Commitment of the Heart As Well As the Hands

Pow! Luke doesn't pull any punches when it comes to what John the Baptizer preached. It's amazing how so many Jewish people came from so many far away communities to go in the wilderness to hear John; only to have him theologically blast them out of the water. John calls them a brood of vipers. Seems to question their intelligences by asking, "who warned you of the coming wrath." As if to say, you couldn't have come up with this on your own. Someone must have warned you! But that's not the upper cut to their doctrinal chins.

John then says to them in so many words, group affiliation does not guarantee your salvation. If you get a chance look at what John says in Luke 3:8, 9. He paints a picture of God literally taking an ax to the notion that group or family affiliation was enough. Graphic enough for you? I can imagine how hard it was for them to hear that. The thing I relied on for my salvation from the coming wrath (my ethnic identity as a child of Abraham) is not adequate enough to save my soul. I imagine it was hard for our church to hear that as well, yesterday. Because many of us believe group affiliation in the "right" church is good enough to warrant eternity with God. But John emphatically states it is more than just being connected to the right group.

We can see throughout the Old and New Testaments people in the right group doing the wrong thing and forced to deal with the natural consequences of that wrong behavior. And I'm so glad John boldly proclaimed this truth. Because if group affiliation is all that is needed then our commitment to Christ can be merely mental assent instead of incarnational living. Think about it. If being connected to the right group was enough, the only thing I would need to do is the minimum requirements to stay connected to the group. My commitment could stay on the heart level and would never really have to move to the hand level; that level of taking my beliefs and enfleshing them in healthy behavior--thus incarnational living.

Commitment in the heart naturally leads to commitment of the hands (behavior, service, action); if in fact there was a commitment made. In truth, it really is not so much about doing a lot of stuff. It's more about owning a belief system so much so that the natural response of that belief is the outpouring of behavior in keeping with that system. It is owning this Christian belief system to such a degree that our very character is changed and that change prompts Christlikeness.

This reliance on group affiliation gets in the way of this type of transformative living. Does this mean any and every group is sound in their teaching and practice and we no longer have to be mindful of those sorts of thing? Not at all. But that discussion tends to distract us from the transformative process. Let us focus on commitment in sound truth to such a degree that it leads to us living out that truth in sound ways.