N.T. Wright - After you Believe: Why Christian Character Matters

thank you very much thank you very much Katherine thank you very much David and all of you it's very good to be here I didn't think in Britain there is anything called an ethical culture Society as far as I know perhaps our culture is unethical or our ethics are uncultured or something so this is an interesting place which is neither a church nor a cinnamon or a theatre and and that this is New York so excellent I always I always learn something new when I come to New York and there are all sorts of things I would love to talk to you about this evening and our time is limited and I do want as David said to flag up some of the issues in this book after you believe I know some of you have heard on mp3 or whatever a lecture that I gave in fuller seminary just over a year ago which was a kind of flyer for this book before I'd written it and so I will come through some of that material and perhaps it bears repeating in perhaps that's all right but picking up what Katherine was saying I want to start by showing you how I got into this topic because actually most people who write about the New Testament have not written about character formation or virtue and vice versa people who do that sort of ethical Theory don't normally go to the Bible to do it they do it on the basis of other philosophical texts and so on and I came in really rather by the back door because of the work that I've been doing and writing about on the final hope and both Kathryn and David mentioned this life after life after death so many of us in the Western Church be it Catholic or Protestant be it conservative or liberal being charismatic or evangelical all of us since the Middle Ages have thought in terms of dying and going to either heaven or hell I've just reread CS Lewis's book the Great Divorce which many of you will know one of the first writers in recent Western times to question the idea that heaven and hell are equal and opposite and Lewis argues for this very strong physical solid vision of the new world which God has for his people call it heaven if you like though the Bible actually calls it the new heavens and the newerth because for many of us the word heaven implies a kind of non-physical purely spiritual existence which is certainly not what the Bible has in mind and then for lewis hell is this rather thin each elated shrunken little existence which is very next very near to the denial of existence altogether because that's really what hell is hell is saying no to everything that God the Creator gives and does and wants for his people saying okay I see that but I'm going to stick with my own stuff and so you shrink and so you become smaller and so you become really unable to sit there equal and opposite with heaven so anyway I was working on this idea of the new heavens and the new earth as a reimbold you think ins v and Paul talks about our desire is not to be unclothed but to be more fully clothed so that what is mortal may be swallowed up with life and the image I've often used is this you know how it is if a friend has been really sick and taken a long time off work and they've been in the hospital and you go and visit them after a while and you come away you say poor old senti it's just a shadow of his former self the good news of the resurrection hope is that if you are in Christ if you are in dwelt by the spirit you are just a shadow of your future self there is a real you which is more you than you can even begin to imagine uniquely you God made you to reflect in some unique way a particular facet of his glory in his love out into the world and when you are in Christ and in dwelt by the spirit you do that more and more you become more uniquely yourself evil despite what the media tell you makes you boring shuts you in makes you a clone of all sorts of other people who are doing much the same tedious sort of stuff when you are seized by Christ and indwelt by the Spirit he will make you more truly yourself that's part of the paradox we live in a culture which says you've got to be yourself find yourself discover yourself and Jesus says yes that's what you're going to do but the way you do it is by dying and rising again Jesus said if anyone would come after me they must deny themselves take up the cross and follow me and that isn't an antithesis to when he said I came that they might have life and have it in all its fullness that is as Jesus showed in each of the Gospels that is the way to life in all its fullness and so I was working on this idea of this full life not the life immediately after death when we rest with Christ when we are in paradise when we are if you like in heaven with Christ conscious happy with him we are waiting because until God remakes the heavens and the earth then the whole story of creation will not be complete and that's what we're waiting for when that happens then the whole creation will be flooded with the knowledge and love and glory of God as the waters cover the sea and we will be raised to new bodily life to stage post-mortem hope is what the New Testament offers you don't settle for cheap or shrunken imitations as they might say in the investments now what does that do then to how we live here and now some of you will have studied the great Greek philosopher Aristotle 2,400 years ago one of the great thinkers in the Western world Aristotle had this vision of what it meant to be genuinely human he had in mind statesmen we needed to train up statesmen they were always men to lead the the city of the Poly's for the next generation and we needed to train up warriors leaders who would run the army who would be the great generals who would have strategy built into them so that they could lead the people in a successful campaign and Aristotle had this vision of what this fine upstanding man usually an individual would look like and he saw just as you might say with an athlete or a musician that if you're going to be that sort of person there are certain