You SHOULD Spend Time on Things that Won't Last

Excerpts from a couple of good books on Christianity and culture.

“Our generation tends to think about motivation in two speeds and two speeds only—there are things that are of the utmost importance, and things that are of no importance. There’s no in-between. That’s one of the reasons this whole conversation about the mission of the church is so difficult. The minute you start arguing that good works are not of utmost importance, people accuse you of saying that they are of no importance at all. The thinking seems to be that good works have to be motivated by the highest imaginable reasons—We’re building for the kingdom! We’re doing the gospel! We’re joining God in his mission! We’re spreading shalom!—or else people will think they’re not important at all.

We need another speed. We need a speed that somewhere between of the utmost importance and of no importance. Something like really, really important might do the trick. The fact is, we as Christians have a lot of things on our plate. There are many things that the Lord calls us to do that are not of the utmost importance, in the sense that they are earth-shattering, kingdom-building, eternity-making things. Are yet they are really, really important, and we are called to be faithful in doing them. If we’re honest with ourselves, we already have this speed, and we use it all the time. Think about our marriages, for example. Our marriages are not going to make it into eternity; they’re not of the utmost importance (Matt. 22:30). And yet they are really, really important, and we give much of our lives and our love and our energy to them. We don’t default to saying that because they’re not of the utmost importance, they must be of no importance at all.

So why must those be our only two options when it comes to good works and social ministry and and culture building and our occupations and all the rest?”

--Kevin DeYoung and Greg Gilbert, What is the Mission of the Church?

“At this point I pause and for a moment to reflect on a common misconception about the proper Chrsitian attitude toward cultural endeavors. Many recent books on Christianity and culture target sayings such as ‘you don’t polish brass on a sinking ship,’ which some people use to denigrate cultural work based upon the idea that it’s all about to be destroyed anyway. Such sayings are indeed unhelpful and misleading, and recent books are correct to look for a different perspective. But often the alternative that writers present is that the ship is not sinking at all. The ship is our everlasting home and is being transformed through redemption in Christ, and thus our cultural efforts to improve the ship are fashioning the new creation itself. As considered in chapter 3, however, ‘the present form of this world is passing away’ (1 Cor. 7:31). Our cultural activities, like marriage and commerce (1 Cor. 7:29-30)—are honorable. They have eternal consequences in that God will recognize our good deeds on the last day and give us our due (e.g. 2 Cor. 5:9-10). But our cultural products themselves are not meant to endure into the world to come. They belong to the stuff of the present world. Contrary to what some people suggest, we are to spend time on things that do not last. We are like the Israelite exiles, who built homes and planted gardens in Babylon, though they knew they would leave there after seventy years." 

--David Van Drunen, Living in God’s Two Kingdoms