Class 5: Christians Are Not Balanced People
Introduction
“Balance” is one of the buzz words of our time. Good people are supposed to be balanced. You balance your job with your marriage with your kids with their sports with your health, with a social life—and if you’re really it all looks easy. Personally, it’s hard not to be familiar with the difficult tradeoffs that we need to make in life. For example: deciding between a date scheduled with one’s wife; preparing adequately for a core seminar; and having something urgent came up at work.
That’s our topic for this morning. But “balance” is not actually what we’re going for. As you can see from the top of your handout, the title of today’s class is “Christians are not “balanced” people.” The Bible wrestles with these same questions I’ve just laid out—but it’s answer is not one of balance.
So let me highlight where I intend to take you this morning. We’ll start by going back to the doctrine of vocation—where we started the class. Then, once we’ve laid that foundation, I’m going to walk through a few major callings that many of us have. And finally, some advice for managing tradeoffs in your life. My prayer in all of this is that you will learn to be a joyful and decidedly unbalanced person as you walk through your life with Jesus.
The doctrine of vocation, revisited
So first, let me take you back to the doctrine of vocation, or calling. A “calling” is something God has told us to do. And as Christians we all have a primary calling. A calling by Christ, to Christ, that we might do good work for Christ. That calling is discipleship. To bring glory to God in everything we do. “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” That’s our primary calling. To salvation and discipleship. And that’s why “balance” is a bad goal for Christians. We aren’t to “balance” our discipleship of Christ with other things in life. We are to be sold out for Christ. We are to look incredibly unbalanced. That’s our primary calling.
Then, as we read in Ephesians 2, we were saved “to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Those are our secondary callings. Colossians 3: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men . . . It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” We do other things in life in order to bring glory to God as disciples of Jesus Christ. Again, we’re not balancing religion with other pieces of our lives—we’re using our entire lives to serve God in the most unbalanced way possible. What are your secondary callings? They are the places God has clearly called you to by virtue of his commands in Scripture or his providential working of your circumstances.
Here’s the point: Your discipleship to Jesus is not just one more ball flying around in your life. It is not in competition with other responsibilities. It is your First Responsibility, and all others are defined by and find their place in service to that one overarching assignment of following Jesus. Think back again to Colossians 3:24. Why are we to work with all our heart at whatever we do? Because we do whatever we do “for the Lord!” You see? The great First Responsibility, discipleship to Jesus, organizes and defines all those secondary “whatever you do” responsibilities. Church life, family life, work life—those are the “whatever-you-dos,” the secondary responsibilities we have as humans and Christians. So we ought to understand all of them as arenas in which we strive to follow Jesus and bring him honor and glory. So are you in school? Then you need to see that God has given you the assignment right now of being a student—a student striving to follow Jesus and bring him glory. Are you a husband? Then God has assigned you the work of being a husband—a husband who is striving to follow Jesus and bring him glory. Are you a retiree? Then God’s called you to be a retiree who is striving to follow Jesus and bring him glory. Are you unemployed right now? Even then, you need to understand that, at least for a season, your assignment from God is to be unemployed, and he intends for you to use that season to follow Jesus and bring him glory.
Faithfulness and Fruitfulness in Church, Family, and Work
When we start to understand that we have one and only one First Responsibility, and that all our other responsibilities are organized and defined by that First Responsibility, a good deal of the chaos we often feel in our lives is relieved. All of a sudden, our various callings and duties in life stop being in competition with one another and instead begin to point in the same direction. Still, though, we can often feel the pressure of our secondary responsibilities bumping into one another. How should we spend an unexpected free afternoon, for example? Should we finish a work project early, or spend time with the kids, or do some kind of ministry at church?
Those are never easy questions, and there are no pat answers to them. But we think there are some principles that can help us manage the jostling demands of work, church, and family. Consider this: For every assignment in your life, you will find in the Bible both a minimum standard for faithfulness, and principles for pursuing further fruitfulness. What do we mean by “a minimum standard for faithfulness?” Well, if you are failing to live up to the basic requirements Scripture gives you in one of your assignments, then you are quite simply not being faithful in that area, and therefore you need to double-down on your attention there before looking anywhere else. And what about “principles for pursuing further fruitfulness?” That means that once you think you’re meeting the Bible’s standard of faithfulness in all your assignments, then you can think about the best way to invest any extra time and energy you might have in order to maximize your talents and abilities for the glory of God and the good of others.
