Impossible Christianity: Why Following Jesus Does Not Mean You Have to Change the World, Be an Expert on Everything, Accept Spiritual Failure, and Feel Miserable Pretty Much All the Time

a new book by Kevin DeYoung

I have recently come to realize that I probably won’t live long enough to read all the books I have now, much less the ones I continue to acquire. So I’ve made a decision: I don’t have time to read good books. From now on I want to read only great books.

Kevin DeYoung’s Impossible Christianity is one of those books. My wife and I read it recently, and it was hard to put down. 

When I read a book, I like to highlight important passages I want to remember. When I come across something really remarkable, I double highlight it by turning down the corner of the page.

Impossible Christianity is a great book, a six dog-ear book.

This, from the opening, lays out the problem:

Many Christians have resigned themselves to the fact—or at least it seems like a fact—that they will be failures as followers of Jesus. Forgiven, yes. Justified, yes. On their way to heaven, yes. But as disciples and Christians, nothing special…. We will do the best we can with our limited time, our limited ability, and our limited opportunities. And yet we will never have the requisite gifts to be truly successful…. We will never pray enough. We will never give enough. We will never share our faith enough. We will not renew our city. We will not repair all that ails our nation. We will not change the world.

He's speaking my language.

I suspect he’s speaking to many of my readers as well. And with that kind of start (and after that subtitle), I’m ready to hear what he has to say.

So many Christian books seem to be how-to explanations aimed at high achievers. Not this book:

Born again Christians are changed Christians. The change will be stumbling, imperfect, and full of temptation and struggle, but the change is nevertheless real, sincere, and discernible. This is not about pride. This is about believing that the amazing grace that saves a wretch like me is the same grace that leads me home.

DeYoung observes that part of the problem is our view of God.

Many Christians, me included, struggle to envision God as the Father who takes delight in us. We know quite rightly that our performance can never be enough to measure up, so it’s hard to imagine that God could actually be pleased with us. DeYoung deals with that perspective head on by distinguishing between two different ways God’s people relate to Him:

We have a tendency to so focus on God as Judge that we forget to relate to him as Father. Both ideas are important; one must not be used to flatten the other. The doctrine of justification is about God as our judge. We are guilty or innocent, condemned or declared righteous, on our way to heaven or on our way to hell. The relationship is binary: we are in, or we are out. Those are biblical categories.

But our relationship with God does not just exist in a courtroom; it exists in a family room…. As a father, God can be angry with his children, and he sometimes must discipline the children he loves. But as a father, God can (and does!) take delight in his children.

Where do I get the idea that it’s up to me to change the world?

In the age of the internet, where every day – every moment! – someone is urging us to be outraged about injustice, we need to hear the good news that we really aren’t responsible to change everything everywhere all at once:

It’s one thing for Christians to be told that they must repent of a specific sin (like racism or abortion), or even to be told that there is a particular unjust statute to be overturned (like Jim Crow or Roe v. Wade). It’s another thing to be told that we must repair the very fabric of society so as to eradicate sin or make it unthinkable. While specific Christians will be called to lead the way in specific areas of political or societal concern, it is unreasonable to demand that every Christian needs to say something or do something about everything.

And then, in what I think is the best sentence in the book:

There must be a way for followers of Jesus to hear, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant,’ apart from being political operatives, full-time bloggers, or community organizers.

Well said, Kevin.

And thank you.

As we offered last week, if I get a sufficient response, I will stock Impossible Christianity on the Discipleship Resource shelf.

Persevere, Paul Pyle  Pastor of Discipleship