“As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. ‘Follow me,’ Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.”

Mark 2:14

On July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards delivered his famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God in Enfield, Connecticut in the U.S. In it he called his local church (and not the local non-Christians) to repent. You see, the Protestant Reformation of the 15^th century had sparked a gradual movement towards personal holiness and piety in the church. In 1741, this movement was peaking with what is now known as the First Great Awakening in the American colonies and Great Britain—a powerful decade that saw revival among Christians on an enormous scale, as people began to engage emotionally and personally with being followers of Jesus.

Whilst this larger movement played out on the world stage, however, Edwards had noticed that the members of his church lived lives that were largely indistinguishable from the lives of the non-Christians around them. They went to church on Sunday morning and behaved appropriately piously at church, but during the week their lives were no different from their neighbors.

Stealth Christians.

Can you relate?

One would be forgiven for hearing the title of this sermon and thinking that it was your average ‘hellfire and damnation’ sermon—but you’d be wrong. If you read the text (you can Google it), Edwards was simply preaching on God’s holiness and power, and accordingly, how foolish and upside-down it is for us not to pursue holiness and Christlikeness with all our hearts (Col. 3:12).

Edwards’ point, or course, to the people of his church was that when you take God’s character and the teaching and life of Jesus seriously, it is quite impossible to avoid being ‘in the world, but not of it’. You won’t be able to help being different from those around you—because you are.

Those who follow Jesus will be different not simply because we do the ‘right things’ (although doing the right things are important), always have the right thing to say (although words of encouragement and faith are important), or because we have our ‘fire insurance’ (although salvation is important)—we are distinguishable from the world because inside us, the Kingdom of God has sway, and we are becoming people who are characterized by traits such as peace, patience, gentleness, and self-control (Luke 17:21, Gal. 5:22-23).

This, of course, is what sets Christ-followers apart from the world—as we apprentice ourselves to Jesus, we tend to do and say the kinds of things that Jesus did and said.

Revolutionary.

Unfortunately, it can be our lives, and what people observe us doing that contradicts what they know us to believe—Mohandas Gandhi once famously said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

In this new year of hope and grace, may we hear Jesus calling us to follow him. May we hear the Lord’s quiet call to seriously and intentionally pursue apprenticeship to Him. A good definition of an apprentice is a person who spends time with someone in order to learn to live and act more like them. May our public life, the bit that people see and are influenced by, reflect the inner reality of our submission to Him.

For Further Action: Consider spending some time in quiet prayer and silence before the Lord, reflecting on your relationship with Jesus. Fifteen minutes or a half hour might be a good starting point. You might begin by meditating on a portion of scripture such as 1 Peter 1:3-9, 2 Cor 4:16, or 1 Tim 4:8. Humbly consider how your outer life reflects your inner life. Ask your ever-present Teacher to come alongside you and show you how He desires you to follow Him in a particular area of your life. Conclude your quiet time with a prayer of thanks and joy that we follow a Teacher who is gentle and humble in heart, and who does not lay a heavy burden on us (Matt 11:29-30).

Resource of the Week: The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis. Do you get secretly annoyed when people come up to you and gush, ‘Oh, you simply must read [insert favorite book here], it, like, totally changed my life!’? Well, this is one of those books for many people—it is, as they say, freaking awesome. Told from the perspective of one experienced demon (Uncle Screwtape) to his apprentice demon (Wormwood), it follows the life of a Christian man from the perspective of the Enemy—in this case, one demon training another in how to be more effective. It is brilliant, and illuminating. A classic quote, pertaining to my thoughts above:

“Hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the enemy’s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.”

-The Screwtape Letters