Of course, on either side of faithfulness and fruitfulness you find the two pitfalls we’ve been talking about throughout this class. Fail to meet the minimum requirement of faithfulness, and you fall into idleness. Push beyond fruitfulness and ultimately you fall into idolatry. Here’s the picture:
IDLENESS || FAITHFULNESS → FRUITFULNESS || IDOLATRY
So here’s what we’re looking for: First Faithfulness, then Fruitfulness, but not Idolatry. Memorize that! It’s a good way to think about managing the whole complex of assignments God has given you. First determine if you’re being faithful in your assignments, and then consider where you might be able to invest for greater fruitfulness. First Faithfulness. Then Fruitfulness. But not Idolatry.
For the rest of our time together, I’d like to walk through three common callings: as an employee, as a church member, and as part of a family. And then I’ll finish with some advice for managing tradeoffs across these callings.
Family
What is the minimum standard of faithfulness when it comes to your family? In all honesty, it’s probably higher than you think! According to Ephesians 5, faithfulness in your family is a pretty high bar: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. . . . Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Entire books have been written about how this works out in real life, but the standard of faithfulness is self-sacrifice—in the form of loving, godly submission for wives, and in the form of self-denying love for husbands. If you have children, the standard of faithfulness is also high: “Fathers . . . bring [your children] up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” (Ephesians 6:4 - KJV) When it comes to your family, the minimum standard of faithfulness, it seems, isn’t so minimum at all! Husbands are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, wives are to submit to their husbands as the church submits to Christ, and both are to raise their children to fear the Lord and obey his commandments.
Beyond that, though, there are ways that husbands and wives can invest in each other and their children in order to maximize fruitfulness. Some husbands and wives invest time in retreats with one another, or get-aways with the kids. Others, for whatever set of reasons, can’t do that. Some spend extra money on family experiences; others spend it on other equally valuable things. The fact is, there’s nothing in Scripture that commands you to take family vacations or schedule regular “family days.” Those may be very good things to do, but as long as you’re being faithful to Scripture’s already-high standard of faithfulness, those kinds of things are not strictly necessary. They’re investments of extra resources into your family with the aim of maximizing fruitfulness in that arena of your life. Of course, it’s also worth realizing that faithfulness and fruitfulness in family life isn’t going to work itself out in exactly the same way for every person. Different people are . . . well, different . . . so you will have to be wise about determining carefully what level or emotional, spiritual, and physical support your spouse and children require. Don’t try to define what “faithful” or “fruitful” means for you by comparing your family life to others’. Determine it rather by considering how the Bible’s commands and principles intersect with the real, specific, and providential circumstances of your life.
And what about idolatry? Is it possible for a person wrongly to idolize his wife or his children? Sure! There are two ways. First, if your investment of time and attention into your family causes you to fall below the Bible’s standard of faithfulness in other areas of your life, then believe it or not you’ve wrongly elevated the importance of your family. Just for example, if you simply declare that you’re not going to work at all because you want to spend every waking hour of your life with your kids, you’re not being faithful in the arena of work. Similarly, if you decide to take two Sundays a month to skip the gathering of your church and play soccer with your kids, you’re not being faithful in your church life. Even more fundamentally, however, Jesus himself set the threshold of idolatry when it comes to family. He said, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” If you love your family more than you love Jesus—if honoring them organizes your life more than does honoring Jesus—then you’ve crossed the threshold of idolizing your family.
Church
What about your church life? According to the Bible, the minimum standard of faithfulness when it comes to church seems to be that every Christian should be meaningfully committed to the life of a local body of Christ. Over and over, the New Testament seems to assume that every believer will be meaningfully connected to and committed to a church. Paul says to the believers in the local church at Corinth, “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.” You can see the imagery he uses there—a local church is a body, and each person committed to it is a member of that body and contributes somehow to its well-being. Hebrews 10:24-25 makes clear that it’s not enough just to be theoretically committed to a church, either. We should “not neglect to meet together,” it says, and we should be active in “stirring one another up to love and good deeds” and “encouraging one another!” So the minimum standard of faithfulness when it comes to church seems to be a meaningful commitment to a local church—a commitment that leads you to meet together regularly with that church and be active in encouraging, loving, and stirring up the other members of that church.