muscles you need to train certain habits that need to become second nature these are the strengths not of body but mind of character and Aristotle had that goal in Greek Telos that's where we want to get here are the steps you need to take to get to it so Aristotle listed the virtues courage justice temperance prudence and several others that cluster round but those are the four big ones he called them the cardinal virtues cardinal means they're the hinge on which human life turns so he urged people to inculcate these virtues to recognize the strengths of character that they needed to develop and work on doing so because human life doesn't just coast along you become what you have bit chiliedu or conversely what you have italy do you become but the difference between virtues and vices is this anybody can learn a vice all you have to do is to go into neutral slide along with the way stuff is going and before too long certain habits of life will have you in their grip it's a vice in that sense you don't have to think about it you don't have to try it'll happen but virtue you have to think about it you have to say I need to take a decision to be this sort of person now and the whole Western Protestant tradition has said oh that's so inauthentic that's just putting it on that's just hypocrisy Luther said that virtue in the Catholic teaching he knew was just hypocrisy pretending to be something you weren't what would Harris throttle have said Aristotle might have taken a virtue like courage I heard a sermon on this a while ago which was one of the things that set me off on this particular train of thought courage is not what happens when somebody about to go into battle takes a very strong drink of something which will fire them up and then goes charging off into the field of battle waving their sword around them shouting some awful war that's not courage that second cousin to folly I suspect you may survive you may kill a few people but it isn't courage is what happens when you take a thousand small decisions consciously thought out to put somebody else's safety ahead of your own so that then on the thousand and first occasion when somebody has just thrown a hand grenade into the middle of a group of your friends you will unhesitatingly and instinctively by second nature go and grab it and throw it away or throw yourself on it or whatever it is putting the other people's safety but nobody does that by nature some people thank God do it by second nature second nature is what happens when you front-loaded the moral thinking I choose to be this today and I will choose to be this tomorrow and it's very hard but then the character is formed and then it can really happen I had a I was working on this a year and a bit ago and I had a striking example which you will all remember because it happened just down the road from here or rather just down the river from here you remember in January last year 15 months ago whatever it is a flight took off from LaGuardia where I landed yesterday evening and it hit a flock of Canada geese and the pilot smelt cooked goose coming through his engines nice smell if it's Christmas Day not a nice smell if you're a few hundred feet above LaGuardia and he had two minutes if he had gone to a book a manual a rule book what to do in an emergency he'd have still been summing through page 350 to find out what to do and the plane would have been in brought in the Bronx a lot of people would have died if he had just been a trainee pilot who just happened to find his way into the cockpit and just did what comes naturally who knows what might have happened plane might have looped the loop gone anywhere because Chesley Sullenberger the third was a 30-year experienced pilot and an instructor and a gliding instructor and pilot as well in that two minutes he did all kinds of things that you can hardly imagine there may be some pilots here tonight and you can imagine that most of us can't in order to do the navigation to get round in a tight turn to get the plane banked so that it would fly right and then just flattened out at the right mo and I just heard a couple of days ago that actually when he said to the flight controller we're going into the Hudson the the air traffic controller assumed that meant were going down with the loss of all lives on board but it didn't it landed flat because he'd done what was necessary up front over a period of years so that when it really counted he could do it by second nature that's virtue courage justice patience temperance he had them all in space those are the classical virtues the pagan virtues if you like you don't have to be a Christian to have those virtues that one of the things I want to hint at at least tonight is that there is a large overlap between Christian goodness and other goodness oh yes there are types of goodness which are unique to Christianity I'll come back to that but part of the point of being a Christian is that Jesus Christ is the truly human being and if you're in Christ you are supposed to be truly human and all the insights that the rest of human tradition has had that points towards genuine humanity but often can't quite make it that just about get there and then fall away they are validated reinforced in Jesus Christ and so as I've been looking at the question of Aristotle and character formation and the question of the future the new heavens and the new earth the resurrection and all that I've asked myself supposing instead of Aristotle's goal Aristotle's tell us supposing you have Jesus gold Jesus what is the goal what are we meant to be and in various passages in the Bible not least the book of Revelation it's clear that we are supposed to be interesting phrase a royal priesthood royal priesthood rulers and priests that's strange language most Christians don't habitually I think think in those terms but this is very clear in various parts of the Bible and the way you can cash it out is this God made humans to reflect his wise order into the world and to reflect the