflect on that connection. What kind of a God do I believe in? What kind of a God don’t I believe in? How might that then shape me in various ways?

But only recently did I see the wider paragraph, which I think offers a perceptive and challenging focusing of the lens of the line, which simultaneously invites a wide-angle view of its truthfulness.

Because Tozer then goes on to say this:

‘The history of [hu]mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion…

And then he continues, ‘And [our] spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God’.

In other words, our view of God (whether affirming belief in that God or denying it) has consequences not simply at the level of the individual, but also for us at the level of society and culture. For me, this prompts two significant applications: (I’m sure there are many more!)

1. Looking at the Church

Firstly, it’s a challenging word to any collective Christian culture. That could be an individual church, a theo-cultural ‘tribe’, a denomination or movement, a geographically-defined representation of the Church (e.g. ‘the Church in the West’).

Collectively, we will be shaped by our view of God in more ways than we know. For good and for ill. It limits and it launches. Our theology is our heart and soul because it shapes our worship, our identity, our mission, our ethics, etc.

It’s likely that we will, of course, in many ways be initially ignorant of these connections. That’s why we call them blindspots!

We want to be ‘always reforming’, coming ‘back’ to the nature and character of God, even if we find that the God to whom we come back is different to the perception of God we had previously.

As the apostle Paul put it in Ephesians 1, we want to ‘know God better’ – and it takes a work of God for this to happen.

But we don’t do it alone. Sola Scripture but not *solo* scripture. We prayerfully read Scripture with others. We need them to show us those theological blind spots.

So as CS Lewis put it, will we therefore let the theological ‘sea breeze of the centuries’ – and, we might add, of the global Church – blow through our bones?

2. Looking at the World

But the second application that came to mind from Tozer’s extended quotation is this: If a people have never ‘risen’ above or ‘been greater’ than their view of God, then doesn’t that motivate us to courageously, compassionately, prophetically hold out God to our world?

And by ‘our world’, the punch of the quotation is that *each* culture and society needs to hear, see, & know this God. Because each culture and society who doesn’t know this God *truly* will be inevitably and variously bound by that lack of knowledge.

Or to put it another way, a distorted understanding of God (again, even if that’s of a God it ‘doesn’t believe in’) will both constrain its vision for life & undermine its flourishing in life.We might note the way Tom Holland’s recent work, Dominion, has explored how European and Western civilisation is indebted to the Christian faith. We are now discovering what happens when we separate the fruit from the tree which produced it.

In a week where we mark the centenary of the birth of John Stott, perhaps we’d do well to rediscover Stott’s unashamed call to ‘theologise’ all of life in all of God’s world. His work, The Contemporary Christian, perhaps models this best.

Let us take up the challenge to ‘tell a better story’ to our world. To relocate identity, value, meaning, love, forgiveness, hope, justice, freedom, dignity, purpose in God. Maybe sometimes we think proclaiming the gospel means a slim, peripheral message?

But in the gospel, we proclaim God, true and living. Tozer highlights for us that without God our cultures & societies are inevitably and unknowingly parched, constrained through our ‘not knowing’, ‘unknowing’ and ‘false knowing’.

Of course, we’re all on a ‘knowledge journey’. No individual, society or church can know God fully. God’s ways are above our ways. But if God chooses to self-reveal in Christ (as the Church has always believed), then to simply say ‘God is unknowable’ betrays a false humility.

As D.A. Carson helpfully notes, just because we don’t God fully, that doesn’t mean we can’t know God truly.

(If you want a reference: A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (26 Jun. 2017), p5.)

If trials are how God transforms us, then telling each other ‘You Got This’ isn’t enough to get through the year ahead.

Life Goals

As we stumble through these early weeks of the new year, I wonder if you’ve had a chance to consider what would count as a successful 2021 for you?

As Christians, we’d probably recognise there’s a number of ‘unhealthy’ answers to that question: getting rich; winning the plaudits of my peers; sculpting my body to resemble the images that bombard me online.

Whilst we might find ourselves tempted by the allure of those answers now and again, we’re likely to agree that they’re not what a Christian should be setting their heart on.

But what if we put the question in more Christian terms: ‘What would it look like to end the year more spiritually mature?’

How would we answer that?

And this is where I’ve been pondering whether even our ‘Christian’ answers may still reveal somethings gone amiss. 

Welcome to the Real World

I’m quickly learning to love the book of James in these disorientating times. It’s a part of the Bible often praised for being delightfully practical, offering an everyday faith.

But more than that, it’s also a portion of Scripture that is absolutely realistic about life. Take how James begins:

‘Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.’ (James 1:2-3)

Right from his opening gambit, James doesn’t hold back that life is full of hard things. Many kinds of hard things in fact. There’s no Instagram filter or rose tinted glasses here.

But to speak of joy alongside trials might seem a bit of stretch to our ears. How does one even consider the idea of rejoicing in the midst of pain?

The Posture of Perseverance

And even when we consider James’ rationale, noting that joy lies in trials producing perseverance (1:3), we might still raise an eyebrow. 

After all, in the midst of hard things, perseverance can seem like a pipe dream. Surely times of suffering are when we feel least like keeping going? Maybe you feel that right now? You’re hanging on with your fingernails here!

But maybe that phrase reveals the crux of the matter: after all, who are we hanging onto in such times? 

