7. The Bottom Line

Despite certain modern assumptions, life with God isn’t mainly a matter of knuckling under to our superior—the image modernity so much detests. In the Christian view, we human beings do have to trust and obey God and express our devotion to God, but not merely because God is stronger than we are and surely not because God wants to bully us into submission. We must trust and obey because these responses are fitting: after all, we know something of God’s goodness and greatness; we know that God made and rescued us. Some of us know that God graced us so that we are forgiven, accepted, renewed as slowly and arduously as an addict. Indeed, only inside the cradle of grace can we even see the true depth and stubbornness of our sin.

This knowledge of God and ourselves opens us up to a whole range of opportunities and duties—to worship God, to try to please him, to beg his pardon when we fail, to receive God’s renewing grace, and out of gratitude to use our lives to weave a whole pattern of friendship, service, and moral beauty.

Christians describe our human situation like this: we must trust and obey in order to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God has in mind not just what we should be, but also what, one day, we could be. God wants not slaves, but intelligent children; not numb obedience, but devoted freedom, creativity, and energy. That’s what the grace of God is for—not simply to balance a ledger, but to stimulate the spurts of growth in zeal, in enthusiasm for shalom, in good hard work, in sheer, delicious gratitude for the gift of life in all its pain and all its wonder.

In short, we are to become responsible beings: ones to whom God may entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them—expecting us to make something significant of our lives themselves. No one of our lives is an accident. None of us simply finds herself here in the world. We have been expected, awaited, equipped, and assigned. We have been called to undertake the stewardship of a good creation, to live within sturdy and buoyant families that pulse with the glad give-and-take of the generations. We are expected to show hospitality to strangers and to express gratitude to friends and teachers. We have been assigned to seek justice for our neighbors and, wherever we can, to relieve them from the tyranny of their suffering. Some Christians have been called, in imitation of Christ, to bear unusual suffering of their own.

But we have also been called and graced to delight in our lives, to feel their irony and angularity, to make something sturdy and even lovely of them. For such undertakings, we have to find emotional and spiritual funding from the very God who assigns them, turning our faces toward God’s light so that we may be drawn to it, warmed by it, bathed in it, revitalized by it. Then we have to find our role within God’s big project, the one that stretches across the border from this life into the next. To be a responsible person is to find one’s role in the building of shalom, the re-webbing of God, humanity, and all creation in justice, harmony, fulfillment, and delight. To be a responsible person is to find one’s own role and then, funded by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, to fill this role and to delight in it.