Cru Talk #1: WITH

Hey everyone! Jason here. I've decided that, since when I prepare talks for Cru I write it all out verbatim, it would be easy to post the transcript on the staff blog, to keep a record of what we've addressed at Cru, and for people who can't make it that week to read what everyone else has heard. What follows is my talk from August 27, the first Cru of the year. Hope it's helpful for review and to direct any friends to!

My wife, Maria and I have been married for 11 years, on staff with Cru for the same length of time, and in Pittsburgh since 2006. When we refer to being “on staff with Cru”, it simply means that it’s our full time job to help introduce college students to Jesus and help them grow in both following Him and leading others to do the same. It’s a fantastic job, and the reason we still do it, and the reason Cru exists, is because we believe that quite literally you will change the world. The university is probably the most influential place in our culture - it’s an innovation and idea factory, a research hub, and a hotbed of social activism. What happens here shapes the world. And you - students - are the leaders of tomorrow. You’ll go on to lead in business, government, medicine, church, and community. Our hope is to see Jesus change your life so that you change the world for good and for His glory. We believe Jesus is the only solution to the brokenness and pain we all experience in our hearts, and to the brokenness and pain in the world. So our mission is to share Jesus and His love with every student on every campus, to help those who follow Him be built up in that faith, and then mobilize you - students, future leaders and culture shapers - to change the world for Christ. That’s why we’re here.

Tonight I want to talk a bit about how we, as humans, relate to God. And I want to kick that off by sharing a bit of my background and story with you.

Many years ago, way back in 1998, in fact, when those of you who are freshmen were just 4 or 5 years old (which is crazy to me), I was also a college freshman. I went to Penn State, and I spent much of that freshman year inventing crazy games and in general wasting a lot of time. It seems to be that when you get several guys together and give them copious amounts of unsupervised free time, they’ll invariably invent something that they compete over. Even if it’s something completely made up. This is probably how Cornhole, Washers, Ladderball, lawn darts, Kan-Jam, and all those sorts of things were created. A particular one we created involved wrapping a ping pong ball with several layers of duct tape, then going out into the hallway of the dorm, with 2 of us spaced about 20 feet apart, one with a golf club and the other with a baseball glove. We’d then proceed to take full golf swings to try to hit the duct-taped ping pong ball past the other. I don’t recommend this. Your RA may not find it as amusing as you do.

Two of the guys I created this and many other games with became my closest friends, but only partly because of the games. We also ended up in a small group Bible study together, and I began my journey of faith with them. They helped me understand Jesus, they stood by me in my best and worst moments, and we had many significant conversations that helped shape the course of our lives and spiritual direction. They even stood by me on my wedding day.

I also started following Jesus my freshman year of college. That was the time and place that things began to click into place spiritually for me - my eyes were opened to understand the significance of Jesus life and death and resurrection, and my need to respond in some way. I had grown up in church and heard the phrase “Jesus died for your sins,” but never grasped what that meant until college. As I began to explore and learn more, my response was eventually to acknowledge that I did believe that it was true, and then to surrender myself to Jesus - to accept the fact that I needed help, I needed a Savior because my life was broken and messy and I couldn’t repair it myself; and to cry out to Him to come into my life and be that Savior.

Before that, I related to God in a very different way. I saw Him like a watchful judge, marking down the things I did wrong and the things I did right, and hopefully I’d have enough good to “pass the test” and be granted Heaven. That was essentially my viewpoint of life - that it was a test and that God was the grader. Our afterlife was determined by how well we did on the test. Much of my spiritual life, then, revolved around the things I did or didn’t do: Did I go to church this week? Was I nice to other people? Did I do well at school? Did I avoid drugs and sex? As a result I was a pretty good kid outwardly, though occasionally that rebelliousness and tendency toward evil and wrongdoing that we all have did come out. But I couldn’t have been more wrong about God and how He relates to us.

I read a book last year, called With, about the different ways people relate to God. The author - Skye Jethani - used 5 prepositions to describe the typical postures toward God. Four are ultimately empty, unsatisfying, and unbiblical, and the fifth is what God has designed and desires (and deep down, we do too). My viewpoint and the way I related to God fell into the category of life UNDER God.

In short, you can define this posture in this way:

“We obey God’s commands and He blesses our lives; when we act outside of His commands or fail to appease Him, He withholds blessing or even brings curse.”

This actually summarizes a majority of human religions. We face a world of uncertainty and chaos, which brings fear, and so we react by trying to control. In this case, we try to control life by controlling God. If we obey and please Him, He will reward us. If we don’t, He won’t. You can see this play out all over the place:

• performing religious rituals like burning incense or repeated, recited prayer in order to acquire God’s blessing
• blaming catastrophe that befalls a nation or a place on the fact that it is “godless” or “immoral”
• the concept of karma - if you do good, good will come back to you, and vice versa
• the concept of reincarnation - what you do in this life determines what you’ll be in the next, all in the hope of reaching some sort of higher level eventually
• a comical example is from the NFL a few years ago. Stevie Johnson, then of the Buffalo Bills, dropped an overtime TD pass that ultimately resulted in defeat. After the game, he tweeted this: "I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…" Stevie was operating under the expectation that his devotion to praise God constantly would be rewarded with success, and when God didn’t hold up His end of that bargain, or so Stevie thought, he was dumbfounded and angry.
• my (and many others) viewpoint that my works and behavior determined God’s love, acceptance, and reward. 

When Christianity is practiced in this way, you could simply call it works-based. We need to do something to inherit God’s favor. And it’s easy to slip into. But the Bible clearly declares that this is not how God relates to us:

“For by grace you have been saved, through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” (Ephesians 2:8-9)

The second posture is Life OVER God. Atheism is the most clear form of this. It says “God doesn't exist. The world operates on scientific, natural principles, and we can learn what these are in order to have a measure of control over the world around us.” In a way, we replace ourselves with God as the masters of our own domain. We determine our own fate, we can do as we choose. God is marginalized from life - if we simply understand the way the universe works we’ll be fine on our own.

