At first, I was nervous about being “on bar” at Starbucks—making the drinks. I had to memorize a thick book of recipes and was expected to make all of them quickly and accurately. One night after work, I had a nightmare that I was in Disneyland making complicated espresso drinks for the White Witch. That was weird.
I also had to learn how to “call” drinks properly. That’s how partners are able to keep up with all the customers’ strange drink variations. Have you ever thought baristas were being snobby by correcting how you order drinks? They were actually using a system that allows them to remember your order more easily. So even though “personal decaf triple tall vanilla with room Americano” may sound like a barrage of information to you, the wording makes your order manageable for them.
My fears about being able to keep up were unfounded. Turns out I was pretty good on bar. In fact, it was my favorite position at the store—except when Iced Tea Lady came in.
Iced Tea Lady stood a head taller than most people and had a loud raspy voice that could be heard from across the store. She always ordered the cheapest drink on the menu, never tipped, and wanted us to think up a new variation each time. She thought we liked the challenge. In reality, most of us found it annoying. But that was not the worst part. What really bothered me was that Iced Tea Lady was a Christian. Not a quiet, polite Christian, but a loud, “Praise the Lord!” Christian who insisted on calling me “Pastor Josh.” On one occasion, I made her yet another variation of iced tea and handed it to her, saying (with far more enthusiasm than I felt), “I hope you like it!” She loudly responded, “Don’t worry, Jesus always makes it taste good!” (I wish I were making this up.) I politely excused myself, went to the back room, and banged my head against the freezer door.
I like to think of myself as a reasonably patient person, but I’ve discovered that I have a low tolerance for super-spiritual Christians. That’s because I used to be one.
The Bad Thing About Being a Good Kid
Many Christian books start out with a call to be radical, which is largely a good thing. I’m starting with a call to be normal because that has been a bigger struggle for me. I grew up in a loving, conservative Christian home. When I was about 12 years old, I started to take my faith seriously. At an age when many of my peers started rebelling, I got closer to God. I wasn’t trying to please my parents; it was genuinely what I wanted. In sixth grade, I refused to look at a friend’s Playboy magazine. I didn’t say bad words—I remember the shame I felt the first time I accidently said “What the hell?” I never smoked or drank, and to this day I don’t really know what marijuana smells like.
Really, I don’t. Just last week I was on a Greyhound bus returning from a writers’ conference, and apparently someone started smoking a joint on board. The driver came on the intercom and said, “Come on, guys! ‘No smoking’ means ‘no pot.’ We can all smell it. Show some respect.” The rest of the passengers chuckled, but I was disappointed that I hadn’t been paying enough attention and still didn’t know what pot smelled like.
Naive as I might be about the ways of the world, I still don’t regret any of those decisions—they’ve saved me from a world of heartache. I might not have all the war stories of a rebellious youth, but neither do I have the battle wounds on my soul. But looking back, I wish I hadn’t fallen prey to the spiritual pride that came with being a good little Christian. I was better at it than any of my peers, and I knew it. While many of my friends were sliding toward the cliff of destructive sins, I was sliding toward the cliff of self-righteousness.
As a teenager, I mentally created a two-tiered Christianity. At the bottom were the normal Christians and at the top were the super-Christians. I had the ugly habit of categorizing everyone. Did you listen to secular music? Normal Christian. Did you speak in tongues? Super-Christian. Did you sleep with your girlfriend? You probably weren’t saved. My greatest fear as a teenager wasn’t being uncool—it was being a normal Christian.
The super-Christian mentality was common in youth groups, especially in Pentecostal churches. We sang songs like “Sold Out and Radical” and went to conferences with names like “Only the Committed.” My youth group days were valuable to my spiritual growth, but these things inadvertently reinforced a two-tiered Christianity. The call to be a super-Christian appealed to my pride at being better than normal Christians.
Radical Randy
Early in my pursuit of super-Christianity, I spent some of my paper route money on a Christian book for young teens. I discovered I should find a mentor, which I interpreted to mean I should find an older Christian who could show me how to be a super-Christian. The teenage years being what they are, I didn’t even consider my own parents. I thought about a couple of other candidates, but they just didn’t seem to be spiritual enough.
Then I met Radical Randy. He was barely five feet tall, but what he lacked in stature, he made up with volume. His crew-cut dishwater-blond hair gave him the look of a drill sergeant. He wore a cross the size of a small cat and had a large, submissive family. He was my first example of an obsessive Christian. My lasting impression is not of a man deeply in love with Jesus but of someone whose very strict version of Christianity dominated every square inch of his life.
