If you liked Kanye’s Jesus is King, you’ll love the 1972 live recording Amazing Grace featuring Aretha Franklin and the Southern California Community Choir. Listening to one of the greatest talents in human history sing gospel for an hour-and-a-half to a live audience that not only believes every word of it, but is obviously drawing strength from the music to live faithfully in the midst of a society that explicitly marginalizes them, is an experience you owe yourself. 

Anyway, there’s a song on the record called “Give Yourself to Jesus.” “Give yourself to the Master,” Ms. Franklin proclaims, slowly and sweetly, “and He’ll make your life sublime.” And when she sings it, it’s not hard to believe. 

Two hours later, though: hungry, bored and probably stuck in traffic, you might easily think, “Sublime? Gosh, lady, I’d settle for tolerable right now.” I’ve been following the Master (in fits and starts) from an early age, and I can tell you that sublimity is not a constant, or even common, experience in my life. 

As I touched on in my last post, the participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ culminating in baptism does not fill your life with perpetual peace and bliss. It doesn’t make you a spiritual hero – or, for that matter, a well-rounded, pleasant or particularly interesting person. “All” it does it make you dead and bring you back to life, with no guarantees or prior conditions on what the new life looks like. What is most immediately striking about the new life – not always, but usually – is how much it resembles the old. 

Wherein lies the difference? Certainly the new believer is now trying to organize and discipline his life according to a new set of values revealed in scripture. In that particular sense, though, conversion to Christianity is the same kind of thing as, say, conversion to Islam, or taking up serious environmental activism, or even making a commitment to self-care. Reorientation of one’s self according to a new outlook is by no means an exclusively Christian phenomenon. Just ask the Buddha, or Mohammed, or that one punk who switched allegiances from the Cardinals to the Cubs mid-game. 

The hallmark of the new life – what I believe really distinguishes the new from the old – is the real world experience of what the New Testament calls the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16). You could find any number of good theoretical discussions of what this is, exactly, but I want to take a stab at describing what it’s like to experience it: 

A recently baptized Christian (we’ll call him Gary) is driving home from a typically draining day at the office. One of his headlights has gone out (again). Gary’s thoughts flick back and forth between the headlight, the traffic, the vague hope that his wife Cindy has already put away Mt Laundry so he won’t have to, the impenetrable mysteries of the College Football ranking system and sometimes – since he is a dude – nothing at all. But as he turns onto his street, he suddenly finds himself thinking something like this: well, putting away the laundry myself would make Cindy’s evening more pleasant. 

Now it just so happens that Gary’s next-door-neighbor, an amiable atheist named Steve, thinks almost every day about how to make his wife’s evening more pleasant. Steve clearly did not have to participate in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to have that kind of thought – but Gary did. That is to say, before his conversion Gary would not have spontaneously considered putting away the laundry for his wife. Pre-conversion Gary would have thought about doing so only as a way of making amends for some boneheaded comment, or something of that sort. But this prompting came “out of nowhere,” and was wholly unaccompanied by any cost-benefit analysis. 

Now, obedience on Gary’s part might form the beginning of a good habit. Doing little things for his wife would become commonplace for him, as it already is for Steve. But the initial impulse, I think, stems from his having “the mind of Christ” through participation in Jesus’ resurrection life. Gary’s experience of this resurrection life is thus, to a large extent, his experience of these “out of nowhere” thoughts (and promptings, feelings, impulses, desires, longings). These constitute the internal newness of the new life, and when they’re pursued they inevitably lead to external newness as well. 

The “out of nowhere” mental/emotional activity I’ve been trying to describe has at least two defining characteristics. First of all, it tends to “take you out of yourself,” fixing your attention on something or, more likely, someone else. Again, this might be unremarkable from an external perspective. A woman might be a Christian for over a decade before she starts paying attention to the needs of others in the same way that her agnostic sister has been doing since the age of seven. The point is that the Christian sister would have never gotten there without Christ. 

To be sure, living the new life is going to feature plenty of what Christians call “conviction of sin,” which is necessarily inwardly-focused. But this conviction is worlds apart from, say, the sort of self-obsession evident in the rigorous pursuit of moral perfection Benjamin Franklin details in his ever-fascinating Autobiography. Christians are fiercely concerned with personal holiness as a means to knowing a holy God (Heb 12:14) and really for no other reason. A righteousness without Christ isn’t worth the having (Phil 3:9). In that way, even conviction is ultimately focused outwards. 

That’s because the second, and more important, characteristic of having the mind of Christ is a kind of growing, visceral longing for God. I’d almost go so far as to say that becoming a Christian is what creates the famous “God-shaped hole” in one’s life, not the other way around .

One of the best contemporary expressions of that particular hole appears at the end of the 2007 film No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel. Tommy Lee Jones portrays a West Texan sheriff who has spent his life confronting the worst kinds of human behavior, and spends the film pursuing the worst kind of human being. Towards the end, he goes to visit his cousin in the latter’s dilapidated shack. They discuss the sheriff’s pending retirement; the cousin asks why he’s quitting. 

“I don’t know,” says the sheriff. “I feel overmatched.” After a pause he elaborates, “I always figured when I got older, God would sort of come into my life somehow. He didn’t. I don’t blame Him. If I were Him, I’d have the same opinion of me that He does.” 

Of course God didn’t come into his life. This is a Coen Brothers film of a McCarthy novel, and none of those individuals do much traffic in hope (seriously, anything McCarthy related is invariably brilliant and also bad for your mental health). What is interesting to me is not the sheriff’s despair but his longing, all the more powerful depicted as it is by non-believers. The presence of God, the sheriff instinctively knows, would somehow right everything even if it explained nothing. 

It’s that instinct – that longing – that heavily characterizes the new life: “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God” (Ps 42:1). After some time, that goes from pious talk to daily experience (growth in the Christian life is characterized largely by no longer saying stuff just because you’re supposed to, and also by losing a certain kind of faux-holy tone of voice when you’re saying it). 

This longing most certainly varies in intensity from day to day (and for all kinds of reasons), but it never quite disappears. At its most intense, it’s a longing that’s on a different level than anything else; even if everything else in your life was superlatively right, you’d ditch it all to live in the presence of God (Ps 84:10). It’s a whole heck of a lot like falling in love, or finding treasure in a field you’d have to sell everything to buy. There might not have been a thing wrong with your life beforehand, but what does that matter now? 

And so the Master might not make your life sublime (at least not in the here and now), but he will instill in you a desire for sublimity that – since we aren’t living in a Coen Brothers film – is ultimately satisfiable. Much is the same as before, but everything – the whole scope and frame of one’s life, the possibilities now open to it – has changed.* 

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* “So that’s it, huh? A repackaging of the well-documented human ‘longing for transcendence,’ observable in almost all cultures and expressed in myriad different ways (including some very secular ones, at that). And how on earth could you possibly know that Gary couldn’t have had that impulse to fold laundry or whatever without some kind of mystical hoodoo? Why not state the obvious? Why not accept the much simpler explanation at baptism is some people getting wet, and some of those people go on to become nicer just like non-religious or non-Christian people sometimes become nicer, just with different motivations?” 

That is a simpler explanation. In my next post, I’m going to do my best to explain why I think it’s the wrong one.