Are You Wearing Yourself Out Climbing the Wrong Mountain?
Imagine if you were told that everything you wanted most in life could be yours if you could scale this one mountain. You got in shape, gained strength, spent a lot of money to buy climbing gear, underwent years of specialized training, until finally, you climbed that mountain. It was harrowing, but you made it!
And then, when you got to the top, a guide told you, “Oops. You climbed the wrong mountain!”
That’s essentially the message that I think far too many of us will hear at the end of our lives. We’ll have given ourselves over to lesser pursuits and will enter heaven with great joy for what’s before us, but great regret for what we’ve left behind.
The modern world has so many compelling pursuits that it is so, so easy to miss a glorious one. In a world with a mountain range of options, how do we know we’re climbing the right mountain?
What All the Kardashians Are Doing
While vacationing in Colorado, Lisa and I spent an early evening at the Iron Mountain Hot Springs. We heard a group of women (I’m guessing it was a bachelorette party) in our pool discussing a surprising number of medical options to keep women looking young. What they did to their faces, injected into their bodies, paid to undergo treatments, and the effort they spent investigating and researching new options to look younger than they are (“This is what all the Kardashians are doing now,” one woman opined) astonished us.
As we climbed into another pool, Lisa asked me if I wished she were more into that stuff. “What were you thinking listening to them?”
All I could think of was William Law’s admonition (Law was an eighteenth-century Anglican writer). I’m paraphrasing him here but basically he urged that women and men should earnestly pursue humility, patience, generosity, faith, compassion, courage, and kindness with the same intensity that those in the world pursue wealth, fame, worldly achievement, and physical beauty.
The world is wearing itself out to becoming wealthier, physically healthier, more famous, and more powerful. There’s a sense in which we Christians should be wearing ourselves out—or at least striving—to become holier. Before you think that sounds heretical, here’s the apostle Peter’s opinion:
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, mutual affection; and to mutual affection, love. For if you possess these qualities in increasing measure, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. But whoever does not have them is nearsighted and blind, forgetting that they have been cleansed from their past sins (2 Peter 1:5-9).
The deception of our age is that looking like you’re twenty-five when you’re fifty, or fifty when you’re seventy, is somehow worthy of more time and money and attention than growing in Christlikeness, whatever your age may be.
Maybe you’re not so into looking younger than you are. Even so, most of us as Christians can fall into seasons where we spend far more time and energy trying to lower our golf handicap, increase our social-media followers, lose weight, regrow hair, help our kids “succeed,” and increase the size of our financial investments far more than we think about growing in humility, surrender, discernment, and patience.
Worse, some Christians even suggest that trying to grow in character is dangerous because it could lead to “works righteousness.” Linguistically, it is nearly impossible to define Peter’s phrase “make every effort” apart from an affirmation of human cooperation in spiritual growth. That understanding is buttressed in Romans 6:11-14 and Philippians 2:12-13, among other places. These passages aren’t about getting into heaven (salvation); they are about how people who are saved should increasingly look. It’s not about pursuing where we’ll go; it’s about pursuing who we are.
The ancients (and Scripture) speak of the virtues of Christ as the spiritual body-building tools we can use to grow. Just as a body builder lifts weights to shape his or her physique, we should know which virtues help round out our character and learn how to practice them.
This ancient and cherished practice has fallen out of favor as of late, but with my book The Glorious Pursuit: Becoming Who God Created You to Be I’m doing my best to bring it back. I first wrote this book in the late nineties and was thrilled when NavPress asked me to update it so they could re-release it, which they have now done. I’m quite enthusiastic about its prospects and its message for today, especially since only about a dozen people outside my immediate family even knew who I was when it was first published.
A Thousand Boots and Spurs
William Law tells the (fictitious, I’m guessing) story of a man who wore himself out so that he could die with a thousand pairs of boots and spurs. He sacrificed his health, relationships, sleep, recreation, everything, in a zealous pursuit to finally obtain one thousand pairs of boots and spurs. Eventually, he reached his goal—and when he died, everyone remarked how utterly ridiculous, foolish, and misguided his life turned out to be. Who could wear a thousand pairs of boots and spurs to begin with?
But then—and this is where it gets convicting—Law asks what the difference is between socking away a thousand pairs of boots and spurs or a thousand dollars (a thousand dollars was worth a whole lot more then that it is now). You can no more spend a dollar in eternity than you can don a pair of boots and spurs.
The Glorious Pursuit is a call to live the truly abundant life as God defines it—a life made possible by God’s grace, empowered by God’s Spirit, and modeled by God’s Son. It’s a pursuit that matters in every age, without regard to “fashion.” When Christians become more concerned about demonstrating generosity, compassion, and kindness than we are about gathering a huge pile of money, impressing others with our looks, or getting lost in nonstop entertainment, we witness to the reality of another world.
In fact, it’s a competing worldview altogether. If we take the virtues seriously, we should be more concerned with humility than fame, even fearing the fame that could jeopardize humility, which is far more valuable in the sight of God. We must pursue compassion and kindness and patience, even being thankful for the opportunities to grow in these virtues, rather than resent the frustrating people who are necessary in order for us to display and grow in compassion, kindness, and patience.
Practicing the Christian virtues is an ancient journey, well-attested to in Scripture and in the most beloved Christian classics, yet it is also a modern highway to spiritual growth and discipleship. Though I first wrote this book two decades ago, ancient Christian practices have a way of finding new relevance with every generation of believers who embrace the glorious opportunity of growing in Christlikeness. I pray some of you will join me in this time-tested, biblically ordained journey to become more like Christ by practicing the virtues of Christ.
More about The Glorious Pursuit here.
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