Lets stop settling for desires far below what we were created for.

Recently I spoke about the fact that words like Peace, Love, Hope and Joy express deep longings we all have, but that we end up settling for “stuff” that promises to deliver these longings but never does.

Over the last couple of nights I have been reading a book that has given me new language to understand just how profound that settling for less actually is.

Regular readers of Faith Reflections will know how much the books of N.T. (Tom) Wright have had on my heart and mind. There has been a deep relief as I encountered his writing because I found him expressing the truth of the bible in a way that made sense intellectually but also challenged my heart and helped me understand Jesus and myself a whole lot more.

His most recent book is called “The day the revolution began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion,” and while I haven’t yet finished, the parts I have already read are helping me understand the dilemma of what it means to be a human being much more clearly.

When I was speaking on Christmas eve about our longings for Peace, Hope, Love and Joy, I knew that I was speaking about the human spirit that is common to everyone. In the book of Job, the courageous young man Elihu asserts that:

But it is the spirit in a person,
the breath of the Almighty, that gives them understanding.
Job 32:8

I knew that whether the people who were hearing me would call themselves Christians or not, there was a spirit in them that that longed for hope, peace, love and Joy. I also knew that no words I could say would accurately capture that reality, because as the writer of Ecclesiastes points out, God has made everything beautiful in its time, however:

He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. (Ecclesiastes 3:11)

Part of all of us is beyond our capacity to understand. Our hearts long for true love, true hope, true peace and true joy and those longings drive us, and as I wrote a few weeks ago, these are the longings that clever marketers try to tap in to when they sell their products.

What N.T. Wright helped me give words to in a new way is what happens when we settle for less than who we are created to be.

Wright builds on the central idea that we are created in the image of God, and therefore are built to reflect his heart to the world. Many Christians talk about Sin being the central problem that stops us doing what we are created to do and being who we are created to be. Wright doesn’t back away from Sin, but says that the real problem is not so much the sin itself but where it comes from. He writes:

Called to responsibility and authority within and over the creation, humans have turned their vocation upside down, giving worship and allegiance to forces and powers within creation itself. The name for this is idolatry.

I remember reading the bible early on in my journey and thinking how irrelevant the idea of idolatry was. Very few people in my life had figurines of Gods that they served, which is what I understood idolatry to be. Gradually I understood that idolatry was more than little statues and that there is a central reason that the very first of the Ten commandments is:

  “You shall have no other gods before me.” (Exodus 20:3)

Jesus says in Matthew 6:21 and Luke 12:34:

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

and that is the central issue of idolatry. To quote the classic country song, We all looking for love (and peace, and hope and Joy) in all the wrong places, and when we do we actually give up control of our hearts. Wright says:

“Worshipping things other than the one true God and distorting our human behavior in consequence is the very essence of “sin”: the Greek word for “sin” in the New Testament means, as we saw, not just “doing wrong things,” but “missing the target.”

I found Wrights examples of idolatry very helpful:

You can see this in the obvious examples: money, sex, and power itself. Like fire, these “forces” are good servants but bad masters. Not for nothing were they treated as gods and goddesses in the ancient world—as indeed many people treat them today (though without using that language), sacrificing to them and obeying their every command

Wright believes that the target we are built for is “a wise, full human life of worship and stewardship.” and that:

Idolatry and sin are, in the last analysis, a failure of responsibility. They are a way of declining the divine summons to reflect God’s image. They constitute an insult, an affront, to the loving, wise Creator himself.

This gives the idea of “sin” and its consequences a much fuller meaning, Wright asserts that:

“When humans sin, they hand to nondivine forces a power and authority that those forces were never supposed to have. And that is why, if God’s plan is to rescue and restore his whole creation, with humans as the active agents in the middle of it, ‘sins” have to be dealt with.'”

“The reason we commit ‘sins’ is because, to some extent at least, we are failing to worship the one true God and are worshipping instead some feature or force within the created order.”

What Wright is saying is not new… Most theologians through the ages would agree with him.. its just that we have often talked about “sin” as though it was the core problem, and as Wright points out, sin is the consequence of the problem and not the problem itself.

One of the challenges of the Western culture is that we have created a culture that promotes idols. As Skye Jethani wrote:

The dilemma posed by consumerism is not the endless manufacturing of desires, but the temptation to settle for desires far below what we were created for.

We live in a culture that is continually promising to answer our longings, and when we find the promise doesn’t work, we move on to the next thing rather than stopping and realizing that money, sex, power, education, family, beauty, health, relationships or anything else will never fill the void that can only be filled by the creator of the Universe.  We continually “fall short”, but get back up and keep trying, despite the fact that a part of us knows it will never work.

In thinking about Sin this way, who Jesus is and what did on the cross and the life he promises take on a whole new level of meaning.

If you are sick of an overly simplistic understanding of the Christian faith, I highly recommend this book.

Once you have read it, please let me know what you think.