Becoming a Christian minimalist …

For many people in Western culture, we’ve bought the lie that “busy” leads to a better, fuller life when the truth is that many people are critically fracturing the quality of their lives by living a too busy lifestyle.

After enduring years of it being a common bragging right to talk about how busy we are, counselors have for many years now been seeing the result of what happens when we try to live lives where we add to the activities of meeting the needs of our lives the stuffing of our calendars with a host of wants, whims, and ways of the world.

The result is an incredible increase in the number of people who feel overwhelmed by their schedules, and people who don’t know how to be still, be quiet, or be alone. The church has contributed to this problem by adding its own list of things for people to get involved with, or its own guilt trips about things people should be doing. Pastor and author, Dr. Charles Swindoll, wrote pointedly about this …

“Busyness rapes relationships. It substitutes shallow frenzy for deep friendship. It feeds the ego but starves the inner man. It fills a calendar but fractures a family. It cultivates a program that plows under priorities. Many a church boasts about its active program: ‘Something for every night of the week for everybody.’ What a shame! With good intentions the local assembly can create the very atmosphere it was designed to curb.”

Preachers can fall into the trap of, Sunday after Sunday, hoisting onto congregants a fresh list of three, five, ten, or any number of new things their people should be taking on during the coming week.

Is it any wonder so many feel so overwhelmed?

It’s not a habit, pattern, or model we see from our Creator, or in what Jesus taught. In fact, if we look closely at what God wants of us, we see a model of “Christian minimalism,” a simplicity to defining how to approach living life as a disciple of Jesus Christ. Being a Christian doesn’t mean we won’t — or even that we shouldn’t — be busy, but it should mean having clear, simple direction for how to approach taking on our days. Let’s look at the simplicity of living we can garner from scripture.

Above all, God wants a real, intimate, and daily relationship with us. God has worked through all of human history to accomplish something that was of primary importance to Him: reconciling sinful man from a broken relationship with Him to a restored relationship with Him. There is a single purpose for our existence, and that is to worship, glorify, and enjoy God. That should be the single greatest guide for the content of each day of our lives.

Being the humans we are, we want an explanation of what it means to live this kind of life. Fortunately for us, God’s Word provides some additional insight for us, but in very simple terms instead of long lists of things to do. God gives us great guiding principles instead of overwhelming us with calendar-busting activities.

Here’s the picture scripture paints for us …

Even from the Old Testament, God’s description for how we should live has been remarkably simple …

“No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God,” Micah 6:8.

See how God defines how to live in such beautiful, yet minimal terms?

God loves us so incredibly much that He gave His only begotten Son to save us from the sin that severed our relationship with Him, because God thoroughly desires that we all be reconciled to Him. Even more, God offers to adopt us as His very own children …

“God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure,” Ephesians 1:5.

By adopting us, God places us into His family called the “church,” a place where we love each other, nurture, support, serve, and care for each other …

“So now you Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners. You are citizens along with all of God’s holy people. You are members of God’s family. Together, we are his house, built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. And the cornerstone is Christ Jesus himself. We are carefully joined together in him, becoming a holy temple for the Lord,” Ephesians 2:19-21.

As His own children, we take up a “family responsibility” within His kingdom by taking on our Father’s mission, making ourselves available to fully participate in His mission and to personally represent Him in this world …

“And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, ‘Come back to God!’” 2 Corinthians 5:18-20.

That mission is where the church tries to make things so very complex, when God keeps it so simple: Love God, love others, and go make disciples …

“’Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?’ Jesus replied, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments,’” Matthew 22:36-40.

“Jesus came and told his disciples, ‘I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Matthew 28:18-20.

So there we are, redeemed, adopted children of God with the purpose of loving, worshiping, glorifying, and walking humbly with God all the days of our lives. We’re children who take up the “family mission” as ambassadors of our King, carrying out a mission of loving God, loving others, and making disciples.

Now, to make a living, we take up careers to pay the bills while we carry out our appointment as our Father’s ambassadors. Those careers are an important environment of living on mission, and hopefully we can greatly enjoy the work and use of the gifts and talents God has blessed us with in our jobs, doing whatever we do as if it’s for the Lord (1 Cor. 10:31).

Finally, all work and no play wears out anyone. We need recreation and the opportunity to enjoy the life God has given us. So we add to our experience time for recreation, personal enjoyments, and rest.

Here’s the problem: Most of us have completely turned our lives around from this biblical idea of how to live. We don’t start with God as the foremost relationship and priority; instead, we start with ourselves, add a job, and heavily load in our wants. That pushes God, the church (our spiritual family), and our life’s purpose and mission to the the fringes of our lives, at best. We live more like selfish hedonists than Christian minimalists, and then we complain about being depressed, anxious, and stressed.

No wonder!

In the beginning, Satan sold the first humans the lie that life should be about becoming your own god, and that’s still how we try to live today, with ourselves at center of our lives pursuing what looks good to us. But fullness of life comes only by listening to and following Jesus Christ …

“The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life,” John 10:10.

Are you experiencing that fullness of life in Jesus Christ today? Or do you have your priorities reversed and your calendars overflowing? What might your life look like, and your personal experience be, if you restructured your life to the biblical idea of how to live?

Scotty