praises of the rest of creation back to him rulers and priests and that's all of us not just those called public office or those call to office in the church this is every single Christian is to share in God's wise rule over the world bringing God's love and creative stewardship into the world is not a stultifying order it's it's a creative lovely thing it's Genesis one thing and then summing up the praises of creation before the creator rulers and priests now that's very different from Aristotle's vision because Aristotle's vision was all about training up these great individuals who are going to be fine upstanding one-offs able to lead in battle able to lead in the state now we still need people to lead in the state the question of what it means to lead in battle looks different with every passing day as technology develops but that's another story but the Christian vision trains people for a corporate role and the qualifications you have to have are not the qualifications which leave you feeling I'm so good at this I'm a self-made man it sa always was men in Aristotle's day doing it and Aristotle wanted thought that when the the perfectly virtuous person had become perfectly virtuous one of the things they would be was properly proud Jesus taught that when your character is fully formed you won't be thinking about your character at all you'll be thinking about how much God loves you and you'll be thinking about whether it's your turn tonight to go and visit old mrs. Jones in the hospice loving God and loving your neighbor and so the formation of character varies from Aristotle to Jesus and Paul in quite a remarkable way Aristotle glimpsed a goal of human flourishing so did Jesus and Paul and the early Christians but Jesus vision of that goal was larger and richer taking in the whole world putting humans not as lonely individuals developing their own moral status but as glad citizens in God's coming Kingdom Aristotle saw that the ultimate aim was to become the kind of character who would be able to in the right way automatically by the long training of habits Jesus and Paul agreed but they proposed a very different way by which the relevant habits were to be learned and practiced that's what this book after you believe is much about and one of the things I discovered we were talking about this with friends over supper just now and I'm not a scientist at all let alone a brain scientist I just leave that to the folk who can do it I've had other life paths but I read a little bit of brain science in researching this book because I was struck by something I'd come across about London taxi drivers now I like getting in New York cabs they're usually quite kind to my wife or myself take pity on these poor Brits trying to find their way around this wonderful city but when you go to London you'll discover London is a far more complicated city again the New York because it's not on a grid pattern it's all over the place and sometimes the streets do this and sometimes they do that and sometimes there's a demonstration and the cabs have to know how to get round so on the and they're not allowed out until they've mastered the whole thing they're examined on it and that they did some studies of the brains of taxi drivers and they discovered that in serious London taxi drivers the hippocampus that's the bit that does spatial reasoning has actually become physically larger that the mental pathways the neurons whatever they call the electronic codes that go to and fro have got so developed that they've developed themselves and these people have actually become different human beings physically measurably different human beings now if that is so when you're finding your way around London how much more might it be so when you're finding your way as a follower of Jesus Christ around the postmodern world is that not a wonderful challenge by the spirit this is not me doing it this is well it is me doing it but is by the spirit we are called to become different people people who know what the map of the world is where the twists and turns and awkward passages are and know how to get where we need to get through it and I find this very exciting and encouraging as a challenge here we are near the beginning of a new century with all sorts of new stuff not only technology but but the post 9/11 world with all its questions the PO modern world with all its cultural dramatic literary questions with all its philosophical and ethical dilemmas and doubts who is leading the way forward culturally who is showing away through the postmodern angst an enemy in two different fresh creative ways of being human I'm actually not sure what the answer to that is right now but I do know this but if all of you here in this room and similar people elsewhere were actually to take this agenda seriously what does it mean that one day we are going to be stewards of creation and worshippers who sum up God's whole creations praise rulers and priests and if we were to think what are the strengths of character we should be developing now if we're going to be that the difference we could make is incalculable incalculable nobody else is leading the way forward into the post postmodern world maybe this is the challenge for the Church of our times because you see when you apply this to ethics which is more or less what it's about we get into the old debates wasn't there a book in America awhile ago yes Jennifer that is a right and wrong was it Jennifer somebody else I forget um but you know within the 50s and 60s and 70s so many people saying oh the old rules don't matter there isn't really right and wrong it's all a sort of shades of grey and people are coming back with a heavy moralism and say actually that is a right and a wrong and you need to know the difference here are the rules and you must live by them and so many in your generation my generation really ever since the Second World War have said those rules are crushing us there are ton weight forcing us into immaturity so that all we