On Being an Ambassador, Part 3: Drawing the Line

Part 1: Cultural Diversity | Part 2: Walking the Tightrope

I think it’s worth looking more closely at where we draw the line between what cultural practices we accept and what we reject—in short, where we draw the line.

What makes a given culture’s norms and practices unacceptable? In a well-known passage, the Apostle John writes,

¹⁵ Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶ For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. ¹⁷ And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever (1J 2.15-17).

We are not to love “the world” or “the things that are in the world.” Now, we know that’s not an absolute statement; we’re told to love our neighbors, as well as our wives and children, and the last time I checked, they all resided on Planet Earth. John gives us some insight into what he means in the next sentence; he lists three things that characterize the world’s thinking and values, things that are at odds with the way God looks at things (what we often call a “biblical worldview”):

• The lust of the flesh
• The lust of the eyes
• The pride of life

As we think about these three things, we realize that they indeed characterize the thinking of the world we live in and in which we are ambassadors for Christ:

• Our culture is devoted to satisfying our physical desires. Because our culture is deeply pornogrified, we tend to think of “the lust of the flesh” as sexual lust, and it does include that, but it’s not limited to that. We want food; we want sleep; we want freedom from pain. And if you’ll think about it, you’ll realize that all these physical desires come from God; Adam and Eve ate fruit—and enjoyed it, and were given free rein to eat from all the trees but one—before they fell into sin. I would suggest that “the lust of the flesh” is the desire to use God’s gifts in ways that he has not intended—and thus to worship the gift rather than the giver. A healthy appetite becomes gluttony; a need for rest becomes laziness; a desire for freedom from pain, which is a God-given sign that we’re using our bodies in destructive ways, leads to drug addiction, which is simply our continuing to abuse the body further.
• Our culture wants what it sees—material possessions of all kinds, from houses to vehicles to baubles to toys, both men’s and boys’. Gotta have it. I’ll be happy with just one more thing. And as we all know, the stuff eventually loses its shine and we’re driven to move on. Once again, in most of these cases the thing itself can well be a gift from a good and generous God, until we move our affections from God to the stuff.
• There’s discussion about what “the pride of life” is. Some think it’s the desire for admiration or popularity; others think it’s the desire for experiences, such as exotic travel or extreme sports. Again, the issue is whether we live for the experience, which is temporal, or for the Creator, who is eternal.

As we represent Christ in our culture or in a foreign one, we must live in a way that declares our priorities clearly. When the culture advocates lust of the flesh, we can’t trim our message to appease the libertines. When the culture lives on greed, we can’t cater to it with some sort of Christianized prosperity theology. When the culture worships political power, we can’t simply champion the candidate most likely to give us a piece of that action, even if he’s a narcissist.

We are representing someone else. That’s a higher mission.

Photo by Carlos Magno on Unsplash

Part 4: Seeing the Long View