New converts and long time converts, researchers tells us, are not shining stars of holiness, reflecting the image and glory of Christ. Instead of being conformed to His image, being changed from glory to glory (2 Corinthians 3:18), many have adopted a willing conformity to the world. In large part we have become a people who are in the world refusing not to be of it. This is a sad turn of circumstances. An awakening of our willingness to do what is right and a rejection of doing what is wrong awaits. Eternal and abundant living should fill our minds with the love of truth and the love of righteousness.

When America had strong leaning toward a Judeo-Christian code of behavior we could depend on Christian leaders and church member to reflect the image of Christ in their morality, in their politics, in their science, in their economy, and in every part of society. Alas, doing what is right is no longer a given when it comes to Christians. Many live by the heart-sickening sounding words “it all depends.”

Ask the generation after you if they believe that cohabiting is morally wrong and against God’s command and you may be surprised at the answer. Ask how far should a young man or woman go (sexually speaking) when dating and be ready for a jolt to your brain the size of an espresso double shot. Ask that if a couple is no “longer in love” should stay faithful to each other and wait for a confused response. It all depends, they may say.

You see morality is now an arbitrary decision governed by feelings and not by reason. The “mushy heart” of Hollywood drives most decisions of right and wrong among us. In “The Use of Science and Ethics” an American moral and social philosopher, Abraham Edel (deceased since 2007), has written this popular piece on morality quoted by John Stott in “Radical Discipleship” (p. 230). Our default relationship to holiness is now nonconformity.

It all depends on where you are,

It all depends on when you are,

It all depends on what you feel.

It all depends on how you feel.

It all depends on how you’re raised

It all depends on what is praised,

What’s right today is wrong tomorrow,

Joy in France, in England sorrow.

It all depends on point of view,

Australia or Timbuctoo,

In Rome do as the Romans do.

If tastes just happen to agree

Then you have morality.

But where there are conflicting trends,

It all depends, if all depends.

How sad. immorality has taken on the guise of prayer: If two agree it (immorality) will happen. Have mercy on us, O Lord!

When the church separates Savior from Lord, it (holiness) all depends. When we make following Jesus to the cross optional, it all depends. When disciple means something different from Christian it all depends. When bidding someone come a die with Christ is strange sounding to our ears it all depends. When we refer people with sinful patterns to the therapist next door, it all depends. When we study videos mostly and Scripture no more, it all depends.

Returning to holiness is the constant mandate of Scripture. Deciding right and wrong on the basis of Christ’s commands of loving God and loving our neighbors as ourselves must recapture our conduct. Self-control must return to our favorite words’ list in the church. Purity must no longer be viewed as prudish but the honorable thing to live by.

Without a commitment to prayer and holiness revival like tomorrow may never come. But it won’t be because the Lord is slow to act but because we are slow to respond to his holy call to be a holy people. Call me Lord only if you plan to live under my Lordship.

Prayer: Lord, help us to resolve no longer to linger in the world miring in unholiness, forgetting our roots in you. Rather, Lord, we cry out to you to grace us with the power to return to holiness. Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on us! Amen.

Stott claims that the church has challenges to overcome to regain its influence back. He names four: Pluralism, and materialism, ethical relativism, and the challenge of narcissism.

3. Ethical relativism, Stott labels an insidious spirit… seeping into the church. He picks mostly on sexual ethics. The incidence of cohabitation is alarming in Western Culture in and outside the church. Conforming to the standards of Jesus in sexual ethics (sexuality must always be within marriage between husband and wife) is the high calling of all Christians, relativism notwithstanding. In Christianity we are not to live by an “it all depends”, but by the words already spoken by God.

4. The last challenge to authentic Christian living is narcissism, an inordinate love of oneself, and the sufficiency of oneself. Got a problem? Look within for the solution. Narcissism neglects the love of God, and others for the love of self.

Pluralism, materialism, ethical relativism, and narcissism, these four but the greatest of these is the unwillingness to seek conformity to Christ at all cost. Stott doesn’t blame the world for being the way it is. He simply points out, having been a pastor and a Christian statesman for a couple of generations that our easy willingness to follow the ways of the world are killing us.