have to do is keep these wretched rules and half of them are made up by people we don't trust anyway that's part of the problem actually with some bits of the church at the moment that is still trying to say the rules the rules and people who've lived under that just say give me a break that's not where I am and then there's other ways you can do it some people say well it's not so much rules you have to calculate whether your actions will produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number that's consequentialism or utilitarianism and the problem is to be honest when you're in a moral dilemma should I do this or do that should I sign this form should I meet that person whatever if you have the chance of the time under that pressure to think out all the possible unintended consequences of your action you're a lucky person take a complicated computer to do that and even that who knows what the consequences of your action are going to be consequences matter but they will not work as a moral calculus and so many people in your culture and mine have gone back to the old romantic vision of spontaneity whatever I do spontaneously that's the really good thing and if anyone else comes with their rules and agendas and cramps my style I resist that I want to be spontaneous I want to be free travel is if you're spontaneous you'll be like a random atomic particle zipping around all over the place you won't be consistent you won't have any integrity you won't have any another great word authenticity you'll just do whatever comes next I was after I gave that lecture in fuller seminary in California just over a year ago my wife and I took a couple of days off down at Laguna Beach and we were browsing in a silly little junk shop just for something fun to do and I discovered a joke a little sign which read there are times I think I'm doing things on principle but mostly I just do what feels good but that's a principle too and now in never do you knew your could think like that of course that is a purely Californian thing I know but you see that idea of just doing what feels good is the low-grade version of the romantic vision of spontaneity and it ties up with the existentialist vision of authenticity I've got to be true to myself that's all very well though being true to yourself you'll notice in post modernity people aren't saying that so much because who is myself I look in the mirror and I'm nineteen different people which one should I be true to if we're honest so the culture spontaneity and the cult of authenticity actually don't get us very far and instead I suggest that the path of the Christian virtues the Christian character strengths is a path which will result god-willing in appropriate spontaneity and authenticity but which will be a spontaneity and an authenticity which you get if you like as the reward at the end of the process think back to the image of courage or any other pictures you like of people who do things with a character well formed a close friend of mine gave me this example at least you didn't know he was giving it but I saw it I was in a big church big service seven years ago in England about three times as many people as there are here was a large very large church very important occasion television cameras there and so on and about 10 minutes a quarter of an hour into the service some people broke in at the door pushed their way past the ushers injuring one of them and rushed up the central aisle of the church shouting slogans nobody actually knew what they were protesting about they were shouting and chanting and doing all it's really quite scary and when they got to the front it was clear they were from their banners that they were part of a particular protest movement called father's for justice that was campaigning for rights of fathers from broken families and to see their children and so on and they'd they specialized in making a real nuisance of themselves but they were very loud and very aggravated and so on and the whole church just froze two or three thousand people just just did not know what to do and then one of the leaders who was taking the service very quietly walked across to this chap who was ranting and raging and really was quite scary this man just had a quiet word in his ear and had a little conversation out of earshot and then the man went over and had a word with the Dean of the Cathedral where it was and the Dean came to the microphone and said that our surprise guests had agreed that they would have four minutes to make a statement and then they would leave quietly so the man did and then they all trooped out I thought how did you do that and the person who done it no particular fast or worried he just gone and then I remembered 20 years before I had seen that same man walking through the streets of Oxford in a cassock on his way to a service unaffectedly stooping down stopping by some people some very rough types who were drinking methylated spirits and all sort of stuff and were being a nuisance on the street sat down with them and just talked with them casually smiled I don't know if he even said a prayer went on his way didn't seem to faze him he had spent much of his life quietly being available to people not afraid of people who other people were afraid of recognizing them as human beings seeing them as people in pain being there with them so when it really counted he could do it and he did it transform the situation some of you will have guessed I'm talking about Rowan Williams the Archbishop of Canterbury character is formed by the thousand little choices and the thousand little choices turn into people who are able to bring God's wise ordering to a chaotic world and people are also able to sum up the praises of creation that's what art and music and all the rest of it all about the whole of creation is praising God and we are called to join in and to do that consciously you know in Revelation creation is praising God in Revelation 4 and 5 but when the humans praise God they