For sixteen years of my life I lived outside of any Christian influence. Once I became a Christian, I endured intense struggles regarding what to do with the completely secular life I had lived up to that point. One of the things I wrestled with was my music collection. Like many teens, music meant a great deal to me and I had purchased many albums over the years. All of it secular. Not a single Christian album. Not a single spiritual lyric. Not a single word about Christ. Album after album of rock and pop from the 1980’s best and brightest.
I didn’t know if it was OK for me to keep listening to that stuff. Was it too secular? Should I only listen to explicitly Christian music? Not really knowing what else to do, and tired of the tension, one day I put it all in a sack, took it to a dumpster far from my house, and tossed it all. Every single album.
It was one of the costliest and most difficult things I did as a teenager. I renounced all that secular music. I abandoned it all. It was forsaken.
But it turns out that I took the easy path.
There are certainly things in life which need to be forsaken. Demand to be abandoned. Completely. Entirely. Wholeheartedly.
But sometimes we’re faced with something that causes us tension, and we opt for what appears to be the most courageous path–renouncement. However, this turns out to be the easy path.
Jesus points to this in his Sermon on the Mount. In Matt. 6 Jesus teaches about money. At first, the way Jesus contrasts “treasures in heaven” with “treasures on earth” and the way he describes money as a potential “master” leaves the impression that money and possessions just might be one of those things we must renounce. This, Richard Foster reminds us, was the response of many in the monastic movement. “Intense renunciation was their way of shouting no to the prevailing values of their society” (Money, Sex and Power, 5).
Yet Jesus calls us to something far more difficult than renouncement. Jesus calls for discernment:
22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, 23 but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! (Matt. 6:22-23 ESV)
Jesus does not call us to abandon all material possessions. We are to retain them. They must continue to be present in our lives. Instead of renouncement Jesus calls for discernment. It’s relatively easy to toss away something that causes tension in our Christian life. It’s much more difficult to retain it and learn to discern its best and godly use. That’s what we are to do with money.
Jesus teaches that a “sound/healthy/generous” “eye” regarding material possessions results in a “body…full of light.” By contrast, a “bad/ungenerous/unhealthy” “eye” regarding material possessions results in a “body…full of darkness.” It’s not the money that’s the problem per se. It’s our view of money. It’s our use of money. It’s our perspective on money. When viewed and used generously and charitably, it becomes a source of great light. When viewed and used selfishly and greedily, it becomes a source of darkness.
It’s a lot easier to burn books than it is to learn to discern their best use. It’s a lot easier to burn witches than to learn to discern how to address people whom others have deemed blasphemous and wicked. And, in some ways, that’s what churches and Christians excel at. We’re good at renunciation. Whether its books or people, we’re good at cutting all ties, removing all traces, and eliminating completely that which appears to have the capacity for evil. But in many cases, we’re called to something much costlier. We’re called to learn to discern how to live in the tension between what seems holy and what doesn’t.
So, before you walk away from that city, that thing, that situation or that person you deem too dark and dangerous, ask this question: Is God calling for renouncement or discernment?