What problems in the church can be attributed to these challenges? Do yo agree that these are the biggest challenges the church is facing today?

In chapter one, Nonconformity, Stott challenges his contemporary Christians for look and refrain from four issues that plague the Church today.

We are not to be conformists to the ways of life in the world. But we are also not to be escapist in our existence in the world. He says “We are neither to seek to preserve our holiness by escaping from the world nor to sacrifice our holiness by conforming to the world”.

He challenges the Church today to be nonconformist to four issues facing us. I only deal with two for now.

1. Pluralism: The reality that many believe that Christianity is not unique among the world religions but only a way to live a good life. He discourages personal superiority while calling us to great humility. Much about Christianity is unique: Jesus Christ, his incarnation (the one and only God-man), his atonement (dying for the sins of the world), his resurrection (conquest of death). Radical discipleship is radical nonconformity to our culture, which is only artificially discerning between systems of belief, and ways of life.

2. Materialism: Our lack of resistance to consume more than we need. We must re-develop a “lifestyle of simplicity, generosity and contentment… learning to be content with what we have. Here Stott echoes Nouwen and many others who have said: We are not what we own, we are not what we achieve, and we are not who others say we are.

Do you think Stott is on the right track is naming the challenges facing the church today?

But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath…put on the new self…after the image of God…compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience (bearing with and forgiving one another… put on love… let Christ’s peace rule in your heart… Be thankful… let the word abide in you and abide in the Word, honoring King Jesus with your life.

Anger has no plans of leaving us alone without putting up a fuss. Without a fight we will never put to death anger or wrath. What then is our strategy for defeating anger in our lives?

We must not settle for a strategy based on lies.

The blame game lie: “He made me angry”. It’s true that people hurt us to the point of anger. However, anger does not come into us from the outside, it comes from inside of us. So we can choose our reactions to hurtful things. In responding to angering events we must be Christ like.

The personality lie: “I’m just hot tempered; deal with it.” It’s true that people are more easily angered than others. However, this reality doesn’t excuse angry and hurtful outbursts toward others, friend or fiend. We remember the words of our Master who showed us another way: “bless those who hurt you…”

The helpless lie. “I can’t help it, my feelings take over.” This strategy, like its blame and personality siblings, is also flawed. We can actually do all things in the strength of Christ, including anger busting things. Our lives are hidden in Christ and we have died to the things of this world. We are to put off these things that beset us. We are more than conquerors. We are to be self-controlled.

Last, there is the culture lie. Our culture today encourages the expression of anger. Punch something, yell at your dog, and tell her how you feel, or take it out on a helpless triple cheeseburger with fries. And supersize it, please! Culture in this case must submit to faith. Jesus’ way trumps culture when there is a conflict between culture and biblical truth and ways of relationship. Put away anger. Pure and simple, but never easy!

All these crutches are excuses or lies we tell ourselves to justify behaviors that allow the flesh to gain mastery over us.

Put away anger and wrath, Paul taught in imitation of our Master Teacher. There is a principle here that must guide us: If we’re commanded undress anger from our person, it’s because we’re Spirit-empowered to achieve the command. This is true not only of anger but all the sins that beset us.

I would like here to introduce a concept that might be helpful in doing the hard work of getting rid of anger. There are certain attitudes and behaviors in the Christian life that are just hard to accomplish by trying, even when we try harder in spite of repeated failure. As much as I want to love my enemies, be humble, or stop being angry when hurt, I discover I am not able to love, be humble, or stop being angry. Trying harder would hardly do. Perhaps another approach may get me closer to godliness and self-control. Perhaps training will do what trying cannot do. Let me explain more.

The putting on of the new self is a process (the slow cure) that the Spirit undertakes (It’s called sanctification, the process of making us holy people) in my life to dress me up with the same mind that was in Christ Jesus (Philippians 2:1-11)”. Paul encourages me in Colossians 3 to “Put on the new self … after the image of God… compassion, kindness, humility”, etc… This process allows kindness, compassion, humility, etc… the antidotes of anger to become permanent residents in me. Through this process, I train to become the kind of person, who automatically responds to anger causing situations with the gentleness and meekness of Christ in me.

