Our vision is to live out God’s reality – “God is real; live like it!” But what does that mean? We believe that God’s reality has implications for the choices we make in every part of life – if God is real, then there is a best way to live and think. But this can be taken three different ways. Many Christians, many Basic Seminar attendees, end up thinking that life is a search for the behaviors that God wants us to carry out, and if we do those behaviors, then we’re living like God is real. I’m realizing that it’s easy for our message to sound that way, and to many students, it probably has. But it’s wrong. I’ll call it the “do the right thing” message.
Matthew 7:22 describes some people on judgment day who did the right things:
“On judgment day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord! We prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many miracles in your name!'”
These were people who did all the behaviors that would make sense if they believed in God’s reality. The next verse records Jesus’ chilling answer to these good people:
“Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'”
So it turns out that “doing the right thing” isn’t enough. Why does Jesus reject them? He doesn’t know them. They don’t have a relationship with him.
Living like God is real is something entirely different from making lists of appropriate behaviors. Jesus Christ is the kind of God toward whom the most important behavior is to build a relationship with him as a person. And it turns out that that relationship will give us the motivation to do the various behaviors that God’s reality implies. I’ll call this the “have a relationship with Jesus that motivates you to do the right thing” message. I mean, why in the world would a college student care what the Bible says about sex before marriage? There’s a lot of motivation to do it! Why would he or she say ‘no’? Why should a teenager living at home think that God has anything to do with his or her internet usage? That kind of God seems pretty invasive, and is easy to react to. We can make lists of what God wants us to do in different parts of life, but they are worthless unless we have the right reason for following them. If the God of the Bible is real, then the right way to live is in a close personal relationship with him. The right behaviors are really just good manners toward a God that we know in a close personal relationship. I hope that we can emphasize this more in the future at VOICE.
Living like God is real isn’t doing the right thing: it’s having the right motivation for doing the right thing.
