Friends: Christian life doesn’t mean “hit the brakes.” Christian life means “use the accelerator wisely.” Blessings, Bob

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Spirituality Column #928

August 27, 2024

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Full Speed Ahead

By Bob Walters

“The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places …You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” – Psalms 16:6,11

In his 1908 classic book, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton has a great scenario of living life – on the one hand – within the boundaries of Christ and His church.  Or, on the other, of living life completely “free” with no boundaries.

Chesterton imagines a high plateau on top of which the whole of the human race exists – where all humanity works, plays, loves, helps, hates, fights, produces, destroys. pursues goals, pursues God, sins, worships … everything. This world is a rollicking whirl of activity and passions because this plateau has high perimeter barriers – fencing and walls – that prevent anyone from actually falling off its lethal cliffs into the bottomless and deathly chasm below.

Those barriers are God’s parameters and the church’s rules that restrain the degree of catastrophe that can occur.  The plateau’s inhabitants are bold because they pursue their passions without fear of real death.  They might bump up against the barricades and be bruised, but they themselves will not topple into the abyss.

Chesterton likens this plateau not just to God’s spiritual guardrails provided by humanity’s promised salvation in Jesus, but to creative humanity’s Godly freedom of physical action, intellectual endeavors, and spiritual pursuits.  Humanity knows that whatever happens on the plateau, Christ in the form of his church – those high walls around the edges – represent God’s guarantee of love and eternal life.

Safely in the arms of our savior, mankind can let its diversely directed passions run free in the very fullness of life’s possibilities (Ephesians 1:23, 3:19, 4:13).  

Chesterton’s other plateau scenario is the same everything, except no barriers, no walls, no church, no savior, no safety.  Mankind’s carefree rollicking becomes timid cowering in the center of the plateau; humanity is huddled in a mass of fear: fear that with no boundaries present, there exists the very real danger of dropping over the side.

Mankind’s creativity and passions are stifled.  Hope of joy is choked away by the fear of venturing from the “safe” but captive middle where any stray misstep may mean the abyss. Passion dries up without salvation’s guardrails promising to preserve life.

I lived 47 years outside the arms of Jesus, and had no sense of being on a living plateau without safety from the abyss.  I didn’t know the abyss, I didn’t know safety, I didn’t know what there was to try to protect myself from.  Then light replaced the dark.

Lo and behold, Jesus was there all the time, despite my ignorance.  Now when I hear anyone mention the “severe boundaries” of being a Christian, I can confidently say … No, life’s boundaries without Jesus are only death on every side. I’ll choose life.

I don’t feel hemmed in by life and truth.  The boundary lines of life, as King David suggests in Psalms 16, are a pathway to pleasant places and to God’s right hand.  Which, we all know, is where Jesus is seated. It is our loving eternity … if we want it.

With no divine boundaries, life’s path leads one to a very different and far less pleasant place: to a dark abyss we likely do not even imagine is there. But it is.

Live life full speed ahead within the boundaries of Christ, and in the full light and liberty of God’s Creation.  Look at this huge, magnificent world God created. No need to be timid, just be humble enough to appreciate the boundaries. They’re a blessing.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes his “awake” date in Jesus: Sept. 2, 2001.