It’s January with all the hope of a new year, a new you, a new lease on life. I love to use the downtime after Christmas as a time of reflection and planning. I update my budget, review my credit report, book appointments, and plan my garden. It re-centers me as I dive into the new year. Last January, I took a class called Perspectives in the World Christian movement. It was life changing. It challenged me and turned my post-Christmas reset into a yearlong deep dive into how I live.
During the course, I read the article Reconsecration to a Wartime, not a Peacetime Lifestyle by Ralph D. Winter and it shook my world. We’ve all heard the taglines: You deserve it. You’ve earned it. You’re worth it. Work hard, play hard. Every day, we’re pummeled with the lure of exclusivity, luxury, and status. Well, Ralph Winter has a different message:
“Ours is a save-yourself society if there ever was one. But does it really work? Underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, and so on. Affluent North America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, etc. And we’re more than ever plagued with the social diseases of drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, abused children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Our divorce courts, prisons, psychiatric offices and mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves, we have nearly lost ourselves.”
Recently, I was reorganizing my closets and had to decide where to put my shoe rack. It occurred to me that management of my excess shoes is a problem I created. We buy storage bins, sheds, and bigger houses to help manage our overconsumption. Then we waste time caring for it. We dust, polish, move, vacuum, store, and wash our excess. It occupies space in our minds as the pressure of maintaining it weighs on us. The cost to us is so much greater than what’s on the price tag. In striving for affluence and ease, we trade one set of problems for another.
From Luxury to Wartime
In the article, Winter talks about the Queen Mary a luxury liner that was repurposed as troop transport during the Second World War. The contrast between its original use and wartime use was drastic. Luxury and excess were set aside for the sake of those on the frontlines of the war. There were other wartime shifts. Car factories were suddenly producing guns, trucks, tanks, and bombers. Food and essential items, such as metal, petroleum products, and plastic were conserved. People grew victory gardens to supplement rations. The whole nation was mobilized in support of those on the frontlines. They weren’t mobilized to change their lifestyles or to do with less for their health or for some future blessing. It was because lives and freedom were at stake.
Today we, the Body of Christ, are faced with a similar call to mobilize to a wartime lifestyle. There are more than 3 billion people in unreached people groups. More than 3 billion people who don’t even have the option to know Jesus as Lord and Savior because they have never heard.
And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. ~ Matthew 28:18-20
According to Winter, affluence is poison to the Great Commission, and the only antidote is reconsecration. We need to actively choose to reconsecrate or set our lives and resources aside for holy use. Luke 12:48 tells us that “From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” As a Church, we understand that those who are serving the least reached have committed their lives and resources to the Great Commission. But imagine the impact if the rest of the Church adopted a wartime lifestyle too? There would never be question of how to fund their ministries.
People are lost and hungry and hurting. This should be an all-out emergency for the Church. Lives are at stake. Eternities are at stake. We’ve been given our marching orders. So, why do we still live like its peacetime?