This process has a goal: to become conformed to the image of Christ. My goal is not to become more of who I am. God forbid. It is my very self that is in desperate need of becoming new. God transfers his divine nature into me (2 Peter 1:4) to make me like Christ.

Along with the goal the process has three components. First the Spirit is the agent of working on me. No solo work here. Teamwork is a required. The second component is life. The Spirit works through life’s troubles, joys, hurts, and troughs to do his perfecting work in me. Through life events, He turns me into an anger-defeating disciple. The third component is the means of grace. The means of grace enable me to do what I am not able to do in my own strength is called the habits of love. These habits work directly in me to enable me to prevent angry reactions in me

Especially pertinent to overcoming anger automatically, I name solitude and silence. They work in such a way to drive me to surrender whatever anger-responding weapon in my hand or to turn it into a fruit-bearing tool. I’m not sure how this works exactly. It’s a deep work of the Holy Spirit within. I only know, that I am what I am, because of these habits. Being alone with God learning to be silent before him, allowing his presence to wash away my pride, my desire to control others, my tendency for revenge, and my self-justifying actions.

I have learned that in walking with the Master that every life changing action in my life demands the work of God in me and requires my efforts. I am willing to participate in this work of salvation (Philippians 2:12-13). The prize: A closer likeness to Christ that refuses to let anger eat away at my apprenticeship to Jesus.

The book is brief but packed with gems and richness. It comes from the heart of our patriarch who lived radical discipleship, taught it, and makes it his swan song. He will write no more.

I am reading, to my delight, this gem of a book divided into 8 chapters with a preface, conclusion and postscript.

The titles of the chapters give what John has learned discipleship to be.

Preface: Disciples or Christians?

Chapter One: Nonconformity

Chapter Two: Christlikeness

Chapter Three: Maturity

Chapter Four: Creation Care

Chapter Five: Simplicity

Chapter Six: Balance

Chapter Seven: Dependence

Chapter Eight: Death

Conclusion: You Call Me Teacher and Lord

Postscript: Farewell!

Join me in reading this blog as I comment on this book in days to come. I can’t recommend the book too highly. But be ready to do some deep soul searching. It is crystallizing a lot of loose things for me. I hope it will do the same for you.

Have you read it? What do you think?

And secure in their hope of the divine reward, they go forward with joy, saying: But in all these things we overcome, through the one who has loved us (Romans 8:37). And so in another place Scripture says: You have tested us, O God; you have tried us as silver is tried by fire; you have led us into the snare and laid tribulation on our backs (Psalm 66:10-11). And in order to show that we ought to be under a superior, it goes on to say: You have placed people over our heads (Psalm 66:12).

Moreover, fulfilling the precept of the Lord by patience in adversities and injuries, they who are struck on one cheek offer the other; to someone who takes away their coat they leave also their cloak; and being forced to walk one mile, they go two (Matthew 5:39-41). With Paul the Apostle they bear with false brothers, and bless those who curse them (2 Corinthians 11:26; 1 Corinthians 4:12).

Comment: This weaving of Scripture is typical in the Rule. God is no softie when it comes to our submission to him and to others. We Christians triumph over our enemies in the same way the apostles and Jesus did: by living in humility and submission to God and others. That’s the way of life with God and his followers. Teresa of Avila let her inner voice slip out: “If this is the way how you treat your friends, Lord, no wonder you have so few of them!” (Cited by Norvene Vest in Preferring Christ)

Prayer: Lord, humility is learned in humiliation. My choice is obey or to lift up my head. Teach me to obey that I may not sin against you. Lord, have mercy on me.

Listen to this Jeremiad: This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, said to me: “Take from my hand this cup filled to the brim with my anger, and make all nations to whom I send you drink from it” (Jeremiah 25:15). The “cup of the wine of the wrath of God”, as the Hebrew literally says, is the cup of the righteous anger or judgment of God. God was angry with his people and with the nations in their disobedience. There is a point of no return when the axe of judgment falls upon debauchery. And God’s anger is the driving force.

