Our CG (Community Group: a weekly 5:17 mix of Bible, people, and food) has heard Steve and me talk about how we’ve been actively trying to ‘do hard things’ recently, especially with the energy we came back from our big overseas trip with. We’ve known for a while that we’d sunk into a rut of just surviving – doing the things necessary to stay in maintenance mode, badly wanting to be able to do more, but not having the all-round health and energy and impetus needed to get out of the rut.
Getting out of ruts (or ‘enacting change’) is another topic I’ve been thinking and reading about recently, but suffice to say for now, God used our trip to inject us with the new energy needed to change our patterns. So instead of pretty much just functioning in maintenance mode, we’re trying to function in ‘do hard things’ mode.
What do we mean by this? Well we’ve borrowed this fantastic motto from The Rebelution – “a teenage rebellion against the low expectations of an ungodly culture”, lead by Alex and Brett Harris. (They happen to be Pastor Joshua Harris’ younger twin brothers). You can read about their ‘do hard things’ motto here, and I recommend you do. It’s about choosing to live intentionally rather than reactively, doing the things that grow our Christian character and competence and impact in the world. This is instead of falling prey to the low expectations the world has of teens generally. Maybe this is applicable to our popular culture too, where not just teens but adults are encouraged to simply live in a way that makes them the happiest – not necessarily to live courageously, against culture where God calls for this, doing hard things.
For us it has a huge range of applications. Take chores for example. Doing hard things means washing the dishes NOW instead of later, because even though we could leave them a bit longer, it would be most helpful to exercise self-control and get them done now in service to the other.
In other areas, it includes tackling hard decisions head-on rather than procrastinating over making them. It means taking our husband-wife roles seriously, or biting our tongues and being quick to listen and forgive, or pushing out of the comfort zones of our personalities and experiences in order to reach out to someone who needs it.
Now all this could sound rather humanistic – as if ‘the only thing stopping you from achieving your dreams is a negative attitude’!! But just like The Rebelution, this isn’t a call to throw God out of the picture and ‘realise new heights of personal achievement as you take control of your life’. Rather it’s a call to dependent yet also ruthless obedience – the kind that achieves much precisely because of how closely God is involved. It’s a call to not let teen or Gen Y or pop or post-modern (or even conservative!) culture call the shots for how to live, but to do the truly hard thing by rebelling against all the often low expectations in order to achieve much for Jesus.
So if you’re in a maintenance mode or other kind of rut we pray you’ll be similarly inspired and motivated to do hard things by and for Jesus. Ultimately we follow his example in this as this week’s memory verse reminds us. He did the absolute hardest thing possible (being separated from his Father) for our sake to give us the possibility and power of doing hard things for his - and because he’s such a good Saviour and Lord these hard things usually end up being good for us too.
its a crazy struggle to swim upstream and the moment we stop looking to Him for strength and looking to each other for support, its so easy to swim a little less harder against the current, and bit by bit if we don’t catch ourselves, we find we’re just being swept by the mainstream of culture and society. i think often times we expect ourselves, or hope ourselves to be radical in every sense of the word. but a friend once told me a radical Christian is one who is radically obedient to God’s word.
btw, thank you again for praying for Dr. Reece tonight. for a slight second i thought it would’ve swept by unnoticed, so thank you (as well as for the 2 cor 4 passage).