a word before we begin

There is a phrase, My Friend, that nearly every believer can say in his sleep. We are to be in the world, but not of the world. You have heard it from pulpits and read it on church signs and perhaps said it yourself a hundred times, and it has the comfortable, settled feel of a thing everyone already understands. And that, I am afraid, is exactly its danger. For it has become the very sort of saying this little booklet exists to take apart: a phrase we say so easily and so often that we have quietly stopped asking what on earth it means.

So let me ask the plain question at the outset. What does it actually require of you, on an ordinary Tuesday, to be in the world but not of it? Where is the line? How do you live among people who do not believe what you believe, work alongside them, laugh with them, buy and sell and vote and raise children in the same cities as them, without either becoming just like them or running away from them altogether? That is not a slogan. That is a daily, practical, often difficult art, and almost no one is taught it.

It is worth our knowing, too, where the phrase even comes from, for it is not a proverb or a folk saying. It falls from the lips of the Lord Jesus Himself, on the last night before His cross, praying for His own. And mark what He actually asks of the Father, for it is more startling than the slogan lets on.

I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil one.John 17:15

Do you see it? He does not ask that we be removed. He could have. He asks instead that we be kept, left here in the thick of it and guarded as we go. That single sentence is the whole assignment, and this booklet, the first of a series, is an attempt to take it down off the church sign and turn it back into a life.

chapter one

aliens and strangers

Before we can say a single word about how a Christian ought to engage the world, we have to settle a far deeper thing, and settle it down in the bone where it cannot be shaken loose. We have to settle who you are. For every right response to the world flows out of identity, and every wrong one flows out of forgetting it. You will not live as a stranger in a land until you are convinced, truly convinced, that you are one.

And that is precisely what the Word insists you are. Listen to Peter, writing to scattered believers who knew something about being out of place.

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.1 Peter 2:11

Those two words are doing heavy labor, and the Greek beneath them is worth the digging. The first, strangers, is paroikos, which means a resident alien, one who dwells alongside a people not his own, present and living among them but holding no citizenship there. The second, pilgrims, is parepidēmos, a sojourner passing through, one whose stay is by its very nature temporary.1 Put them together and Peter is telling you what you are with great precision. You are a lawful resident of a country that is not your home, and you are only passing through it. You live here. You do not belong here. Both halves are true at once, and the whole art of the Christian life in the world hangs on holding them together.

your true citizenship

is waiting for you

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sources & notes

  1. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entries “Stranger” and “Pilgrim”: paroikos denotes a resident alien dwelling among a people not his own, and parepidēmos a sojourner passing through, a temporary resident. Cf. 1 Peter 2:11.
  2. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Conversation”: politeuma (Philippians 3:20) is the community or commonwealth of which one is a citizen, citizenship as a possessed franchise; the related verb politeuomai appears at Philippians 1:27.
  3. Marvin R. Vincent, Word Studies in the New Testament, vol. 3, on Philippians. Philippi was refounded as a Roman colonia after 42 B.C. and augmented with veteran settlers by Augustus following the battle of Actium (31 B.C.); it held the ius Italicum, and its residents took marked pride in their Roman citizenship, law, dress, and Latin speech though the colony lay in Macedonia. Cf. Acts 16:12, 20–21.
  4. Jeremiah 25:11–12 and 29:10 foretell the term of Babylon’s dominion and Judah’s captivity; Jeremiah 29:4–7 records the instruction to the exiles to build houses, plant gardens, and “seek the peace of the city.” The captivity is commonly reckoned from the first deportation (c. 605 B.C.) to the return under Cyrus (c. 538–536 B.C.). Cf. 2 Chronicles 36:20–21; Daniel 9:1–2.
  5. Daniel 1:1–4; cf. 2 Kings 24. In the first deportation of c. 605 B.C., early in Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, Daniel and other youths of Judah’s nobility were carried to Babylon; the standard chronologies place this initial deportation in 605 B.C.
  6. Daniel 1:6–7; 4:8, with the standard Hebrew lexica and Bible dictionaries on the names: Daniel (Heb. Dāniyyēl) means “God is my judge,” the suffix -el denoting God (Elohim); the assigned Babylonian name Belteshazzar is built on the god Bel (a title of Marduk), commonly rendered “Bel protect his life.”
  7. Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Old and New Testament (Commentary on the Whole Bible), on Daniel 1:8, observing that Daniel’s resolve was fixed in the heart beforehand as the safeguard of his integrity under trial. Quotation paraphrased.
  8. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entries “Conform” and “Transform, Transfigure”: syschēmatizō means to conform to the outward fashion or scheme of a thing, while metamorphoō denotes transformation, a change of inner nature, and is used of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:2; Mark 9:2). Cf. Romans 12:2 and the present-tense force of the imperatives.
  9. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Overcome”: nikaō means to overcome, conquer, prevail. At John 16:33 the perfect tense (nenīkēka, “I have overcome”) denotes a victory already accomplished with abiding result. Cf. 1 John 4:4.
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