add a little word because you are worthy to receive praise because you created all things we are called to be the people who think it out to know why we praise God and who think out what we are doing in the ethical sphere and in our moral sphere the way Paul puts it is this in Romans 12 he says do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may work out in practice what God's will is what is good and acceptable and perfect there's the challenge transform by it doesn't happen automatically and here's the big lie you see so many Asians have bought into the idea that well I became a Christian I said a prayer Jesus has come into my life so now he gives me the Holy Spirit so now whatever he wants me to do it'll just happen automatically well if you think that you'll be a very shallow and muddled Christian because from one point of view it does happen automatically the Spirit does work in people's lives thank God for that but precisely the way that the Spirit does that is by making you more human which means making you more thoughtful making you more able to see what the issues are to think them through to take the hard moral choices and to put them into effect and just because it seems like a hard moral choice doesn't mean that's not what the Spirit is calling you to I have had people say to me pastor Lee well I thought maybe God was calling me to do this or to give up that or whatever it is but actually after a short while I realized God wasn't calling me to that it's what I think wait a minute that just means you tried to be good for a day or two and it felt rather difficult so you couldn't be right because you'd bought into the cult of spontaneity and authenticity and you were trying to fit the wind of the Spirit into the little bottle of 19th and 20th century philosophy can't be done transformed by the renewing of your mind grow up says Paul in your thinking and this is partly you see this works out in that wonderful wonderful passage in 1st Corinthians 15 about a 13 about love it's a great poem it's fascinating in terms of its aesthetic place within that section of 1st Corinthians Paul has this fantastic picture of the body of Christ in Chapter 12 he has this amazing picture of the church at worship in chapter 14 and in between these two he has this matchless little poem on love which is itself tripartite and works in a particular way you can study it and if you're into literature and poetry you really just should relish it for what it is an amazing creation but people often miss the fact that Paul says there something about the future in relation to the present and this is back to Aristotle only now in the Christian key Paul says when I was a child I spoke like a true I behaved like a child I reasoned like a child but when I became adult I put away childish ways now we see through a glass darkly but then face to face now I know in part then I shall know even as also I am known and then he says so now these three things abide faith hope and love but the greatest of these is love what has eschatology to do with ethics what has the new heavens and the new earth for which we long to do with my moral struggles here now exactly this I'll tell you love is not our duty it is our destiny love is the language they speak in the new creation and we get to learn it here oh it's difficult there are lots of irregular verbs there's vocabulary that will be very difficult to get into your head in you and get your tongue round but learn it and one day you'll be singing in it and faith and hope are pretty much the same you have to practice them so what will we hope for in the future hope is not just optimism about something that might happen one day which would be nice hope is total trust that the Creator God is God of the future we won't stop having that total trust in the new creation it'll just be a wonderful celebration God is going to do what God is going to do and we will be part of it faith faith will be very different in the future faith is the utter trust in God the Creator the Redeemer at the moment that's hard we have to practice it like a difficult sport you I'm a very bad golfer I often say to people one of the great things for me about golf is that a bishop has to have at least one thing that he can do really badly and it doesn't matter but because most of what I do you know got to get it sort of right but when I have had golf lessons it's really you know I'm told you've got to hold it like this not like that to feel so unnatural and some of you here will be golfers and you'll have gone through that process and then actually only when you practice it again and again and I don't have time to do that but when I do it gradually I can see what it would feel like for that grip gradually to become natural so that I would just walk up to the ball and it would happen automatically I'm not there yet maybe when I retire I'll have more who knows that'll be the day but that's what it's like with faith faith is hard now we should expect it to be hard we were our grip isn't something that we just have by nature you have to work at it and learn how to do it let somebody teach you but one day one day we will know as we are known and trust as God then will n trust us with the stewardship of his world and so what about those wonderful things that Paul talks about in Galatians 5 the fruit of the Spirit that it's it's a fantastic passage and there's lots I could say about it but just want to say a few little things because I think people again often misunderstand this Paul says okay here are the works of the flesh all those nasty things that make society a bad place to be that ruin families and so on immorality and and anger and violence and jealousy and malice and all of that stuff and then he says those who are led by the Spirit are not under law or not under the law and we instinctively misunderstand this you know when you're listening to the New Testament it's sometimes like playing a musical instrument in entirely the wrong acoustic you need a good