Influence.

Hebrews 12:2
1 Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, 2 looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

I remember the first time I saw Michael Jordan play basketball. His agility. His command of the ball. His ability to defy gravity. A man in flight. His incredible competitiveness. His insight into his teammates that enabled him to summon their best.
But what made him great? Was it simply a matter of physical ability or team spirit?

I submit it was something that he shares with anyone who has ever been truly magnificent in a team sport.

He could read the state of play.
He could understand the game at any given point and knew how to act to change the outcome. He could see the present in the light of a preferred future. And he knew how to build, in the present, a platform for his desired future.

He discovered the key to real influence.

I have been travelling over the last several months, speaking in various settings, to a wide range of ages and audiences. Several observations have been nagging me:
Why does the church, for all her beauty and function in creating a place we call home, seem so irrelevant to the culture at large?
And
Where is my generation?

I decided I wanted to journal some of my rambling thoughts on Generation X, the Church as we know it, and what our role is in the development and redemption of world culture.

So...here we go.

Influence.
We were designed for it! We were not born to be ignored. Or overlooked. We were created to be influencers.

AND I submit that if we truly want to engage the work of God in our time we desperately need to recognize that we were designed, crafted and formed to wield that influence.

It is fundamental to the Christian world view that human beings were created to impact and influence their environment more than the environment should impact and influence them.

The very first instruction that God gave human kind was a directive that called on our influence-ability.

Genesis 1:26
26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

This is a command to influence. To influence our environment more than your environment influences us.

But if this is Gods intention, what has happened? How did we get where we are? a place where it seems as though the church in so many communities lives playing perpetual defense, disconnected and without a voice to bring hope?
It goes back a long way. We made a decision at the tree. The fall. And sin entered the world. In that moment...we lost some of that ability to change the world more than the world changes us. That fall from grace cost us our capacity for influence, and we became in many ways the influenced rather than the influencers.
Long story made short, through the redemptive work of Jesus on the cross, everything we lost in the garden was redeemed to us again. Including our ability and calling to influence and shape our world.

Hear me: When you choose to become a Jesus follower, you inherit a ‘re-position’ as a person with an incredible capacity to influence.

Influence is hardwired into the human condition.

One way or the other, influence will flow. All around us everyday, this battle rages. For most of us this is a dormant memory of a forgotten year...something that stretches back to pioneers of faith that have gone before us. A memory locked deep within our spiritual psyche. “You were created to change your world. You were created to be a hinge on which the culture of your sphere of influence swings.”

Whether we understand this or not, the reality remains: either we will influence the egocentric (all about me) culture around us or it will most certainly force us to become like it...and the result is a selfish, emasculated form of faith that carries no authority, wields no power and settles for whining from the edges of culture about the darkness that we don’t like.

And be assured...it is a fight. Not against people...but against a system of thought and power brokering that is broken, decrepit and diseased at its very core.
Light vs. Darkness
Flesh vs. Spirit
The temporary vs. the eternal
Spin vs. Truth
Political correctness vs. Prophetic correctness.

Either we will invent the future or someone else’s vision of the future will re-invent us!

Romans 12:2 says,
With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him. Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mould, but let God re-mould your minds from within, so that you may prove in practice that the plan of God for you is good, meets all his demands and moves towards the goal of true maturity.

This is a statement about culture.

It’s a sociological fact that whichever group in society has the strongest sense of culture, the most well defined sense of identity, that group becomes the leading voice in the country.

That is why in Canada, and in every country and culture in our world, small groups of people have very great power. They have established a very strong sense of who they are. They have built a stronger culture than the culture around them.

What Romans 12 is saying is that we have the right, as our mind is renewed, to NOT allow the system of the world to squeeze us into its mould. BUT instead, we were made to live out and PROVE that a life lived Jesus’ way is stinking incredible (my translation).

It is our right to define the culture more than the culture defines us. Who, more than the people of God, have such a clear and profound identity? Such a dynamic and powerful mission? Such a beautiful and hope-filled message?

Abraham Kyper, the nineteenth century journalist, theologian and Dutch Prime Minister, wrote:
'There is not one part of our world of thought that can be hermetically separated from the other parts, and there is not an inch in the entire area of our human life of which Christ, who is sovereign of all, does not cry "Mine!"'

Who will you be?

Jonathan