Radical Randy taught me that the closer you were to Jesus, the less normally you talked. Even “How are you?” was answered, “Blessed, brother!” If being worldly means trying to fit in, Randy wasn’t worldly at all. He acted as if he lived on another planet and visited this one as infrequently as possible. He was like John the Baptist in an outdated three-piece suit.
Radical Randy was also a street preacher. In my mind, that made him more spiritual than a pastor, so I began hanging out with him in order to study how to be a super-Christian. But as each outreach approached, I felt a growing knot in my stomach. I was ashamed to admit it, but I hated street preaching. The stomach flu would have been a welcome reprieve. I figured something must be wrong with me. Was I merely a normal Christian after all?
Even as I tried to power through street ministry, something else made me even more miserable. I didn’t know how to talk or behave in front of Randy. Having a conversation was like walking through a minefield. Anything I said or did might be condemned as too worldly—not wearing a cross, listening to rock music (even Christian rock), or using an NIV Bible. Many things that my parents thought were perfectly fine were not spiritual enough for Radical Randy. Part of me couldn’t stand being with him, but the other part was sure I just wasn’t spiritual enough.
All this time, I had a growing fear that if I were going to be a super-Christian, I’d have to be as obsessive as Randy. How much longer until I had to burn my Christian tapes, use a King James Bible, and start speaking Christianese? I loved God and wanted to obey him, so I was willing to pay that price. But a dangerous and horrifying change was happening in me. I used to look forward to a lifetime of following Jesus, but now I began to dread it.
I can’t remember how long my time with Randy lasted. It felt like a year, but in reality it couldn’t have been more than a month or two. I just couldn’t handle it anymore—the dreaded street preaching, the impossibly high standards of holiness, and above all, the fear of having to be an obsessive Christian. In true teenage fashion, I just ignored the whole thing and hoped it would disappear. I stopped hanging out with him and tried to fade away, which was a little awkward in a church of 150 people. He just let me go quietly—I think he was used to people not measuring up.
The Two-Tier Trap
After that, I began an unconscious quest to discover what wholehearted devotion to God really looked like. This book is something of a record of that quest. Did devotion mean being obsessive, like Randy? Or could a fully devoted follower of Christ be more normal, like my parents? Their love for God was obvious and affected every part of their lives, but my dad worked in a lumber mill, and my mom was a homemaker. My dad even got a regular paycheck. Randy had to live on faith. Isn’t it more spiritual to trust God for your rent?
Years later I discovered there was nothing new about my two-tiered Christianity. It’s been around for centuries. In the bottom tier were all the ordinary or carnal Christians, and in the top were the priests and saints (in Roman Catholicism), sanctified Christians (in the holiness movement), or Spirit-filled Christians (in Pentecostalism).1 It’s kind of like a spiritual version of the haves and have-nots.
From personal experience, I already knew how damaging the two-tiered mentality was for those presumptuous enough to assign themselves to the top. As a pastor, I’ve discovered how detrimental it is for those who believe they belong on the bottom tier. Most Christians look at the greats—the apostle Paul, Francis of Assisi, Mother Teresa—and decide they can never measure up. Or they look at missionaries, street preachers, and pastors and feel certain that they just aren’t on the same level as professional Christians. Too many Christians feel guilty for their normal, everyday lives, which doesn’t involve performing miracles, standing behind a pulpit, or sharing the gospel in a distant jungle.
I’ve come to believe that the entire system is absolute nonsense, a trap of the enemy that puffs up a few Christians and deflates the rest. It immobilizes everyone who buys into it. Here’s how I came to that conclusion.
Whatever happened to Radical Randy? My family moved away, so I didn’t hear much about him except that he had left our church because of a doctrinal issue. Later, I heard a rumor that he had an affair and deserted his family. As awful as it sounds, my first reaction was relief. I felt bad for his family, but this was the first hint of something I desperately hoped to be true—being an authentically godly person doesn’t necessarily mean being obsessive.
I wanted to believe that being a fully devoted follower of Christ didn’t require being obsessive and totally disconnected from this world. At the same time, I was suspicious of that desire. Was I just trying to water down the gospel? On one hand, the Bible was filled with prophets and apostles who looked uncomfortably like Radical Randy. I couldn’t deny that God called some of his servants to be very strange—even telling Ezekiel to cook his dinners over human excrement. (Much to Ezekiel’s relief, God compromised and let him use cow manure instead.)
