The Deepest Truth About Life in Jesus

How do we stop looking to lesser things for meaning?

Most of us feel the constant need for something more. As Christians, we often wonder: How do we make heavenly meaning of earthly life?  We often can’t quite articulate what we mean, what we want, or that which would be truly fulfilling. Most of us have tried various lifeless, life-sucking paths that led to emptiness.

Right now, millions of people are looking to tribes of various sorts—political and otherwise—to find meaning and belonging. For this to work, we must carefully define our team and put it in its best light, while simultaneously demonizing the other team. We compare our best to their worst.

This is not a new phenomenon.

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Addicted to Division

In Corinth, one of the early Christian churches, the Apostle Paul had to encourage them to stop dividing themselves over their loyalty to one Christian leader over another (1 Corinthians 1:11–12). The effect of this behavior, according to Gordon Fee, was “tearing or rending, quarreling and dividing based on opinions of various leaders in the church.” The same is now happening with both church leaders and the politicians to which these leaders align.

It often goes like this: “This is my vision/version of Christianity or politics and if you don’t like it then you are wrong, or evil, or not a Christian.” We divide into groups engaged in never-ending, worsening conflict with terrible name-calling and vicious attacks.  

Our social stressors, growing political trauma, and the increasing peer pressure to engage differences with hate are a powerfully toxic mix. It produces widespread addiction to arguing and dividing from others. We then use these rifts to serve our pride and find self-worth by the things, people, or ideas to which we attach ourselves. We see ourselves as wiser than others by selecting the "better" leader as our own. This path is well-worn and leads to nothing good. This is why Paul advises: Don’t boast about following a particular human leader (1 Cor. 3:21, NLT).

The Basis for a Better Way

Paul, seeking to help the Corinthian church through their divisions, asked them to look higher than human leaders. He did so by appealing to what they already possessed so they would stop looking to lesser things for meaning. He said:

For everything belongs to you—whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world, or life and death, or the present and the future—everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.

1 Corinthians 3:21-23 (NLT)

World, life, death, the present, the future—these are all ours? That is a powerful reorientation! That leaves little to grasp. Paul is showing the Corinthian church how to step out of sub-allegiances and to live into the reality of what is already ours in Christ, freeing us by giving us the capacity to love and serve others.

Whatever real thing may be going on at any point in human history—and we have lots of bad stuff happening right now—happens in the context of God’s plan for the world which was:

Set…out before us in Christ, a long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up in him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on planet earth.

Ephesians 1:10 (MSG)

Sum and unity are only found in Jesus.  Human leaders, being mere mortals, can never compare with what is happening in and through the immortal Son of God, the Second Person of the eternal Trinity. God is one; and Christian existence, brought about by the death and resurrection of Christ, is ultimately to be found in the one God. It cannot get any better than that.

In Jesus, Paul finds meaning for all aspects of life. In contrast, when we belong to a religious or political leader there is a different reality, marked by scarcity. Unmet desires then produce the instinct to fight and harm others in service to getting our way.

This is why it is a crucial aspect of Christian spirituality to know that no matter how loud religious leaders or political candidates and their various operatives scream…

everything crucial already belongs to you in Christ Jesus.