Escaping the Middle-Class Mindset
Image by Ben Elliott
Based on a sermon given by Alex Harris - Regional Minister at the Yorkshire Baptist Association - at The Well Weekend Away, Spring 2022.
I'm going to excuse myself straight away if my tone is a little bit intense as we progress.
If, today, you can say, “Jesus, I'm longing and attempting to trust you and follow you,” then amazingly, he is calling you to be one of his gospel carriers. And that is absolutely remarkable and desperately needed in our present culture and society.
In the UK, 21% of Church of England churches will not reopen after the pandemic. 25 of the 35 Church of Scotland churches around Glasgow have closed in the last three years, and they have just sold the cathedral in the centre of Glasgow to Scottish Heritage as a secular site. Between 2015 and 2020, our weekly attendance at Baptist churches around the UK went down by 20% in five years.
This is not the moment for restrained faith. This is not the moment to flinch, or be hesitant or to be intimidated. In fact, what we actually need are barbarians. What we actually need is people who realize that the rules of modern society are not Jesus's rules, and so it is time to break them. I say that with caution and with care, but I say it with absolute conviction and clarity.
Barbarians are those who realize that the box that they have been told to live in by society is not the box Jesus is calling them to live in. And for a very long time, the way that we as Christians have responded to culture - myself included - is by saying, “I will place my Christian faith inside that box that society has put me in.”
For me, the box is, “Alex, be middle class. Do not let your Christian faith affect your middle classness.” And so I've defined how to live for Jesus within the parameters of being middle class. And Jesus is saying to me, “Alex, what on earth are you doing? Be my barbarian. Live by my rules. Even as they break the rules of middle classness!”
Why on earth do I think my car has to be less than 10 years old? Why on earth do I think that my children need to have their own bedrooms? Why on earth do I think that their education is such a high priority? Where does Jesus tell me that in the Bible? Nowhere. He says, “Go and make disciples, and do it by my rules.”
A couple of years ago, I walked into our little front room. Our oldest child and our youngest - they were aged about ten and two at the time - were sitting on the floor together playing a board game. And then I noticed they weren't playing it properly. And I said to Isaac, the oldest, “Isaac, why are you doing? You're not allowed to do that in this game.” And he replied, “Yeah, I know. But my brother couldn't win by the rules. So I just changed the rules.” All right, it's cute. But it is also prophetic. The rules our culture calls us to play by as Christians mean people can't meet Jesus. And so our responsibility is to change the rules. If we cannot win the game by society’s rules, we need to change the rules.
Let’s look at Acts 16 together, and in particular at three people that Jesus calls to be his gospel carriers: Timothy, Lydia, and the Jailer.
I want you to start thinking, “Which one of these am I? And what is the new barbarian way that I live this out? What is the new, by-only-Jesus's-rules way?” Not the rules of my friendship group, not the rules of society, not the rules of trying to be middle class, but by Jesus's rules only.
The first one is a churchy kid called Timothy. The chapter starts like this:
Paul came to Derbe and then to Lystra, where a disciple named Timothy lived, whose mother was Jewish and a believer but whose father was a Greek. The believers at Lystra and Iconium spoke well of him. Paul wanted to take him along on the journey, so he circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.
- Acts 16:1-3
Timothy is about 14 or 15 years old here. His dad doesn't believe in Jesus, but his mum and his grandma do and they've invested in him. In fact, in 2 Timothy, Paul writes, “I remember how you learned the sacred scriptures as an infant.” So I can imagine Timothy sitting on his mother's knee, or on his grandma's knee, being prayed over and told stories of Jesus. By the time he’s 14 years old, he loves Jesus. And He longs for Jesus. And then this wiry, scarred missionary called Paul comes into their church one Sunday morning, and Paul tells about his missionary journeys. And then Paul, at the end says, “Is anyone going to come with me?” And of course that’s the moment when everyone in church looks down at their feet, don't they? But then one chair creeks. And Timothy stands up and says, “Paul, I'll come. I am so committed to Jesus, I will preach and be imprisoned.”
That's what Timothy’s committing to at 14. Paul could have pulled up his shirt and shown him his scars from being whipped. Paul could have shown him the injuries where his bones had been broken for preaching about Jesus. And Timothy says, “I'm so for Jesus, I'm going.” Do you know how Lois and Eunice probably felt? Absolutely terrified for their beautiful boy. If you are a young person reading this today, here’s the message: terrify your parents with your faith. For you, to be a barbarian is to not live in the box of your parents’ expectation of your faith: put them to shame.
And to the parents who are hating me right now: I am a parent. I feel a bit sick in my stomach about this. But it's so important isn't it? We need to get out of the way a little bit and release them to run.
The second person in Acts 16 I want us to look at is a successful businesswoman from Asia called Lydia. Here’s what it says about Lydia:
On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us.
- Acts: 16: 13-15
This is a successful business-woman from Asia. We know she's successful, because she trades in purple cloth. At that time, purple was the most expensive colored material: that's why bishops and royalty still wear it today. And so if you're a dealer in purple cloth, you're a highly successful fashion designer. She is single, she's not married, she doesn't have family, and she's desperately seeking more.