On the other hand, the obsessive Christians I knew personally were seldom filled with love, joy, peace, or any other fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:21-23). They were judgmental, self-important, angry, and miserable. Conversely, the Christians I admired for their spiritual fruit were surprisingly normal. Something wasn’t adding up. Either the Bible was encouraging me to be the sort of person I naturally avoided or else I misunderstood what the Bible was saying. I needed to know if the radical lifestyle of the biblical prophets and apostles was the gold standard we were supposed to strive for.
In Bible college I learned how to find my answers by reading the Bible more carefully. Context is king, we were told. Never just read one verse, our professors said, always look at the context. Not just the context of the surrounding verses, but the cultural and historical context of each book. The Bible was not written in a vacuum, but by real people to real people in real circumstances. If we ignore the cultural and historical context, we will likely miss the entire point.
Look at it this way. In the off chance you own an actual telephone book, take a look at the first several pages. You’ll find a section about what to do after a major disaster—turn off your natural gas, use the water in your hot water tank for drinking, keep your fridge closed as much as possible, and listen to a battery-operated radio for instructions. These are great suggestions for times of emergency. But if you were to apply these instructions to everyday life, you’d be hunkered down in your house, huddled around an AM radio and eating cold Spam while your neighbors were outside enjoying a barbecue.
With that in mind, look at the context of these saints. Ezekiel walked around naked in a time of national crisis in order to shock a complacent nation. John the Baptist munched on crickets dipped in honey while ushering in the turning point of human history. Several books of the Bible were written in times of political and spiritual emergencies, and we must be careful how we apply them to our lives. In what ways does our situation match theirs, and in what ways is it different?
Here’s the point. God called the prophets to do some pretty weird things because that’s what their situations called for. Their stories continue to encourage and inspire us, but they don’t necessarily provide point-by-point direction on how to live in our contemporary situations. When we focus on only a few figures with unique missions in extreme times, we miss just how much the Bible has to say to the majority of believers who are trying to live normal lives in ordinary circumstances.
Granted, many Christians don’t think we are living in ordinary circumstances. Time and time again we’re told these are the last days. I grew up believing that the Soviet Union was the great beast of Revelation. When I was in the eighth grade, one of the bestselling Christian books was 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988. The follow-up book, The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989 didn’t sell quite as well Going further back, some Christians in my grandfather’s generation didn’t keep a savings account because they were sure Jesus would return before they’d need it. Even further back, the apostle Paul had to address end-time mania in 1 and 2 Thessalonians. After two millennia of false alarms, all the end-time drama starts to ring hollow. Yes, Jesus is coming back, and we must be ready, but it might be a while, so we must be ready for that too.
Once I understood that the Bible wasn’t just written to people in crisis situations, I began to see God’s interest in normal life hidden in plain sight.
The Bible and Normal Life
I recently finished a three-year series preaching through the Bible. For me, the biggest surprise of the series was discovering how much I enjoyed the Torah and the Mosaic Law.2 In it, I was able to see God’s interest in everyday life. Chapter after chapter deals with normal, earthly things—from crop rotation to another very practical matter: “As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement” (Deuteronomy 23:13).
Are you surprised that verse is in the Bible? It seems so unspiritual. By the way, did you know that Jesus talked about using a toilet? See if you can spot it: “ ‘Are you still so dull?’ Jesus asked them. ‘Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body?’ ” (Matthew 15:16-17).
Did you find it? No? That’s because almost all English translations leave it out. The Greek actually says, “Whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is expelled into the toilet.” I wonder why translators felt the need to censor that out? What does that say about how we read the Bible? I’ll tell you one thing, God is far more comfortable discussing our bodily functions than we are. He doesn’t blush when talking about menstrual cycles and nocturnal emissions. He is completely comfortable with the normal things of this life.
That alone doesn’t prove that God is just as pleased by our normal lifestyles as he is the radical lifestyles of the prophets and apostles. One more point needs to be made. God ordained a small number of Israelites to be Levites, priests, and prophets. Yet he never treated them as super-Jews and the rest as just normal Jews. The priest and Levites had special jobs, but the Bible gives no hint that they were more obedient to God than the rest. God’s intent was for all Israel to be “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:6). Priests, prophets, farmers, shepherds, and carpenters all had equal opportunity to obey and serve God wholeheartedly, right where they were.
