I’m excited by business and I love people. To clarify by business I do mean profit-making, breaking even and money. For quite a few years though I’d counted myself out, they didn’t fit, the idea of money making meant exploiting – gain at the expense of people. Then I twigged, ‘The world doesn’t fight fair but we don’t have to fight our battles that way – never have and never will. The tools of our trade aren’t for marketing or manipulation but demolishing a corrupt culture…… and building lives of obedience into maturity’ (1 Corinthians 10:3-6 MSG).
Many of us live with the recognition that God isn’t calling us all to live on the breadline. Yet in knowing the blessing of a rich, western lifestyle, we begin to question the distribution of our resources. We are left with the dilemma of how to enjoy God-given financial wealth, whilst preventing the on-set of guilt whenever we hear the word ‘materialism’.
“Identity”…. *que switch off*…. yawn… heard this one before.
If you’re anything like me…. this is exactly what’s pulsing through your mind right now. Dull. Old. Meh. All that identity chat is for girls and a topic reserved for one of those deep and meaningful natters they have with coffee and cake. It’s a subject only slightly less cringe-worthy than all that romance chat and completely irrelevant to the real life adventure stuff.
Well that’s what I figured anyway. Until recently…
Life at some point will throw at you a situation that will get to the core of you. I am talking about the kind of pain and suffering where the bottom falls out. For the vast majority of us this is an inevitability not an option. When you became a Christian God did not promise an easy life, God promised to be faithful. The first question is: how should we react?
Something I’ve noticed, especially as I’ve been at University, is there’s a culture. There’s a culture of being a nice person, a culture of going to Church every Sunday, a culture of seeing Christian friends and a culture of being comfortable. There’s a lot of people hanging around the church.
First thing, if we are going to get anything right in what we do we have to go look at how Jesus did it. Jesus was the Son of God, straight up and guess what? He worked as a carpenter before his ministry. If Jesus is doing something then it usually is a good barometer to test what we are doing.
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: the old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5v17-20).
Have you ever been rejected from something you wanted? Ever poured all your time and effort into dreams only to see them crash and burn? Or maybe the people you aspired to impress have dismissed you out of hand. It’s hard to know where to go when everything you work towards isn’t there anymore. The thing that defined you has moved on and left you behind.
The famous American boxer Muhammad Ali was known for his tag line ‘I am the greatest!’ The media, his rival boxers, everyone around at the time were left in no doubt as to what he thought about himself.
As a Christian I wonder whether you have ever thought of yourself, even for a short-while, as being a ‘great’ Christian? What does it even mean to be great in the Kingdom of God anyway? We know what it means to be great in the world of football – everyone can see that Messi is a great player (if not the greatest) because of the staggering number of goals he has scored. We know what it means to be great in the business world – we consider people like Mark Zuckerberg to be a great businessman because of the products and wealth he creates. But what does it mean to be great in the Kingdom of God?