acoustic to make the instruments speak properly or it may be change the image earn you just a very little bit to stretch some violin strings only instead of stretching them over a violin which has the right sounding body stretching them instead over a block of concrete and then wondering why the music doesn't sound right as when people hear if you're led by the spirit you are not under law they instinctively go back to the 19th century rejection of deontology that is of rules in favor of the cult responds in it oh I'm just led by the spirit so there aren't any rules I'm just going to do my own thing the Spirit will guide me that will be all right no that's precisely what Paul doesn't mean the key point really is that this is fruit and again I don't know much about golf I know even less about gardening but I do know this if you just plant a fruit tree you will be lucky if you get much fruit from it if you just leave it there if you want the tree to bear fruit you're going to have to work at it you're going to have to help the tree to bear the fruit oh I know we all we preachers of preached sermons about works versus fruit and it's about Christmas trees versus apple trees you know I've heard this sermon dozens of times I've preached it once or twice myself where if you try to be good in your own strength it's just like sticking things onto the Christmas tree and we know that they don't really grow there they make it may look pretty for a while but pretty soon the tree will die and the stuff will drop off and that self-help moralism and by the way everything I've said comes under the rubric just in case there should be any people with particular reformed anxieties here tonight surely not that everything I say comes under the rubric of by grace through faith this is by grace alone through faith alone and everything happens within that framework but then you see people say well the apple tree that really grows the fruit so that's the difference as a Christian you're a fruit tree and so it'll happen automatically well that's all very well the fruit of the Spirit does not grow automatically let me just read you a paragraph from this book the nine varieties of fruit love joy peace patience kindness goodness gentleness faithfulness self-control they do not suddenly appear just because someone believes in Jesus and has prayed for God's Spirit and then sat back and waited for the fruit to come now okay to begin with there may be dramatic change I was with a man the other day who spent most of his early life in prison or youth prisons or adult prisons and when he was out he was being a football hooligan and he was robbing and he was taking cars and he was doing all kinds of immoral and extraordinary stuff and drink and drugs and he very nearly died when he was in early middle life from his extraordinary dissolute life and some Christians found him on a park bench dying and prayed for him and got him to the hospital and prayed for him and they talked to the doctors and nurses and they prayed for him he got better and when he got better he wondered what this thing was that these Christians have been doing and that man now is a wonderful Christian man thank God and is working in the prison world to say to young people in the northeast of England where I live please don't do it like this now his testimony is the in the very early days of his own faith when he really had no Christian background speak of at all um things were happening in his life where he found that he did want to be different he did want to do certain things which he'd never want like read the Bible why would you do that and and and he didn't want to do some of the stuff that he had instinctively done before there are dramatic changes these do happen when people get converted thank God the new life of the Spirit does flow through but that is the blossom to get the fruit you have to be a gardener you have to discover how to tend and prune you have to discover how to irrigate the field you have to discover how to keep birds and squirrels and rodents away you have to watch for the blight and the mold you have to cut away ivy and other parasites that suck the life out of the tree you have to make sure that the young trunk of the tree can stand firm when there are strong winds coming and only then will the fruit appear and in case you think that that's actually sounds rather depressing that I'm imposing an alien note of false externality on Paul's wonderfully spontaneous spirit-filled joyful picture of the easygoing romantic Christian note the final characteristic in the list love joy peace patience kindness goodness faithfulness gentleness self-control when I was an undergraduate I heard a sermon which I rather resented but which I now think was true in which the preacher said all the fruit of the Spirit is easily counterfeit able in happy healthy young people except self-control isn't that interesting you know everything's going well you and it's a sunny day you've got good friends around you plenty to do you're studying you're playing sport you're listening to music having a good time hanging out love joy peace yeah that's what I'm into this is great and and yes I under the self control well perhaps not quite you know but like plato's vision of the virtues back behind Aristotle's so with the fruit note that the word fruit is singular which isn't the fruits of the spirit once after a very difficult college meeting in the Oxford College where I worked one of my colleagues said to me I know our Lord told us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves but being busy men some of us find it advisable to specialize can't be done you get the lot or you don't get any if this tree isn't bearing all nine varieties of fruit you have to question whether it's the genuine article and we could go through them but I mean it's very interesting you know that that loves hesitate take joy joy is not happiness joy and happiness often go together but joy is much deeper and richer than happiness joy is