“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus… work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 4:5, 12-13 ESV).
The combination of our culture’s embrace of relativism and postmodernism has made the pursuit of virtue a lost art. After all, why chase after a standard of living that doesn’t exist (Since according to these worldviews, absolutes like right and wrong, don’t exist)?
Even among secular observers, the vast majority think that our American culture is declining. Everyone sees that America is sliding towards moral decay.
Most troubling though is the loss of virtue among those who call themselves “Christian.” More and more, there is little difference in the opinions and behaviors of those who claim to be Christ-followers and those who don’t. There is a huge disconnect between what people say they believe and how they live.
In David F. Wells book, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision, he says:
“This is the first time that a civilization has existed that, to a significant extent, does not believe in objective right and wrong. We are traveling blind, stripped of our moral compass. And this is true, not only in society, but increasingly in the Church as well. How should we respond? First, the church will have to become courageous enough to say that much that is taken as normative in the postmodern world is actually sinful, and it will have to exercise new ingenuity in learning how to speak about sin to a generation for whom sin has become an impossibility… Second, the Church itself is going to have to become more authentic morally, for the greatness of the Gospel is now seen to have become quite trivial and inconsequential in its life.”
How do we become more “authentic” morally? The apostle Paul taught the Philippians that they had to remember that they had the “mind of Christ.” They were to have the worldview of Christ. Then, having that mind that transformed their thinking, they should “work out” what God was working in them. When we follow this teaching, God gives us both the “will” and the power to do His will.
When we work out in the gym, we are not making muscles. God gave us biceps when He created our bodies. What we are working out is the muscle that God has already given us. In like manner, it is not enough to just get salvation (to have faith muscles), we must work out our salvation, our faith, so that we become more and more like Jesus. This is what it means to be His disciples. We follow Him.
Making more laws and rules won’t turn America around. Laws can’t put back together the pieces of our broken culture. As the nursery rhyme says, “All the kings horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty back together again.” More government isn’t the answer.
The only way to change American culture is to change American hearts and minds. The way to win the war for the soul of America is to get back to being the salt and light that the church was called to be. As N. T. Wright writes in his book, After You Believe – Why Christian Character Matters, what we need is to start a revolution for virtue in the church:
“Virtue, to put it bluntly, is a revolutionary idea in today’s world— and today’s church. But the revolution is one we badly need. …What are we here for in the first place? … to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made… that is the central thing that is supposed to happen ‘after you believe.’ This transformation will mean that we do indeed ‘keep the rules’ – though not out of a sense of externally imposed ‘duty,’ but out of the character that has been formed within us… To make wise moral decisions, you need not just to ‘know the rules’ or ‘discover who you really are,’ but to develop genuine Christian virtue.”
Let’s start working out the virtue that God is working in.