In a final way, Jesus downed this judgment cup with one crucifying gulp when our judgment was nailed to his cross. But as long as the cosmos remains rebellious against God the residue of the anger of God remains as an instrument of judgment and reconciliation.

So much for God’s anger; what about ours? Since we are made in the image of God, is not anger or wrath part of the human gene pool? So we deduce then that there must be a right anger and a wrong anger since it is inconceivable to call God’s anger wrong.

Right anger serves and protects something good. The world God created is good, and we, the apex of creation, are very good even if we are desperately flawed. Anything that causes this goodness to wane or be destroyed incurs the judging wrath of God. In turn, we who are imitators of God (Ephesians 5:1-2) also make right and wrong anger choices. Righteous anger is God’s way of protecting the good, of purifying the world and our hearts. The wrong or sinful anger promotes the dark side of rebellion.

What is right anger? One time someone attempted to harm one of my children. I became a fiery and irritable 5-foot ball of anger. This kind of anger is right, fair and just. Justice and putting things to rights demands it. When the poor suffer and are taken advantage of, God is angry and we should be too. Not at God, not at ourselves. At a world system we are determined to transform in our anger. When a woman is abused in any way, our anger leads us to sympathize with her. Is justice even possible without right anger? Probably not! Until the kingdom of God comes in a final way and the will of God is done anger is the right response to injustice of any kind. Angry feelings, stemming from these situations, are not sinful. They fit well with Paul’s repetition of an Old Testament teaching to be angry but without committing sin or breaking a commandment of God. Letting the sun go down on this anger does not seem right.

The right kind of wrath is part of the life of the heroes of Scripture. Abraham beats the tar out of Lot’s rival warlords. I assure you he did not enter the war in love. Moses, by God’s voice, encouraged an eye for an eye, and made mincemeat of Egypt. And what to say of all the prophets of Israel, who railed against injustice, abuse of God’s moral law, and life in the fast lane of sin? Just as God’s wrath is positive and active so must our anger be.

Our problem is with the wrong anger, the Cain kind of anger that acts to destroy brother and neighbor (raising Cain we say). Rather than love, hatred digs its ugly claws into the seat of anger. The passage in Genesis 4 tells us that Cain branded his moral compass with the seal of internal anger. He then nursed the internal scar until it broke through his skin in the form of a hateful killing club.

But physical violence is not the only anger we commit. Pride, greed, and envy often lead to backbiting, slighting, or demeaning language against our neighbor. “How many reputations have you killed, O unrestrained anger?”

Then again, angry feelings are not always served piping hot or sported at the tip of the tongue or dangled on the sleeve. Often vengeance is calculated in the frigid temperatures of anger. Stafford (Disordered Loves, 82) quotes this Spanish Proverb: Vengeance is a dish best eaten cold. Vengeful anger injures with a deliberate word (a disposition of character that calls a neighbor a fool, Jesus said), withholding goodness, or ongoing unforgiveness.

And this: Displaced anger. I had to stop the other day when I realized I was beginning to react angrily to a situation. I quizzed my soul: Why are you angry within me? My soul admitted: I am angry at the injustice of a previous situation and because you haven’t let go of it, you’re wearing your anger on your sleeve in this other situation.” Touché! I took a mental shower and returned to my usual self.

Put away your wrong anger? But where? On the cross where Jesus traded hate for love. Those who walk with the master train their souls to respond with love when hate is more natural, when vengeance is pleasurable, and when keeping that angry piece of our minds we’re so willing to part with, right where it belongs: On the lips of prayer.

Walking on the way is a  familiar metaphor in Scripture. It pictures the pursuit of the moral life as marked by God. People of faith (all kinds of faiths) have known that more than human wisdom is needed to negotiate a life well lived, a good life. This brings up the question of whether we can be good without God, the question of the ages. If I were to answer this question honestly and personally (from personal experience), I would say: “I know that I can be somewhat good. But I cannot be the best I can be in goodness without God.” And he who settles for some goodness by self-will when all the goodness he can be with God is at his disposal is a rank fool.