Once I saw that truth in the Old Testament, I began to see it in the New Testament as well. Jesus had 12 disciples, and there were only 120 followers in the upper room on Pentecost, but many more believed in him without leaving their daily lives.3 The Samaritan believers stayed faithful in Sychar. Jesus told the man freed from demons to go back home instead of following him, and Mary’s and Martha’s normal lives provided Jesus with a place to stay.4 Yes, some were called to radically alter their lifestyles by leaving everything and following Jesus, but most were equally obedient and commendable by staying home and following him from there.
This same pattern continues on a larger scale in the early church. A few were called to become missionaries, but the vast majority of Christians kept working the same jobs and living in the same houses. “Each one should live as a believer in whatever situation the Lord has assigned to them, just as God has them. This is the rule I lay down in all the churches” (1 Corinthians 7:17).
Where in the New Testament do we see the apostles telling early Christians to literally abandon everything for the sake of the gospel? Nowhere. Far from simply tolerating their normal lives, the apostles taught them how to be faithful in them. C.S. Lewis came to the same realization.
Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before, one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.5
Happy to Be Normal
Somewhere along the way, I completely discarded my two-tiered Christianity and my super-Christian identity. I finally realized that I’m not any higher or lower than other followers of Jesus. I’m proud to live my normal life as a Christian, serving God alongside students, factory workers, retirees, and many others. Certainly, some Christians are more obedient than others. Some are sliding toward complacency and destructive sins. Others are sliding toward obsession and self-righteousness. But there’s only one faith and one family.
Are You a Top-Tier Christian?
Are you desperate to believe that you’re a better Christian than others? Would you feel crushed if you discovered that you were lumped in with all the regular Christians who don’t try as hard as you? Of course, you’d never say that out loud because you know how arrogant it sounds. Is your identity determined less by being loved and accepted by Jesus and more by being a really good Christian? Is it hard for you to relax because you’re working so hard to stay more spiritual than the masses?
I’ve been there. One time, when I was playing capture the flag with a group of missionaries, I lost my temper and kicked a guy where I ought not have. I was devastated, not because I really hurt him, but because I failed so publicly. I don’t ever want to go back to being crushed by every little mistake. It feels amazing to be able to fail, repent, and not care what others think. Paul wrote about this to people like us.
If anyone thinks they are something when they are not, they deceive themselves. Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone, without comparing themselves to someone else, for each one should carry their own load (Galatians 6:3-5).
Stop the comparisons. Repent of arrogance and self-sufficiency. Learn to rest and fall into Jesus’s arms. Learn to fall into the arms of your Christian community. It’s amazing how much I learned from other Christians once I stopped thinking I was better than them.
Are You a Bottom-Tier Christian?
Do you feel as if you’re in the stands, watching all the major-league Christians down on the field? Are you convinced that God must be a little happier with super-Christians than he is with you? In theory, you know that you could join them on the field, but that would require changing everything and leaving behind everything you’ve ever known.
Here’s what I’d say to you. You are not a sub-par Christian. You are not condemned to be a spectator. God is happy with you right where you are. You can be a fully obedient, devoted follower of Christ in the life God has given you.
By God’s grace, you are the lead actor in your story, a story that he wrote for you and no one else. He chose your time in history, your family, your nationality, your skills, and your IQ. He wants to work through your experiences, your failures, your strengths, and your weaknesses. He can do things through you, right where you are, that he cannot do through anyone else. God isn’t waiting for you to move to India to start working through you; he’s just waiting for you to rely on his grace.
God gives us the same promise he gave regular Jews.
But you [not just your pastor or the missionaries or the heroes of the faith, but you] are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light (1 Peter 2:9, quoting Exodus 19:6).
That is good news. We can be free from the guilt of not measuring up. It can also be scary. It removes many of the excuses we might use to justify our lack of obedience. What complacency, what laziness, what mediocrity have you excused because you’re “just” a normal Christian?
• I have house payments, so I can’t serve God.
• I have kids, so I can’t help out at the food bank.
• I don’t have formal Bible education, so I can’t share the gospel with my neighbor.
• I’m not a pastor, so I can’t live up to all of God’s standards.
The only thing standing between you and a life of wholehearted obedience isn’t your job, place of birth, income, or knowledge of the Bible. It’s your willingness to fall into Jesus’s arms and lean completely on his grace. Repent of self-sufficiency—it was never about you or what you brought to the table anyway. It has always been about what God can do through people just like you and me.
Perhaps you think this is easy for me to say because I’m a pastor. I don’t know what it’s like to have a job that feels meaningless or to struggle with feelings of spiritual inadequacy. You might have been right until I started working at Starbucks. That was where God taught me the value of hard work and showed me just how inflated my view of vocational ministry really was.