Breathing Freely the Clean Air of Grace

Secular materialism, the great religion of our age, is the second-hand smoke that we breathe daily, lethally, and unwittingly. Although we may not feel in danger, there is cancer in the air. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that modern Christians analyse the way in which a post-Christian culture threatens our vitality. We cannot allow ourselves to sit passively in toxic fumes. Gospel vigilance today means keeping watch lest the spirit of the age begins to suffocate our life in Christ.

In one sense, every age has the same problem. This is what Paul refers to as the “flesh” (c.f. Phil. 3:4). This is the mindset that drives human beings to think that they can achieve life, bliss, and liberty without the aid of divine wisdom, power, and grace. For the Apostle Paul, this “flesh” was fed on the paltry food of Pharisaic religion. Paul was sufficiently detached from reality to think that the CV outlined in Phil. 3:5-6 was sufficient to secure him a place in the life to come.

Of course, on the other side of his conversion, Paul realised the foolishness of such thinking. Encountering Jesus was a radical upheaval of his values. The things he once thought of as “gains” were transvalued as “losses”. The gospel reprogrammed his heart so that he came to see that the only way to be right with God was a complete renunciation of self-confidence and a complete entrusting of oneself to Jesus. Righteousness could not be purchased; it must be a gift from God, that is, of faith.

Now, we live in a very different spiritual setting than did Paul. This means that, for us, the “flesh” is often experienced in the form of a different kind of godlessness than afflicted Paul in his pre-converted state. Our fleshly religion is a secular religion, that is, one that revolves around the self, not God. This is evident in a lot of different ways. For many of us, peer recognition means a lot more to us than does divine approval. We don’t struggle with religious guilt as did Luther or Bunyan. Instead, we agonise over whether or not we are “winners” or “losers” in the eyes of our colleagues. Similarly, in a secular age, conspicuous consumption replaces conspicuous sanctity. Unlike the Pharisees, we don’t measure the width of our phylacteries or the length of our prayers; we do, however, spend far too much time selecting a pair of shoes or contemplating which phone is most honourable to hold in public. Are many of us devoted to legalistic righteousness? Not really. But transpose righteousness from the key of Moses to the key of self-care, and our zeal in religion is seen to match that of the most pious of ancient Jews.

All of this indicates that the problem of the “flesh” has not gone away in the modern world. We, too, are relying on the self for life, freedom, and happiness, the great difference between us and Paul the Pharisee being that, whereas his religion was governed by a passion for God, ours is lived for nothing more noble than the self.

What should we do when caught in the thicket of a false religion? The answer is that we need to undergo the same revolution that occurred in the heart of Paul. We need to discover that all of the things counted as “gains” by the culture around us are in fact “losses” when compared to the “excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus”. We need to come to appreciate that the only righteousness that matters, when the dust settles, is being “right” with God, and the only way to garner such righteousness is by faith in Christ.

If we grasp this truth, heart-transformation will occur. We, like Paul, will find ourselves willing to suffer the loss of all things – indeed count them as rubbish – if only we can know Jesus himself and “the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His suffering, being conformed to His death, if, by any means, [we might] attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10-11).

What happened in the life of Paul is that he discovered that the life he so longed for, resurrection, could only be gained in Christ. Henceforth, everything changed for him. Life simplified; life focused; life renewed in purpose. From then on, his life reduced to a single lane in a single race with a single prize: “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:13-14).

But how does this transformation happen? How do we reach a point of seeing the vanity of a false religion and the impotence of the flesh? The answer is the gospel. It is by meditating on the death and resurrection of Jesus that we find a higher purpose in the world and a uniquely stable ground of righteousness before the only audience that matters, God. The gospel is the knowledge that transformed the life of Paul, and the gospel is the knowledge that can heal us from the fumes of secularism and fill our lungs with the invigorating air of free grace.

By Joe Barnard