Commitment and Responsibility

I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians; both to the wise and to the unwise ... For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believeth ... For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith ... The just shall live by faith (Romans 1:14, 16, 17).

Debtor. It's a word that implies obligation, responsibility. Paul felt that because of what Christ had done in his life, he owed the nonbelievers a debt: the debt of bearing the gospel of Christ to them. The apostle's word also suggest a deep sense of commitment. Paul realized that men and women are made right with God to be an instrument through which the nonbeliever could acquire faith and, consequently, salvation. Realizing the crucial role of faith in salvation, he felt a deep commitment to the call.

As Christians, as bearers of the good news, we ought to be moved by the same sense of commitment and responsibility. We ought to feel obligated as a body to make visible to the world the love of God. We ought to discharge that obligation with commitment: in word, in deeds, and in our general behavior -- all three of them in harmony, not one of them as opposed to another one, and not doing one today and the other one tomorrow. We ought to practice responsible Christianity.

Through proclaiming the gospel by word, by deeds, and by our behavior, we will show the effect in our lives of Christ's work on the cross more than two thousand years ago. When a nonbeliever looks at a community of believers and sees that their lives and deeds are in harmony with the gospel they proclaim by word, the life of that nonbeliever becomes open to God's gift of faith and salvation.

We as believers are not the faith givers. It is God who gives faith. But God uses the community of believers as a seed-bed upon which he sows the seed of faith in the lives of nonbelievers. The community, in a sense, becomes the good news in that its members live and act in ways that are attractive to the nonbeliever.

Paul does not urge a sense of commitment and responsibility among believers for the exclusive sake of the salvation of nonbelievers. This is also necessary for the edification of the body of believers itself. When believers are committed and responsible, they will be responsive to the Holy Spirit. Consequently they will be able to discern the working of the Spirit among them.

One important result of this discernment is that they will then be able to identify those people in their midst to whom God has given certain unique gifts. Once they identify the gifts each of them has received from God, they will then submit to the authority of one another, realizing that the authority each one of them has is from God, who has equipped them with special gifts in order that they might minister to the rest of the body. When believers thus submit to the authority of each other, they become teachable, and, being teachable, they are able through the Holy Spirit to understand God's will for the body as a whole, as well as for their individual lives.

Believers are not moved easily to this sense of commitment and responsibility. European-Protestant theology in today's church has tended to emphasize salvation to the minimization of commitment. As a result, we do not have a body of faith sufficient to bring about the kind of conversion that develops commitment to Christ. What we have is simply a gospel that saves people individually and prepares them for heaven.

The problem with such a gospel is that it is all too easy to dichotomize it, to regard proclaiming it as one thing and living it as quite another. This kind of dichotomy is evidenced by certain elements of the church here in America. The glaring lack of harmony between what is preached and what is practiced indicates that they believe: "It doesn't matter whether we live what we preach or not. The important thing is to preach the gospel and get people to heaven."

That is not the kind of faith Paul talks about in the text quoted above. The apostle proclaimed the real faith, the faith that so transforms the believer's life that he or she does not stop at being saved. Rather the believer becomes so committed to the Savior that this person feels obligated to go on and exercise faith in the context of the body of Christ, i.e. the community of believers. The receiver of this faith is thus not merely a recipient, but is indeed a debtor.

John Perkins was a contributing editor to Sojourners and president of Voice of Calvary in Mendenhall and Jackson, Mississippi, when this article appeared.