The Good News of Specificity
There is a big difference between simply saying “I love you” and saying “I love *this* about you” as a dad. Oh, we should and must tell our children that we love them, but there is something powerful in expressing specific delight in some aspect of who your children are. There’s a big difference in telling your children to “behave” or “be responsible” and telling your kids to clean up their rooms, brush their teeth and go to bed at a certain time. The specificity matters, its an important part - both in expressing delight and in shaping behavior. But such specificity can be hard - both in parenting and in the work of evangelism and discipleship in the church.
One of the more subtle ways that otherwise bible-believing Christians avoid God is through our tendency to believe and confess in generalities. We can accept the Bible’s teaching on sin, the need for repentance and confession, the kingdom of God, the call to believe in Jesus and to then obey him. Pastor’s will teach these things. Christians will get together and talk about these things, read about these things and admonish one another concerning these things. But they all remain marvelously general. They never touch the ground. Sin is treated as generally as possible. We might occasionally confront things like pornography or esoteric concepts like pride or a failure to love - but I find it rare that we will talk about specific sins and specific instances of biblical obedience in the concrete realities of everyday life. I think we avoid concreteness in our own lives and in pastor’s sermons for a few reasons.
Living in one of the most divided eras in our culture’s memory, I think we are terrified of interpersonal conflict. And while the Bible confronts ideas and philosophies, it does so by confronting concrete behaviors. While it commends faith and obedience to Jesus, it does so through concrete actions and relationships and practices. If we begin to get specific with either our own behaviors or the lives of our neighbors and friends, the teaching of Scripture goes from being a theoretical set of potentially appealing ideas to actually confronting real lives, real addictions, real fears, and real comforts. The command of Scripture is not simply an esoteric call to have some new ideas layered on top of a life lived in modern, secularist and individualist terms. It is a specific call to believe something new about the world and God and ourselves and to therefore live differently in that world. This necessarily means conflict with specific ways that we or our neighbors are actually living. And while conflict can be done really poorly. It ought to be pursued in love and because of love. Evangelism will involve conflict. Discipleship will involve conflict. Conflict is often very painful - strong relationships can be shattered. Our own need to be well-liked or respected can be threatened. Its often right here, when we start talking about specific ways that God has commanded us to live that we can find ourselves embarrassed because of how God speaks or feeling the pain of our own need to repent of specific behaviors and change. Specificity creates conflict in our own lives and with our friends.
Another reason we avoid this specificity is fear. It is easy to appear courageous when a pastor stands up and preaches about sin and the need to repent of sin, the centrality of the cross, and the offer of forgiveness. But to do so without naming specific ways that real people and real ideas and real behaviors are in conflict with God and what He says is to treat the gospel as a series of theological platitudes. If we champion the systematic teachings of Scripture without speaking to the specific ways it calls people and cultures to real repentance and obedience, then we may sound bold and orthodox and courageous, but we’ve avoided the actual places where courage and boldness are needed.
But one of the glorious implications of the incarnation is that holiness and obedience and faith have been seen and touched and heard. James warns us that faith without the (concrete) fruit of obedience is a dead faith. God’s gracious gift of the law and the prophets, as well as the gospels and the New Testament letters gives us enormous amounts of material to learn how to trust God and to obey God in all manner of different circumstances. The danger of sin remaining in the esoteric realm is that God’s mercy remains there as well. Instead of wonderfully concrete instances of confessing our specific sins and believing on God’s grace for those specific moments - we can be haunted by a vague sense of guilt, God’s grace can become just a generalized sense that God loves us despite the fact that we are marred by sin. Obedience becomes defined and driven more by generalities and less by the actual biblical commands and examples that can bear rich fruit in our lives. It gets reduced to common cultural norms dictated by secularist ideas from the right or from the left. But God has given us more than this. He has called us to repent of real ways that we’ve failed to obey his word. He offers forgiveness and grace for specific deeds and attitudes and ideas that we confess.
We must make sure we aren’t simply taking Christian concepts and layering them on top of lives being lived however we want. We should insure that our evangelism isn’t doing the same thing with those who don’t believe - merely inviting them to adopt a new set of ideas to fit neatly into lives lived in rebellion against God. The Gospel addresses specific people with specific sin and specific needs with a remarkably specific hope.