the fruit of the settled conviction that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead another taxi-driver story I was in London a few weeks ago and I got stuck in a traffic jam and was sitting there bored and I was dressed more like a bishop than I am now the purple shirt and a dog collar and the taxi driver looked back at me said so you're a vicar are you and I said no bishop actually and yeah okay said the Church of England I said yet he said oh I'm a Catholic myself said you're having difficulty about women bishops at the moment aren't you and I said yes we are having difficulty graduating Bishop and and he said the way I look at it is this if God raised Jesus Christ from the dead all the rest is basically rock and roll and I got out my blackberry and I texted my colleague back home and said you'd never guess what I've just heard and he texted straight back and said there's your Easter sermon on a plate and it was it's online you can look it up I but you see joy is what happens when you make and it is an effort you have to think it through it's not just oh yeah God raised Jesus that's right resurrection that's what we believe in now and then go away and think of something else that the early Christians were being persecuted beaten up driven out of towns misunderstood vilified but when you study their writings and their common life they were joyful because they knew that something had happened in real space time matter reality as a result of which the world was a different place and they were invited to be part of it that's joy and in the midst of all the others I'm nearly done time is up but I just want to say a word about this because some of those fruits and fruit varieties of fruit of the Spirit particular patience and love are among the things that nobody in the ancient world and comparatively few in the modern world think of as virtues mentioned blackberries mobile phone advertisement in England at the moment saying impatience is a virtue and there's a particular kind of phone which does everything so much more quickly and so that's great isn't it impatience as a virtue less in patience isn't a virtue any fool can be impatient doesn't take effort to be impatient believe me I know but what you know the t-shirt and please God give me patience and I want it right now and in the ancient world there are four Christian virtues which nobody else had regarded as a virtue patience is one of them humility is another Aristotle self-made man that's what it's supposed to be no you look away from yourself into the God who made you and out to your neighbor in love you won't be thinking about yourself you lose yourself in that wonderful patience humility chastity nobody ever else thought sexual self-control was a good idea you know just get as much as you can and the only real problem in the ancient world with sexual behavior was whether there was a jealous spouse going to come and and get you for what you've been what you've been up to chastity and charity nobody else in the ancient world thought it was a good idea to look after other people than your own kith and kin the Christians did it's one of the main reasons why the gospel spread nobody else had dreamt of behaving like that before let alone making a habit of it let alone making it the center of their life that's what we do we are people who love one another and whose love goes out into the world and that's where I want to end really the idea you see some people who write about virtue write about it as though it's a private thing as though Christians do this so that they can be a pure community and then maybe if the world notices there's some people behaving very oddly over there maybe we ought to do as well but but that it cannot be like that if this is genuine humaneness we're talking about and if we are requiring those habits of heart and mind and soul and strength then this must flow out this must make us better wiser citizens not to collude with nonsense out there to critique where appropriate but to celebrate Paul says rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep and he means that right out there on the street and he says in Philippians whatever is noble whatever is pure whatever is true whatever is lovely if there's any virtue anything worthy of praise think about these things that lots of stuff to celebrate in the wider world and then he says what you have learned and received and and seen in me do and the God of peace will be with you do you see the point we are part of that great thing called the human race and God loves it too bit and we are to reflect that love and to honor the fact that God has done so much and is doing so much in the world through people who don't know him because God is good and produces beauty and wisdom of all sorts but the Christian is called to the lifestyle which says this is different this is the different way to the human and those two go together we are to collaborate without compromise and to critique without dualism we are to be God's people shining his light into the world not to look down on the rest of the world and say who you poor people who are so dark out there there is darkness out there sometimes darkness in here tragically as well we at with the people who shine that light who reflect God's light into the world to be rulers and priests and we're to do that through the character training the faith for hope the love the following of Jesus which is our calling as Christians that's really what I wanted to say my time is up thank you very much we are going to take some questions now you

Channel: Center for Faith & Work

Views: 270,748

Rating: 4.8447576 out of 5

Keywords: Wright After You Believe, NT Wright, God, Faith and Work, Faith, Work, Gospel, Culture, NYC, Church, Redeemer NYC, NYC Church, Center for Faith & Work, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, CFW, Tim Keller, Cultural Renewal, Character, Christian Character

Id: ukyNU51OcnA

Length: 44min 25sec (2665 seconds)

Published: Fri May 18 2012