The Ordinary Christian Life: Why does Christianity so often seem determined to produce extraordinary Christians? What brought this to mind was a recent promotion for a book about the Puritans. It was introduced this way: “The Puritans knew following Christ could cost them their lives. While we skim, scroll, and rush, they meditated, prayed, and examined their hearts. In persecution, defeat, and disaster, they clung to Christ. The Puritans were united in this: they strove to follow God fully. Despite their shortcomings, they were people of faith, and that set them apart in their day and in ours. Open these pages and let their example inspire you to follow God as they did. Fully.”
That final expression caught my attention: follow God fully. What does it mean to follow God fully? How committed is committed enough? How surrendered, how devoted, how consecrated must we become before we qualify as serious Christians? At what point have we forsaken enough to rise above the ordinary believer? The danger is that once we begin thinking this way, the Christian life starts to feel like a ladder of spiritual attainment, with ordinary believers always standing somewhere below the truly serious ones. There always seems to be another level to reach, another sacrifice to make, another measure of devotion by which we can distinguish the serious Christian from the ordinary one. But perhaps there is nothing wrong with being an ordinary Christian.
For most of us, the Christian life is going to look far more ordinary than extraordinary. We are simply going to spend our lives getting out of bed, going to work, loving our spouses, raising children, caring for parents, paying bills, enduring disappointments, helping people when we can, failing far more often than we would like, praying imperfectly, reading Scripture imperfectly, and looking again and again to Christ. For most believers, that is not a lesser version of Christianity. That is simply where faith is lived. So why does ordinary faithfulness sometimes seem almost embarrassing?
It is as though believing Christ, loving your family, loving your neighbor, and receiving the mercies of God with thanksgiving were somehow no longer enough. We began needing words like radical, surrendered, sacrificial, devoted, &c. Christianity had to be impressive. The believer had to be impressive. And without quite noticing it, the extraordinary Christian began to replace the extraordinary Christ as the thing we were being taught to admire.
The center of Christianity is not supposed to be the astonishing degree of our surrender and devotion. The center is Christ: His righteousness, His obedience, His cross, His resurrection, His sufficiency. But we seem almost incapable of leaving the glory there. We keep turning Christianity back into a story about what grace has made of us: how devoted we have become, how much we have sacrificed, how differently we now live from everybody else. Christ may still fill our vocabulary while, almost without noticing it, we ourselves become the ones we are admiring. And that shift has consequences.
Once the extraordinary Christian becomes the standard, ordinary faithfulness starts to look suspiciously inadequate. The man who gets up, goes to work, provides for his family, comes home tired, loves his wife, helps his children, prays as he is able, reads Scripture when he can, and rests his hope in Christ may begin to feel that he is somehow falling short of real discipleship. So may the woman whose days are filled with work, children, meals, errands, responsibilities, interruptions, conversations, care for others, and the thousand ordinary demands that rarely look spiritual enough to impress anyone. She may not have hours for meditation, long stretches of uninterrupted prayer, or a dramatic story of sacrifice. She too is simply living the life God has given her, looking to Christ in the midst of it. And somehow we have learned to make that sound like a spiritual deficiency.
The trouble is that these categories are almost impossible to define without turning the Christian life into a contest of spiritual intensity. One man prays twenty minutes, another prays two hours. One woman reads a chapter of Scripture before the children wake, another spends the morning studying theology. One Christian gives generously while living comfortably, another gives away almost everything. Which one is following God “fully”? Which one has sacrificed enough? Which one is devoted enough? Once we begin asking those questions, we have already drifted dangerously close to measuring Christianity by the Christian instead of by Christ.
Maybe the answer is not to keep raising the standard of spiritual intensity, but to recover the ordinary Christian life as something good in and of itself – not as the consolation prize for believers who never became radical enough, but as the actual setting in which most of us will know the faithfulness of God.
It may be time to remind ourselves where most of the Christian life is actually lived: where God has placed us: in our homes, at our jobs, around our tables, among our families, through sickness, weariness, disappointment, laughter, work, rest, and all the ordinary circumstances that fill our days. We do not need to turn those things into something heroic before they matter. They matter because they are the life God has given us, and there is no shame in receiving that life from His hand with gratitude, living under His care, receiving His gifts with thanksgiving, and looking to Christ in the middle of it all.
What the Christian finally must forsake is not an ordinary life, but every hope of standing before God in a righteousness of his own. It is not comfort, possessions, leisure, family, work, or the ordinary mercies of life that must be surrendered. What must be abandoned is every claim that our devotion, sacrifice, obedience, or seriousness can commend us to God. Philippians 3:7-9. The great renunciation of the Christian life is not measured by how impressively we have followed Christ, but by whether we have abandoned every hope of standing before God in ourselves.
Perhaps Christianity does not need to make us extraordinary in order to be glorious. We are ordinary people living ordinary lives, often weak, often distracted, and often painfully aware of how little there is in us worth admiring. But Christ is not ordinary. His righteousness is perfect, His obedience complete, His mercy inexhaustible, His salvation sufficient. We may simply receive the life God has given us with thanksgiving and keep looking to Christ. Ordinary sinners have an extraordinary Savior, and that is more than enough. MPJ