This is exactly what Adam and Eve famously did in the Garden of Eden:

“the serpent said to the woman…’God knows that when you eat of it [the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’” (Genesis 3:4-5)

Adam and Eve then took the fruit in their desire to be like God. Instead of submitting to God and living in communion with Him as His created children, they sought to chart their own course and be their own master. You and I do this as well - whether it’s blatant, like denying His existence, or subtle, like declaring Him our Lord yet choosing to let our agendas and hopes and dreams be what determines our choices and direction. A “Christian” form of the Life OVER God posture is reducing the Bible and its teachings to a self-help manual or set of principles like natural laws - in this we, as Skye Jethani puts it, “put [our] faith in the watch rather than in the watchmaker.”

Many people, both in Christian circles and apart from them, live in a Life FROM God posture. Not long ago I read that in a sermon delivered to her church, Victoria Osteen - famous and widely televised pastor Joel Osteen’s wife - made the following remarks:

“I just want to encourage every one of us to realize when we obey God, we’re not doing it for God–I mean, that’s one way to look at it–we’re doing it for ourselves, because God takes pleasure when we are happy. . . . That’s the thing that gives Him the greatest joy. . . .

So, I want you to know this morning — Just do good for your own self. Do good because God wants you to be happy. . . . When you come to church, when you worship him, you’re not doing it for God really. You’re doing it for yourself, because that’s what makes God happy.”

Yikes. This hits the mark of a Life FROM God posture - the idea that God exists to make us happy, healthy, and well-fed. That our devotion to God isn’t about Him at all, but about us. He’s just there to hand out things (money, cars, houses, etc.) that will make us happy and prosperous. A common term is the “Prosperity Gospel.” It’s a distinctly American creation that has spread throughout the world, that ultimately, when you strip away some of the near-biblical language and thought, carries the message that God exists to serve us and please us, not the other way around.

This posture ultimately reduces God to a Santa Claus like figure - we pursue and follow Him based on what He can do for us, rather than to enjoy and have communion with Him.

The last unhealthy posture is the Life FOR God posture. This is especially dangerous because it sounds right, and it can be hidden behind many good things. You could simply describe it as “putting God’s mission ahead of God Himself.”

Now, I’ve just described Cru earlier as a very mission-focused organization. We want to change the world for Christ. And there is nothing wrong with this, just as there is nothing inherently wrong with living in obedience to God, living according to His principles, or even experiencing blessing from Him that does at times come materially. It’s just that these things must be offshoots of the truer, more biblical posture of relating to Him, which I’ll describe in a moment.

When you’re involved in a more activist faith - whether that be in taking the good news of Christ to the world as a missionary, working to end poverty and hunger, freeing people from sex trafficking, or a myriad of other wonderful, godly endeavors we are to pursue - the danger is for us to find our significance and worth in what we do FOR God.

Many of you, as you come to college, are probably asking questions like “What does God want me to do with my life? How can I make an impact in the world for Him? What more can I do with my time and my talents to serve Him?” Again, these aren’t necessarily bad. But it’s so easy to assume that God values what we do FOR Him over anything else. So we wrestle with guilt or a sense that God is disappointed in us when we sin or fail, or even devote time to things unrelated to the “mission”, whatever particular one it is. And we pursue holiness not to become more like Christ, but to be more effective or ready to do whatever service for God we feel called to. If we take this posture too far, we cut the heart right out of Christianity.

The antidote, or the posture the Bible points us to, is Life WITH God. With. That simple preposition makes all the difference. This is what we were created for.

Remember the passage from Genesis I quoted earlier - the serpent deceived Eve with the promise that she and her husband would be “like God.” Before this they were “with” God - living in a perfect Creation, enjoying daily communion with their Creator, living out His purposes for them out of the context of relationship. But they gave it up, as we all have. We all trend toward one or more of the other postures. But God persistently is inviting people back into communion with Him. We can see the fruit of it when Paul, in the book of Philippians, describes what is most valuable to Him:

“Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him…” (Philippians 3:8-9a)

The surpassing worth of knowing Christ. Being with Him in relationship. Gaining Him was the utmost. It isn’t about what we can do FOR Him or get FROM Him. It’s not about having control and mastery over the world around us by living with an UNDER or OVER posture. He Himself is our greatest treasure. Jesus Himself even describes eternal life - what many would see as the ultimate thing to gain, Heaven itself - in relational terms:

“And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)

Eternal life is knowing Jesus. Being with Him. This must be our foremost pursuit. I’ve already described tonight how we are all estranged from God. We stubbornly and selfishly seek to chart our own course and be “like God” - in control of our lives. It might result in us outwardly making a mess of things - abuse, addiction, hurting self or others - or it might simply be in our hearts. But this is why Jesus came to earth, died, and rose again. Our rebellion and seeking to live with ourselves in charge carried with it the penalty of death (Romans 6:23) - which in its deepest and most spiritual form is separation from God. If God is the source of life, death is being apart from the Giver of Life. We are all in danger of existing in this separation for all eternity. But Jesus, being perfect and being the one person who perfectly lived life WITH God, made Himself a substitute. He exchanged our death for His blameless record and His righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21). And then He rose, conquering death and offering to us this eternal life of everlasting relationship and communion with Him. What’s left for each of us is a response - will we accept it or not. I, by God’s grace, accepted Him as a college freshman, and though it’s had its ups and downs, and though I still weave in and out of those alternative postures of relating to God, it has been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.