That’s just the lowest bar, though. Depending on your life’s circumstances at the moment, you may find that God is calling you to invest more time, energy, and attention into maximizing your service and even leadership within the church. Not everyone is called to be an elder in the church; but some people are, and Paul implies that a desire to be an elder is a good desire (1 Timothy 3:1)! You don’t have to give up an extra night a week to lead a ministry in order to be a faithful member of your church; but doing so might be a great investment of extra time and energy and attention that pop up in your life. Every Christian needs to be a member of the church, but we aren’t all the same member. Some of us are eyes and mouths and even brains; others . . . well, we’re fingernails, and at this point in our lives, given all that God has placed in our paths, that’s simply all we can be.
Strange as it may sound, you can even turn your service and leadership in your church into an idol. Just like we said when it came to family, if your investment of time and energy in your church causes you to default on being faithful in your other God-given obligations, then you’ve idolized the church, and you need to reassess things. Beyond that, Paul even seems to be fighting against the idolizing of ministry in 1 Corinthians 3 when he writes:
5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task.6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 8 The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their own labor. 9 For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.
Don’t let your heart become convinced that your ministry in the church is indispensable. No matter what you do, you are still only watering and planting. It is God who makes things grow. Forget that, and you’ve wandered across the threshold of idolatry.
Work
The Bible also gives us parameters of faithfulness, fruitfulness, and idolatry for our work life. The minimum standard of faithfulness for our work is really pretty simple. 1 Thessalonians 4:10-12 puts it like this: “We urge you, brothers . . . to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands, as we instructed you, 12so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.” Ephesians 4:28 puts it like this: “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need.” What all that means is that while enjoying our jobs and seeking personal growth and making lots of money can be perfectly legitimate desires, all it takes to be faithful in the arena of work is to be able to provide for ourselves, to take care of our families, and to have something left over to share with others. That’s it!
Of course, once that’s done, you can always invest more time and energy and attention into a job in order to maximize your talents and abilities for the glory of God and the good of others. You can give a few more hours or spend a little more brain-space strategizing and planning. You can offer to travel for your employer, or take a promotion that’s going to utilize your gifts better but also require a little more time and attention from you. None of that is strictly necessary to be faithful in your job, whatever the world or your firm might tell you. But any of those things might be a great way to invest some of the extra resources of your life.
The trouble comes, of course, when our investment of resources runs out of “extra” and starts encroaching on our other areas of responsibility. That’s when work has become an idol. The threshold of idolatry when it comes to work is well defined by Solomon when he says, “Do not wear yourself out to get rich; have the wisdom to show restraint,” (Proverbs 23:4). Solomon talks about “getting rich,” but we can easily substitute other ideas there as well. Don’t wear yourself out to get satisfaction. Don’t wear yourself out to get influence. Don’t wear yourself out to get power. Don’t wear yourself out to get respect. Don’t wear yourself out to get stuff. Instead, show restraint. Fail to do that, and you’ve crossed the threshold into idolatry of work.
Holding It All Together
So God has given us a number of assignments in our lives, and he expects us to be neither idle nor idolatrous in any of them, but to pursue faithfulness always and added fruitfulness when we can in all of them. So how do we balance all these assignments? How can we think about them in all their interrelated, jostling glory?
It’s often a little too easy to talk about our responsibilities clinically and neatly, as if each one fits tightly into its own custom-made carrying case. But in the real world, things are never that neat. We live in a world where things come up and life happens whether we want it to or not. We’re trying to be faithful at work, and a child gets sick. We’re trying to be faithful at home, and a church member calls with a crisis. The goalposts move, the target jumps around, and before we know it we can find ourselves discouraged, distracted, and overwhelmed. That was me (Seb) the night my son was born! Instinctually, I was tempted to try to relieve the pressure I felt by running from one of my God-given assignments. “I’ll just default on my work,” I thought—which was really to say, I’ll fail to be faithful in it. But of course that was wrong. All these assignments are real ones, and they are all given to us by God. Therefore we can be sure that he wants us to be faithful in them and increasingly to be fruitful in them.