What Does it Mean to Be Different?
A reflection from Matthew 10:37
Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. —Matthew 10:37 (ESV)
When I was in college, I wanted to get a tattoo. I asked my dad if he thought this was a good idea, and he asked me why I wanted a tattoo. I said, “I want to be my own person. A tattoo is my own mark on my body. It’s a sign of distinct identity.” My dad then asked if other college students had tattoos, and I let him know that they were very popular on campus. And then, my dad asked a brilliant question: “So, you want to be different from everyone else by doing what everyone else is doing?”
In his book, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling God’s Purpose for Your Life, Os Guinness writes that God’s people “are called by God to be distinctively different, that assimilation may be as disastrous as defeat, and that times of success may be more dangerous to faithfulness than times of rejection and persecution.” This quote and the chapter in which it appears are compelling. As Christians, we must not give in to the twin temptations to compromise our faith or to assimilate into the culture. And that brings up an important question.
What does it mean to be distinctively different?
I’ll be direct. I think most of us have a shallow answer to this question. We define “distinctively different” primarily or even exclusively in moralistic terms. “I don’t smoke, and I don’t chew, and I don’t go with girls that do.” So, I’ve checked the box to be different, right?
I’m not sure.
When Jesus said, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,” I don’t think he was just talking about not drinking more than one beer at a party, not watching R-rated movies, and trying not to cuss when you hit your thumb with a hammer.
At this point, many Christians will say, “Yes! We’re also different because we go to church. My unsaved neighbors don’t do that!” But we often think of going to church as part of our moral performance. Instead of belonging to a church out of love for God and fellow believers, we participate because it’s what we think we’re supposed to do.
What I’m getting at is this: Too often, we Christians define “being different” as “being a good person.” So, we do the things that we think will make us good people: we go to church a couple of times a month, we say grace before supper, we sometimes read the verse of the day that pops up from our Bible App, and we’ve got the local Christian radio station on our car’s list of saved channels.
But Jesus meant something more. Loving family members is far deeper than moralistic performance. When Jesus said his disciples must love him more than they love their own family, he was cutting to the heart of our most deeply held loves and values.
To be distinctively different means not only to act differently but to love differently.
Even though we claim to follow Jesus, we often simply accept the values of the world around us. We’re quick to ask, “Is this the right thing to do?” but we forget to ask, “Is this the right thing to think?” Society today tells us the good life is found in living for self, pursuing our own happiness, casting off any restraint that keeps us from running our own lives, making more money, owning more things, having more sex, getting more followers, and buying the latest device.
As Christians, we must stop and ask whether the world’s definition of the good life is correct. If we blindly accept the idea that the good life is found in individualistic self-fulfillment, then we’re not really any different than anyone else in society. We might pursue that end through different means (e.g., moralism instead of hedonism), but at the end of the day, we’re all just chasing the same thing because we all love the same thing: self-actualization.
To be distincitvely different means to reject the world’s definition of the good life. We love Jesus more than we love anything else—even good things like our own family members. We don’t love the way the world loves. We don’t think the way the world thinks. We don’t see the way the world sees. We don’t value what the world values in the same order or priority. And because we are distinctively different at the deepest level, we don’t live the way the world lives.
For many Christians, our morals differ, but our loves are the same as the world’s. And thus, one has only to scratch the surface to find that our lives are essentially the same as those of our unsaved neighbors. But when our loves are different, our lives will be different, and so—by the way—will our morals.