When most think about God they think of rules, commands, judgments and wrath—with the cherished counterbalance of grace and forgiveness sprinkled in. In American evangelicalism the goal of faith appears to center on “believing” the right thing—believing the gospel. But if “belief” is the only goal of the gospel, then once a person believes, life is futureless—we’ve done it all; we’ve finished the race because the finish line is “spiritual enlightenment.”


  I’m not suggesting that belief isn’t critical and the place we must start—it is—but isn’t there more? Is it possible that God’s dream for human destiny is more than just believing a message? It seems to me that Jesus and the early church were less about believing in something in order to “get ready for eternity" than they were about creating a community of people who lived differently—precisely because they “believed” something unique. Their belief was an alternative vision of reality, which demanded a nonconformist value system from the one being heralded by the religious and political contexts they found themselves in. These were a people who testified to the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ by embracing a new dimension of living—one committed to death, if need be, in order to fulfill the missio dei (the mission of God) in the world. This bunch believed that the events of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection—and the story that those events carry forward into the present—really do make sense of life. These were men and women who aligned themselves with that story, which made them different—they belonged to Jesus Christ who was present to live in and through them. But relatively few think of Christianity as a call to enter a new kind of living—a life jacked up with adventure, mission and divine destiny. Faith for many is nothing more than fire insurance from hell, some acquiescence to rule-keeping (it’s the least we can do), and a safety net of forgiveness when we break the rules. On this view the human experience of faith isn’t much more than a life of stumbling and bumbling around “holding on” to faith the best we can till Christ sees fit to bring us home.


  But what if the Christian life is supposed to be more than that? What if it is a calling for us to step into something larger than ourselves? What if God is inviting us into something more than legalism and rules? What if he is inviting us to participate in some kind of divine quest? SOMETHING ‘TOOKISH’ In J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic The Hobbit, Biblo Baggins lives contentedly in his home at Bag End, Hobbiton Hill, until one spring morning the wizard Gandalf visits him. Gandalf, sensing that there was a hunger for adventure beating secretly in Bilbo’s heart, said to him, “There is more to you than you know.” Bilbo, it turns out, was part of the Took clan, on his mother’s side—they were the ancient defenders of the Shrine. Galdalf knew that, though Bilbo may have inherited the easy-going nature of the Hobbits from his father’s side, his Tookish thirst for adventure would eventually lead him to go beyond the safety of the Shrine into the adventure that would save the world.


  I think God put something “Tookish” in all of us. Erwin McManus writes, “There was a voice screaming inside my head, Don’t sleep through your dreams! Ever heard that voice? It calls you like a temptress to abandon the monotony of life and to begin an adventure. It threatens to leave you in the mundane if you refuse to risk all that you have for all that could be.” I think there is something in us that wants to be part of saving the world. True, we have those things we inherited from Adam that make us cower and lunge into survival and protection mode, but we also have a drive in us that wants to make a difference—that wants to glorify God. We don’t have to settle for being bean-counting legalists who only color between the lines—we can be spiritual pioneers; adventurers who dare to explore what a life fully committed to God can really look like. A TIME-CRITICAL WORLD God has invited us to be participants in establishing his kingdom in the world. God does not force that participation on us; we must choose to participate through our obedience.


  Truth is we don’t have all that much time—one life; one shot. This ought to freak us out a little. We ought to be a little crazy about seizing each day—trying to jam them full of as many right choices and as much Holy Spirit activity we can possibly say YES to. Jesus said with a palpable sense of urgency, “As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work” (John 9:4). We need to keep that sense of urgency alive in us. This helps: the psalmist said, “Teach us to number our days” (Psa. 90:12). In other words, it’s good for us to think about the fact that we are going to die. Get that. You are going to die. So am I. We are going to expire, croak, become dust-lickers. Living life with this awareness isn’t being morbid; it makes us live better. I want my days to matter. I don’t want to be guilty of living in the sin of sloth. Sloth is defined as the lack of desire to perform work or expend effort. It is one of the historical seven deadly sins. Sloth, in the context of spiritual life, means we don’t make it a priority to do what we should, or to seek for the grace to change what we should in ourselves. We become apathetic, which means we have no feeling or motivation to act. We see this sin present in Israel as Jesus calls out over the city of Jerusalem: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! Look, your house is left to you desolate” (Luke 13:34-35).


  For Christians, spiritual sloth sometimes means we really don’t care what the Bible teaches about something, so we put off reading or asking about it. Sloth keeps people from participating in challenging spiritual experiences or events. It’s easier to spend our time glutting our souls with TV dramas and comedies. It’s much more work to engage with people or ideas that call us to action: to loving our neighbor, helping the poor, or telling the truth. Being IN the faith and experiencing salvation does not mean you are DOING the faith and participating in the missio dei. I think receiving Jesus is different from being an apprentice of Jesus, his mission and his ways. Being an apprentice of the Christ suggests you are not just believing in the message of redemption and experiencing personal forgiveness—that is certainly where it begins, but that is not where it ends. Following Jesus is an adventure in being counter-cultural. It is being on a mission to change the world. This is beyond simply dedicating one’s life to faithful service in order to build up a local church congregation, its programs, numbers and facilities—this is about a change of heart, about us putting our skin in the game of bringing God’s justice into a unjust world. Vows help us stay “in the zone” of fervent obedience. But obedience is not the fruit of simple human effort; it is the fruit of grace. This is the only place human effort works…when it is an effort to step into grace.


Get more on Ed Gungor at SimonandSchuster.com