CHRISTIANITY 101: HOW TO RUIN YOUR LIFE IN SIX EASY STEPS
Dr. James Bryan Smith is a professor of theology at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. James Bryan Smith was also the primary speaker at that conference I recently attended in St. Pete Beach, Florida. In a book entitled The Good and Beautiful Life, he tells a marvelous story of what can happen when a person bases their life on a faulty narrative. Listen closely.
One summer I worked as an intern chaplain at a retirement center. It was a pretty cushy job. The residents were all in good enough health to not need constant care. They seemed to enjoy living together…kind of like a college dorm experience for people with gray hair. I saw smiling faces wherever I went. In our daily chapel service, a woman named Gladys played a hymn, I gave a short devotion, and we ended with one more hymn and a benediction. The rest of the day the residents spent talking about their children and grandchildren, having tea, or shooting pool. It was a pretty nice job. Sipping tea with grandmothers and shooting pool with grandfathers was not a bad way to spend a summer.
Mostly I mingled during social times, but occasionally someone would request a visit. One day my supervisor handed me a note that said, “Ben Jacobs in room 116 requests a visit from the chaplain.” She looked at me and said, “Good luck with this one, Jim.” Her tone indicated that I was in for a difficult afternoon. “What could be so hard about this?” I asked myself, as I made my way to Ben’s room. I knocked on the door and a deep voice replied, “Come in, young man.” Ben sat in his rocking chair with a shawl around his legs, wearing a blue cardigan and a button-down shirt. He had gray hair, a well-trimmed beard, and very severe features: large, deep-set eyes and a long, thin nose. He looked serious and important…like one who was accustomed to giving orders.
“Good afternoon, Ben,” I said, reaching out to shake his hand. “Sit down, son,” he said matter-of-factly, without shaking my hand. For the next hour we discussed philosophy and world religion. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to test my intelligence, or if he just wanted to impress me. He certainly did impress me. He knew a great deal about very sophisticated matters in religion and philosophy. We engaged in a debate over which philosopher was best. I suspected that he did not want to just debate philosophy, but I was not completely sure what he did want. After a while, he said, “Well, you must have much to do. I will let you go now.” This time he did shake my hand, and as I left the room he said, “Would you please come back tomorrow?”
For the next six days I went to room 116 to talk with Ben. Each day he opened up a little more…sharing his life in bits and pieces. Then, on the seventh visit, I discovered Ben’s intention. He wanted someone to whom he could confess his sin. Not any one sin, mind you; Ben wanted to confess having lived a bad life. Now the casual observer would probably say that his life was not so bad. Some might even say it was a life well-lived.
Ben said, “I was born in 1910. I made my first million by 1935. I was twenty-five years old. By the age of forty-five, I was the richest man in the state. Politicians wanted to be my friend. I lied, cheated and stole from whoever I could. My motto was simple: Take all you can from whoever you can. I amassed great wealth and everyone was impressed with me. I had a lot of power in those days. I had two thousand employees, and all of them looked up to me or were afraid of me. Making lots of money was all I cared about. I had three wives, all of whom left me because of neglect, or because they caught me in one of my many affairs. I have one daughter, who is now in her early forties, but she refuses to even speak to me.”
Ben paused to look at me to see if I was judging him. I wasn’t. I was actually pretty stunned. He looked so grandfatherly in his sweater. He looked nothing like the kind of person who could have lived such an ambitious and selfish life. He went on to say, “I suppose you could say that I have ruined my life, because today, I have nothing. Oh, I still have a lot of money. I have more money than I could ever spend. But it brings me no joy. I sit here every day just waiting to die. I have nothing but bad memories. I cared for no one in my life, and now no one cares for me. You, young man, are all I have.”
What do most of us want more than anything else in life? Chances are, what most of us want more than anything else in life…is to be happy. No one seeks a dull, boring, meaningless life. We want to be happy, and we want to be happy all the time. I’m sure Ben Jacobs – the man we spoke about earlier – wanted to be happy as well. With the course he set for his life as a young man, he probably thought he was pursuing happiness. The problem was that the ideas Ben had as to what constituted happiness…were wrong. His dominant narrative – like all dominant narratives – dictated his behavior and produced certain outcomes. No one ends up in a situation like Ben’s all at once. It takes a long time to ruin a life. Yet it all starts with the stories by which we live. It all starts with our dominant life narrative.
Many years ago, my little brother and I were having a philosophical discussion that might be construed as referring to the subject of dominant life narratives. I remember saying to him, “The ways of the world and the ways of God are polar opposites.” He said, “What do you mean by that?” I honestly don’t remember what I said to him then. But now that I’ve had a little time to think about it, I know what I’d say to him now.
