Quit Showing Up to the Wrong Ballpark

I once drove my oldest son to the wrong ballpark. It wasn’t a small mistake. He was trying out for a new baseball team—an important and unnerving opportunity for any twelve-year-old—and I drove to the complete wrong town, two hours away from where the game was being played. He missed the opportunity to play the first game of the tournament because of my blunder.

I’m convinced that many Christians are making a similar mistake as they try to navigate their lives in a complex world. We’re locating the action in the wrong arena, directing our energy and focus in a direction where the real game isn’t even being played. We’re showing up at the wrong ballpark under the assumption that big things are happening there when all the while the real game is being played somewhere else.

In Luke’s gospel, we get two scenes that both depict the phenomenon I’m trying to describe. First, in Luke 2:1-7, Luke describes the most powerful political figure in the world, Caesar Augustus, issuing a decree that all the world be registered. Caesar Augustus was believed to be a god. When he issued a decree, you only had one choice—obey it. But, simultaneous to his decree—in fact, through his decree—God was doing something else by means of a no-name couple from a redneck town.

In the barn alongside the animals in the little town of Bethlehem, the virgin gave birth. The eternal Son of God came quietly into the world as a baby and was laid in a feed trough for livestock underneath the decree of the emperor of Rome, the most powerful figure in the world. It would’ve certainly seemed to the normal Roman subject that the real action resided with Caesar’s decree, but we now know better—the little town of Bethlehem was the host site.

Then Luke does it again. In Luke 3:1-2, we read, “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysania tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.”

Among a listing of the “who’s who” of the most powerful politicians in the world, Luke describes “the word of God” coming quietly to a strange man in the wilderness. Which data set would interest the public more? If the ancient equivalent of the New York Times could have interviewed any of the people listed above, who would they have chosen? Certainly, not John the Baptist. Yet, the main action of God isn’t located with the politicians; it resides with camel-hair-wearing locust-eater in the wilderness.

Despite mountains of revelation showing God’s people that he delights in choosing “what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor 1:28-29), we keep showing up at the wrong ballpark. Namely, we keep mistakenly thinking that the main action in our world is occurring on Capitol Hill when all along, it’s been the pulpits of First Baptist and Covenant Methodist and Second Presbyterian—everywhere the word of God is faithfully proclaimed.

Please don’t mistake my message. I do not intend to minimize the importance of politics, for God has ordained government to uphold justice, protect life, and enable human flourishing. Further, Christians should be involved in the political process to ensure that government is doing its job. In fact, I would argue that loyalty to Christ should make us more concerned with politics. The issue is primacy. For those who are in Christ, our primary politics has to do with the eternal kingdom of Christ. We’re citizens of heaven now. Our promotion of the gospel of the kingdom must be louder than our partisan loyalties.

C. S. Lewis noticed the same mistake being made back in 1960: “Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell’ Christianity as a means of ‘saving civilization,’ do not come to much. The little knots of friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.” Lewis wisely understood the human heart’s fascination with the big and powerful, but he also knew that Christ’s real work isn’t always discernable in the eyes of the world. “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

Do you believe that the word of the cross is the power of God? Do you really believe it? If you do, it will show in what gets you most excited–in what Jonathan Edwards called the heart’s affections. You’ll anticipate your pastor’s next sermon more than the next president’s State of the Union address, the Lord’s Supper with your brothers and sisters in Christ more than a front row seat at the inauguration. Without minimizing the importance of good government policy, you’ll be more interested in local churches being planted in the Middle East than in national border policies. You’ll realize that the confession of a former lost sinner that “Jesus is Lord” in the baptism pool has more world-changing power than any government edict. You’ll spend more time, money, and energy getting the gospel to the ends of the earth than moving votes for your favorite candidate.

Andrew Fuller once warned, “When a man’s thoughts and affections are filled with such things as these [politics], the Scriptures become a kind of dead letter, while the speeches and writings of politicians are the lively oracles.” For those obsessed with politics, the glorious realities of Christ and his kingdom often become uninteresting. The good news of the gospel loses its luster in the ever-changing spin cycle of Fox News, CNN, or whatever political podcast you can’t miss.

Let’s stop showing up at the wrong ballpark. Let’s locate the action where God is at work—where the gospel is being preached.

The post Quit Showing Up to the Wrong Ballpark appeared first on Remembrance of Former Days.