Yes, belief in God does not exempt the saint from doing foolish or immoral things. And there’s plenty of atheists who live lives worthy of saints. Question them, however, and they’ll admit that they are at a loss to explain their own moral lives coherently to your or their own satisfaction. They cannot adequately answer “Why should we be good?” The moral life has no obvious authority. Reason alone cannot justify it. The desperate need for it in society, and in human nature, are not sufficient to explain why we should be good. Only God’s will and God’s call can make perfect sense of the inherent necessity of being good.

God not only answers the question of why we need to be good but the ultimate answer to how we can be good. We have tried, all of us to walk, stand, and sit not with the bad of the world. Not one has ever succeeded (except the One in whom there is no guile or sin). No matter whether we have the genius of Ben Franklin, the moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr. or the dogged perseverance to alleviate poverty of Mother Theresa. Our strategies for tooting our own goodness trumpets sound like clanging cymbals. Lowering the bar of goodness is a bankrupt way of doing goodness. The demand is sky high, the will and the natural capacity worm low.

In Why Bother Being Good? The Place of God in the Moral Life, John Hare articulates what we need. “We need moral faith… the faith that it is possible for us to be morally good in our hearts and the faith that the world outside us makes moral sense… We have to believe that our capacities have been transformed inside [ourselves]… and that “the world outside is the kind of place in which happiness is reliably connected with a morally good life.” (cited by Miroslav Volf in Against the Tide: Love in a time of petty dreams and peersiting enmities.

As moral people, who are imaged as walking in that blessed-is-the-man-tableau, which the psalmist paints for us in Psalm 1, we, who are moral people bent on a goodness that is not our own but gifted to us by God, are convinced that we need not do what is morally reprehensible in order to be happy. Unless we are persuaded by this, as the Psalmist of Psalm one evidently is, we cannot satisfy the demands of morality. We will think otherwise and cease to try to be moral if we believe “that we will be miserable when we do.”

The moral faith necessary for leading moral lives (why should we be good?) demands faith in God. He alone is able to “transform hearts and providentially lead the world in such a way that (in the end) virtue will unite with happiness.” Believers and non-believers alike may not realize that God is at work in the heart and in the world to marry virtue and blessedness. God ordained and performed the ceremony of that marriage. Ultimately on a cross.

To truly live abundantly (to walk, stand, and sit in attachment to a Righteous God), is to walk on the way that God marked, with God, before God, and for God.

Prayer: Dear God, I know deep within that my moral goodness can only come from you. Even the moral faith that I need to do the right things in life and believe I can be pleasing in your sight is a gift from you hand. I, in my own power and might, try as I may, have no natural capacity to be good. The good I know to do, I do not, I cannot do. Thanks be to God, who in Christ Jesus, my Lord, charted the way of goodness for me, and has given me the Spirit of God to convince me that I should be good and enabled me to be good. Help me even more today to remain convinced that virtue for me, as it is for all your people then and now, is necessarily tied to blessedness. Blessed is the man indeed. Amen.

The fourth step of humility is that if in this very obedience hard and contrary things, even injuries, are done to him, he embraces them patiently with silent acceptance, and does not grow weary to give in, as the Scripture says: He who perseveres to the end shall be saved (Matthew 10:22). And again: Let you heart take courage, and wait for the Lord (Psalm 27:14). And showing how the faithful ought to bear all things, however contradictory, for the Lord, [the Scripture] says in the person of the afflicted: For you we suffer death all day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter (Romans 8:36; Psalm 44:22).

Paul says in Philippians “do all things without grumbling”. I may grit my teeth and obey. I may obey dutifully but attitudinally inwardly be rebellious. I may think myself obedient when truly I’m indifferent.

Deep commitment to Christ is not obtained in life’s peaks but in the mire of life’s troughs. Our love is deepened in the troughs and our love motivates our going further along the road less traveled among many of us today: The Way of the Cross.

Prayer: Dare I ask you for perseverance and endurance? Shall I enter willingly into sufferings (mine and yours to complete), denial, and crucifixion? Is there no other way? Narrow is the way and few there be who find it. Lead me on this way though my ego be killed. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God who knows the way of grief and suffering, shame and abandonment, have mercy on me.