A few years ago, I read this very passage. And I wondered: where do people who are seeking God go? Where do they go today? If people have some kind of longing, where do they go? My local pub, which is a bit of a dodgy pub called The Ox Feathers, has five clairvoyant evenings a week. So I realised that there must be such spiritual hunger in this place, to support a clairvoyant event almost every night of the week. And on a Friday night, they were advertising open mic clairvoyance. So I went to the Landlady, Debbie, and asked for a slot.
That Friday, all the different acts were in different corners of the room. I’d printed a big banner which said, “Jesus knows. Clairvoyance by Alex Harris (Baptist Minister)”. Soon enough this queue of people had turned up at my table. I had printed cards with Bible verses on, and each person would sit opposite to me for three or four minutes, explain the problem in their life, or the question they had, and I would think about what the Bible has to say about it. Then I’d find one of these cards, or once or twice, I got my Bible out and pointed to a Bible verse. I'll be honest, it was exactly like pastoring, just in a pub. People kept coming, and no one punched me in the face.
At the end of the evening, Debbie the landlady came up and she said, “Alex, I'm really interested. Because I know there's something more out there. But I know this clairvoyance thing is rubbish. But you say you're a Baptist minister. Will you tell me more?” And over the course of the next two or three years, Debbie became a Christian and came to fall in love with Jesus. And then, Debbie opened up the pub. And what was born in our pub is what's called a pub church. And it literally does what it says on it on the tin. People experiencing Jesus in the pub on a Thursday night.
Debbie is a Lydia, isn't she? Because Lydia's great contribution to the gospel cause is that she is a generous patron. She takes her wealth and her status and leans it into the gospel. She opens up her home and leans into the gospel and says, “I'm going to put my resources behind this Jesus enterprise.”
So I'm now talking to you if you happen to work in a job that comes with a larger pay packet. The Gospel needs patrons like Lydia, like Debbie, who take their homes and their wealth and their status and surrender it for Jesus. That’s a barbarian approach to money, isn't it? Because our society tells us, “Make sure you pay your pension, make sure you can have ski holidays, leave the kids an inheritance, make sure you've got stuff squirreled away.”
And society keeps saying that until we all really believe that those are the rules we have to function in and our Christian faith has to fit within that box.
The final gospel carrier we’re going to look at is a hardened jailer, living out his comfortable retirement. And Jesus literally shakes him to his core. We’re going to skip through the introduction to this story: Paul’s been imprisoned, but then God sends an earthquake which opens only the door of Paul's cell and no one else's. Now let’s see what happens next.
The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household.
- Acts 16:29-34
Now let me just give you some context. To be a jailer in Philippi: that was a cushy retirement job for a government soldier who’d had a successful career. So he's probably in his 60s, he's probably been a Roman soldier for thirty or forty years, he's done it well and been successful. As a reward, he's been given this cushy role in a sunny resort town to run a jail for the last five years of his life. He's on a government pension. He's a hardened individual, he has killed people, and he has sent people into battle: there is a hardness that grows if you have experienced what this man has. And it takes an earthquake to shake him apart.
And then he comes to believe in God and Acts tells us he’s full of joy. In the original language, the phrasing of ‘filled with joy’ suggests that this was something that he was experiencing now for the first time: that this guy had never known joy in 60 years, until he met Jesus in his retirement. But what is also radical there is that by choosing to be baptized and becoming a Christian, he has just lost his pension and his job. And yet, having just lost his job, what's his response? Joy. Now, this is a call to our retirees, or those on the edge of it to start thinking, “What does retirement look like?”
I spoke to a couple on the edge of faith and the edge of church just last week, who had just taken early retirement. She's 58. He's 63. They've been able to take early retirement. I asked how their weekend was going, and they told me that they had spent the whole weekend looking at campervans and caravans: £80,000 for a bedroom on wheels. They told me that they wanted one so they could go to the seaside at weekends. And I thought, “WHAT A WASTE.”
It reminded me of a famous story from John Piper about the couple who decided to spend their retirement collecting shells. He imagines them meeting Jesus and Jesus asks them, “What did you do with your retirement? I let you have a job and a career, I gave you a life that meant that at 60 you could have 20 years to do whatever you wanted for me. What did you do with it?” Will they - like the couple in John Piper’s illustration - say, “Jesus, look at all our shells”?
And if you're in that stage of life, I'm trying to make you uncomfortable. Because we have become so comfortable with society’s rules, we don’t even know the rules are there. And we squash our Christian faith into society’s box. The rules of our culture say, “Have a nice retirement.” No. Jesus would say, “The closer to the finish line you get, the faster you run, the more careless you become, the more risks you can take.” Because really, what have you got to lose?
So: if you’re a Timothy: put us to shame. If you’re a Lydia: give it all away. Or, if you’re the jailer: you should be burning out, crashing out, arriving in heaven with nothing left, because you gave it all in that last stretch.
It’s time to be a barbarian for Jesus.