What if spiritual perseverance is less about the internal ability to resolutely persist come what may, but rather about having such an awareness of our weakness that we have ‘come to the end of ourselves’ and have thrown ourselves on something external to ourselves: God. 

To put it another way, as we feel weak and cling to the Lord, this is actually what it means to be steadfast. This is the posture of perseverance.

We learn to lean.

The Surprising Shape of True Maturity

Often we act like growing as a Christian means having it all together. But James connects this perseverance to the greater work of how God is shaping us:

‘Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.’ (1:4)

In other words, true Christian maturity is not about having it all together, but rather realising that we don’t – but knowing where to turn in the midst of that.

Of course in many areas of life maturity looks like becoming more independent – think of the small child walking without a hand to hold, or the employee no longer needing to be spoon-fed their tasks. But I think James would say that actually Christian maturity means becoming more dependent.

Yes, we want disciples of Jesus to have their own renewed minds, reflecting on their own circumstances and desires and days through the lens of the gospel. But let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that the cry of our self-determined age – ‘You got this!’ – is a vaguely Christian exhortation. 

Leaning into the Future with God

So as we scan the horizon for what 2021 may hold – for ourselves, for our churches, for the Church in this disorientating season – know that there’s few greater things that God could do for us than teach us to lean on him through hard times. 

Christian growth does not work like a board game, where if we land on the right space we can skip ahead to the finish. As we say in the UK, we can’t avoid the ‘hard yards’. 

In other words, James is adamant that we can’t get to Christian maturity without perseverance. And we won’t discover perseverance without trial. Learning to lean is the Christian life.

The Best Place To Be

But if we under any doubts about whether it’s worth it, just a few sentences later James crystallises where such leaning will lead us to: ‘Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial because, having stood the test, that person will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him.’ (1:12)

Wherever this year takes us, leaning on the Lord is the best place to be, because ultimately it’ll get us to the best place we can ever be: receiving the crown of life from the God we love.

Yes, there will be things we’ll face this year that we’d never have chosen to face.

But despite how hard those times may be, we can be confident that God is forming us through them as we learn to lean upon him.

He got this. And we can consider that pure joy.

A Lesson from Babyville

In the midst of the craziness of life with a newborn, one of the phrases Zoe & I often come back to is ‘every day is a stage’.

Welcome to my thought process…

Oh, hurrah, the little one was only up for a feed once last night… oh, and then the following night he’s awake three times for nearly an hour each time… just when we think he’s getting into a rhythm, suddenly everything changes!

Every day is a stage.

It’s a helpful nudge for our expectations as parents not to be unrealistic, and not to get discouraged when one day is so different to the next.

The COVID Landscape

And as we enter a second lockdown here in the UK, this phrase has kept coming to mind. This is the COVID landscape and it often feels that ‘every day is a stage’.

Many have noted that one of the best ways of capturing this landscape is the acronym VUCA: Volatile, Uncertainty; Complexity; Ambiguity.

The term became popular through the US military in the early 1990s, in response to the collapse of the USSR and the fact there was now a much more complex ‘threat’.

In every sphere of life at the moment, we face volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – and life for churches and church leaders is no exception.

Welcome to the Hebel World

Of course, we all know this is what life can be like. But life feels particularly ‘like’ it at the moment!

In the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, the writer repeatedly uses the Hebrew word ‘hebel’ – often translated as meaningless, but I think better translated as vapour or vanity. Rather than suggesting life has no meaning, it captures that sense of life being ungraspable and fleeting. Part of why we want to grasp life is because it is meaningful, and yet it is vapour. Plans, dreams, schedules.

Life is vapour. A Saturday night announcement from Downing Street and suddenly our plans for the following weekend have to shift. Who knows what Christmas will look like? Who knows what 2021 will be like?

But what are we hoping will bring relief? More certainty? A Government plan? I saw this tweet from pastor Andy Prime this week, which picks up on another repeated phrase from Ecclesiastes and reminds us where to look:

2020 is not our enemy, or the problem.
2021 is not our saviour, or the solution.

This is 'life under the sun.'

The answer is not a new year.
The answer is new life.
And even our calendars point us beyond themselves to the Christ.#AD#InTheYearOfOurLord

— ᴀɴᴅʏ ᴘʀɪᴍᴇ (@revandyprime) November 4, 2020

Another VUCA

Rather than just hoping things ‘go back to normal’, some have argued that the best response to living in a VUCA world is actually an alternative ‘VUCA’ – and I’ve found this a helpful starting point in my own thoughts:

Respond to Volatility with Vision: painting a picture of the future that isn’t dependent on certainties…

Respond to Uncertainty with Understanding: reflect on the context and empathise and embrace reactions, after all we’re all feeling the fragility…

Respond to Complexity with Clarity (simplicity): discerning/communicating what we are about and what counts…

Respond to Ambiguity with Agility: facilitate innovation and build a culture of resilience…

If Every Day Is A Stage, Plan For Tomorrow

Of course, in all of this we still need to make plans – and yet to make them prayerfully and hold them lightly. James Lawrence, Leadership Principal for CPAS, has a helpful nugget of wisdom here for moving forwards:

“Think long-term … prepare medium-term … plan short-term”

I find that a helpful way of framing time, but also of framing my expectation levels and where I spend my energy.

After all, every day is a stage.

How are you finding the fragility? What has helped you take steps forward? How could the craziness of a newborn baby frame your perspective at the moment?