Intensity vs intentionality and ‘gospel lightness’

I sat in a prayer meeting once where we were led in prayer for a person who had a rather tedious job in a not-very-well-run office. The prayer lasted for 3–4 minutes and was concerned with the person’s godliness: it asked for grace to help them endure, wisdom to look at their job in the right way, and patience — the works!

Now, these are all good things. I have no problems praying for them. But the person in question had an ordinary job, pretty much like millions of others in the world with ordinary jobs. Many of those people go to work, get on with it, and then go home. There’s no great drama, no big issues. It’s boring. It’s a means to an end. But that’s pretty much it. It’s just the stuff of life. Nothing more. Nothing less.

And yet, that prayer (prayed as it was with compassion and love) turned ‘normal life’ into a ‘challenge of faith’. So whereas once Christians were commended because of the way they faced persecution and death, now we face a day at the office with the same degree of trepidation — and sue God for copious grace with the same degree of urgency!

I believe in the doctrine of sufficient grace: in Christ, there is always sufficient grace to help in time of need.

But our ‘grace need’ when facing a mundane and thankless job is not as great as our ‘grace need’ when facing a stake or a firing squad.
Of course, we should still pray about the job and more particularly about the worker’s attitude to it.  But we shouldn’t agonise over it.

Why do our lives have a tendency towards ‘heaviness’, worthiness and intensity?  We could rephrase that: why do we create crises?

Part of the answer has to be that, by and large, we don’t really have any!

That sounds like it could be a good thing, but crises are one of the ways we justify our existence. They are the way we give our lives meaning and significance. They somehow make us important, or are a means of soliciting sympathy.

But part of God’s glory is that he is the God of the insignificant, the mundane, the trivial and the incidental.

In Christ we thrive in the normality of our lives, and by creating constant crises, we rob God of the glory of his superabundant grace for the common man.

This grace is ours in the gospel as the Holy Spirit takes it and applies it so we believe in it and delight in it. Grace softens our heart, shapes our will, and transforms our life.  It incites us to love for God and eager obedience, and so it sanctifies us and glorifies us.

If we focus on the grace of the gospel, we’ll be sure that it’s God who gets the glory for any change that is wrought in us.  I want to argue that this same grace should bring a ‘gospel lightness’ to my life and our lives together.

Obviously, I don’t mean gospel lightness in the sense that we go easy on the gospel! I mean that the gospel should produce a lightness in how we live.

The hope of the gospel seemed to bring lightness to Peter’s readers in the midst of trials — so much so that others noted it and enquired about it (1 Pet 3:15; 4:12–19).  Likewise, James 1:2 encourages those who are suffering to count it pure joy.  This echoes Jesus’s own directives to rejoice when you’re persecuted (Matt 5:11–12), and not to be anxious (6:25–34).  And so for the Philippians: gospel lightness means not grumbling, but joyful contentment in all circumstances (2:14–16; 4:4–9, 10–13). If your master is God, then anxiety isn’t an option; joy and thankfulness are the only right response.

Such joy and thankfulness, contentment and trust are the result of grace, and produce this ‘lightness’ about our lives, individually and corporately.

So, to summarize, the gospel should be the ground of our confidence, which is why the need is for intentionality, not intensity.

‘Gospel intentionality’ is where we're comfortable with one another, real with each other and able to bring the gospel to bear upon one another at critical and mundane times.

‘Gospel intentionality’ enables us to rebuke someone because they are not being joyfully content in a trivial circumstance, without having to sit and listen to someone go into all the personal struggle of godliness.
It means being able to readily turn one another away from ourselves and onto the Saviour. It’s different from intensity because it is done readily and easily, almost casually, in the course of normal conversation.
So it’s said and it’s gone, and so it reduces the need for heavy one-on-one sessions.  (Sometimes these are necessary, but they should be the exception, not the norm!)

As we live with gospel intentionality, under the gracious rule of King Jesus, we will point to the future and provide a taster of what the age to come is like — all this in the stuff and routine of ordinary and mundane life.

So we must believe in grace, preach grace, gospel one another with grace and live grace.  In this way, Jesus will grow us into gospel communities with a lightness that those on the outside will notice, enquire about, and long for.