The ways of the world are these: Look out for number one. Nice guys finish last. All’s fair in love and war. If it feels good, do it. He who dies with the most toys wins. And, “What does it matter what I do, as long as I’m not hurting anyone else?” Those, my friends, are the ways of the world. The ways of God can probably be summed up in a couple of sentences. Perhaps Jesus put it best when he said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind. And you shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.” The ways of the world and the ways of God are polar opposites. Following the ways of the world as our dominant life narrative will likely put us in the same boat as Ben Jacobs. Following the ways of God as our dominant life narrative is the only thing that can bring us the true happiness we all so desperately seek.
The Apostle Paul describes what it means to follow the ways of the world in the passage we read from the book of Romans. In fact, we might even title this particular passage: How to Ruin Your Life in Six Easy Steps. What Paul is essentially saying is this.
The first step toward ruining your life is to refuse to let God be God. In verse 21 Paul writes, “For though they knew God, they did not honor him as God, or give thanks to him.” Paul refers here to humanity before the advent of Jesus Christ. The point is that we can see God’s handiwork in the creation that surrounds us. To refuse to see God as God is to fail to see God as the source of all that we have and all that we are, and to simply take it for granted.
The second step is that the mind darkens. Refusing to honor God as God, in Paul’s mind, is a step away from reality. It goes against the truth of the universe. Therefore our minds – which thrive on truth and reality – darken. As Paul put it, “They became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.”
The third step is idolatry. Paul believes that we all need a god of some kind. If we reject God Almighty, then we need something to take God’s place. Nature abhors a vacuum. What we’d really like is a god who will do things for us and ask very little in return. So in order to have such a thing, we create idols. As Paul put it, “They exchanged the glory of God for images resembling a mortal being.” Idols these days, however, are not necessarily graven images. Idols are those things in which we invest our lives in order to gain pleasure, happiness, or a sense of purpose. The key is that the idol serves us by giving us our desires, and we serve it by sacrificing our life’s energy to it. Ah, fame and fortune are powerful idols, are they not?
The fourth step is the wrath of God. The Greek words translated “wrath of God” are orge theou. They mean, in essence, that God simply leaves us to reap that which we sow. Perhaps C.S. Lewis put it best when he said, “There are those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done.’ And there are those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’” As the Apostle Paul put it, “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts.” That’s what the wrath of God is. God simply gives us over to the consequences of our own actions.
The fifth step is that pleasure is pursued at all costs. Disconnected from reality and on our own, we must find a way to gain fulfillment. The easiest route is through our mortal bodies. Lust, avarice, greed and gluttony become the routes to happiness. Of course, the “high” that comes from our bodies has a constantly diminishing effect. Each time we engage in those practices the pleasure decreases, thus requiring greater frequency or greater quantities to attain the level of pleasure sought. Paul put it this way: “For this reason, God gave them up to degrading passions.” The initial “lusts of their hearts” has now turned into “degrading passions.”
Last but not least, the sixth step in how to ruin your life is that sin reigns. Sin becomes normative behavior. When we reject God and try to replace him with things that do not satisfy, we naturally begin to reflect that which stands against God…namely, sin. Paul wrote:
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness and malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters; insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless and ruthless.
Does that sound like anyone you know? Every time you turn on the evening news you see exactly what Paul was talking about. How do you ruin your life in six easy steps? It all begins with that first fatal step – the same step that tripped up Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden – refusing to show God the respect, the honor, and the thankfulness he deserves.
By contrast, virtue is what brings about a godly life. Virtue is not the outward appearance of a person; virtue is the inward reality of the heart. Virtue is what brings about true happiness. In his early years, Thomas Merton despised the word virtue. To him, the word meant, “prudery practiced by hypocrites.” Yet Merton later discovered that virtue – the power that comes from moral excellence – is the only way to happiness. In The Seven Storey Mountain Merton wrote:
Without virtue there can be no happiness, because virtues are precisely the powers by which we can come to acquire happiness: without them, there can be no joy, because they are the habits which coordinate our natural energies and direct them to the harmony and perfection and balance, the unity of our nature with itself and with God, which must, in the end, constitute our everlasting peace.
Each and every day we make decisions that move us closer to a life of virtue or closer to a life of ruin. Though the past may be written in stone, the future is more like wet cement…pliable, soft, and ready to be shaped by the decisions we make. Join us over the course of the next few weeks as we seek to develop a more godly life narrative. Join us over the course of the next few weeks as we seek to discover what it means to live a life of virtue. Join us over the course of the next few weeks…as we seek to discern what happiness really is. Amen.
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