(from “Daily Thoughts for Disciples” by Oswald Chambers, January 27th entry)
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“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven.” — Matthew 7:21
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Human nature is fond of labels, but a label may be the counterfeit of confession. It is so easy to be branded with labels, much easier in certain stages to wear a ribbon or a badge than to confess.
Jesus never used the word testify; He used a much more searching word — confess. “Whoever confesses Me before men…” The test of goodness is confession by doing the will of God. “If you do not confess Me before men,” says Jesus, “neither will your heavenly Father confess you.”
Immediately we confess, we must have a badge; if we do not put one on, other people will. Our Lord is warning that it is possible to wear the label without having the goods, possible for a man or woman to wear the badge of being His disciple when he or she is not. Labels are all right, but if we mistake the label for the goods we get confused.
If the disciple is to discern between the person with the label and the person with the goods, he or she must have the spirit of discernment, that is, the Holy Spirit. We start out with the honest belief that the label and the goods must go together; they should, but Jesus warns that sometimes they get severed, and we find cases where God honors His Word although those who preach it are not living right lives.
Judge the preacher, He says, by his or her fruit.
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Taken from Daily Thoughts for Disciples, © 1976, 1994 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd., and used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Grand Rapids MI 49501. All rights reserved.
[[Some words Chambers uses are not used often today — click [here] to look up difficult words.]]
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Brief commentary:
You know, it’s amazing to me that Chambers wrote when he did, several decades before “commercialism” — that is, the driving force of brand names — really took off. There are two parts to this point, and both are just as timely (if not more so) today than they were when he penned them.
Perhaps because of my life being spent more or less in proximity to the Los Angeles metropolitan area, I see a culture so infused with the idea of “branding” that everything is almost instantaneously boiled down to a label for people. You’re a “Coke person” or a “Pepsi person”; a Dodge, Ford or Chevy guy; a conservative or a liberal, Republican or Democrat; a Methodist or a Baptist or a “Calvary Chapelite”. No matter what the topic of consideration is, there’s a label for what category you fall into.
And honestly, that’s unfortunate.
Artists would cringe if you reduced the Mona Lisa to the description “some smiling chick”, or the Sistine Chapel to the description “fancy paint in an old building”. It’s telling that riding the waves concurrent with this epidemic labeling is the feeling amongst just about everyone that they’re “more complex” than the labels they’ve been given would lead you to believe. We hate being oversimplified, yet we typically participate quite frequently in oversimplifying others so we can plug them into our mental spreadsheets for easy classification.
Why do we do this?
Because it’s much easier to label something and file it away for later consideration (which happens more and more rarely as time goes on) than it is to face something now, considering, pondering, meditating upon the nuances and subtleties that people bring into a discussion. By and large, we make more enemies through this practice than we make friends, which in turn will gradually feed our idea that “we’re so misunderstood”, because after all, “if people really understood me, more people would like me, right?”
In Christian circles, this practice is very much alive and well — not typically in a malicious way, but more perhaps because when people come to faith in Christ, it’s usually out of a recognition of their brokenness and the sense of offense they have brought to their Creator. And as new people in any group tend to do, they seek to be accepted among some faction of the group at large so they can become comfortable in their new social surroundings.
Nothing wrong with that.
However, when we set ourselves up for the kind of “oversimplification” that we always say we don’t like others to impose upon us, it gives the enemy a foothold. Scripture is crystal clear about the fact that God despises divisions amongst His Body, and that the enemy often puts a lot of energy into trying to get the brethren to fracture and divide.
It’s a very casual thing amongst many modern Christians, and we even assign lots of religious-sounding titles to our factions: over on the left, those are the “worshipers” sipping their lattes and looking like they just came out of an Aeropostale catalog; in the front, we have the “glory-be’s” — you know, the ones who are very outgoing or athletic and never pass up an opportunity to declare a little too loudly “glory be to God!” for them finding a parking space or discovering that the new phone they want to buy is now $25 off with the e-coupon they were emailed on their old phone; back in the back are the “exes” — you know, the ex-alcoholics, the ex-druggies, the ex-prostitutes, etc.; and over on the right, we have the “show thyself approveds”, the studious crowd who never walks out of the house without a Bible, concordance, and three commentaries on whatever book they’re currently reading through.
Recognizing that “an eye in the body is obviously not a foot” is not at all an issue; different people with different callings and at different stages of their spiritual walks and in different social or professional circles are obviously going to be different. But the fact that we’re too often so eager to not be “the new guy”, and are willing to jump into a label just so we can be known as somebody (even if it’s not who we really are OR who God intends for us to be), that’s the problem.
My closest brothers in the fellowship I currently serve at are (in no particular order) Chargers fans, Broncos fans, Raiders fans, 49ers fans, Falcons fans, Angels fans, Dodgers fans, Lakers fans, Clippers fans, Ducks fans, Kings fans, Penguins fans, Sharks fans, and on and it goes. There are natural rivalries that we (possibly because we’re men, but I don’t think exclusively because of gender) find ourselves in throughout the course of the years, almost always amicably. Yet we don’t allow those petty differences to become fractional.
If we were to look at “more spiritual” differences, as in who’s more of a “worship kind of person”, or who’s more of a “meditative student of Scripture”, it would honestly be just as petty to divide over those differences as it would be to say “I, as a fan of the greatest football team on earth, the Green Bay Packers, cannot in good conscience serve with the likes of you, a demon-spawn fan of those hacks the San Francisco 49ers”.
Church, wake up! God puts eyes and noses and ears and veins and arteries and bones and muscles and mitochondria all together in this skin-bag we call a body so that we — as eternal spirit-beings — can interact within the confines of a specially designed “earth suit” with the world we live in. And He does the same exact thing with this grander-scale version that He calls His Body, putting together feet that smell with noses that run and mouths with halitosis and waxy ears so that each and every one of us can be sharpened, be edified, be “grown up” and molded into more complete and effective bondservants of the Lord Jesus Christ than we can possibly imagine being if we were apart from such “crummy” and different service-mates!
As is said, “the label and the goods must go together”. God’s sovereignty will carry the message above even the faults and hypocrisies of the messenger (a la Philippians 1:18), but that doesn’t excuse the messenger from his need to make Confession to God, then go out and make public his Confession of God. And if that person is a teacher, all the more frequent the need to revisit that practice of Confession.
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