To serve God wittily... explanation

To serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds....

Almost every word of this phrase has significance for an obedient following after Christ. At least for me. Unpacking this I use the inclusive 'we' - others may not think or feel this way, which is fine. I would be interested though to hear from you what you think it might mean "to serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds".

To serve implies obedience, but as willing grateful surrender, an inner attitude of consistent readiness, from which each action and activity derives its value as an act of devotion following after Christ.

To serve wittily means an end to naivete, a call to attentiveness and alert observation of the world in which we live and move, and within which we are called to serve. So having  our wits about us will mean, (and this only for starters - feel free to add to this unpacking process)

1. Not being rendered myopic by cultural assumptions, but rather see the world through the lens of the Gospel - not war but peacemaking; not greed but generosity; not lies but truthfulness; not power over others but power serving others.
2. Not being pushed around by consumer pressures but rather being intentionally shaped and transformed by Jesus. And what are the economics of the Kingdom; what is it that profits a human being?
3. Not being morally domesticated by ethical and cultural accommodations, but rather seeking to live in the radical freedom of the Kingdom of God where the only rule is God’s rule. The culture of hard realism challenged by visionary compassion; the idolatry of the bottom line questioned by gestures of sacrificial extravagance; the semantic cosmetics of political correctness superceded by communities of Jesus embodying radically inclusive love.
4. Not being embarrassed by the evidence of Christendom in decline, but rather seeking and embodying a lifestyle more faithfully rooted in the teaching of Jesus.

1. The tangle of our minds – tidiness and system, an imposed order on life, what P T Forsyth called the lust for lucidity – none of these answer to the sheer messiness and inconvenience of the world, our culture and our times. There is that in the Gospel which resists being combed into shape, style and fashion. ( I use the metaphor as one who no longer has much use for a comb!) My own experience has been that Christian theology, ethics and practice have to relate to a world constitutionally ambiguous, unpredictable, inconsistent – and each human life is entangled in the consequent joy and suffering that is a human life together.

And it is the tangle of our minds; speaking here only for myself, my deepest theological convictions, and even my most passionate spiritual experiences, are often rooted in the life of the mind. Thought, reflection, consideration, contemplation, reason, understanding, prayer – however deeply I feel the truth of things, they become most real and I own them as life convictions mostly as they are received and welcomed as ideas rooted in experience and expressed in the life God gives me to lead. Loving God with my mind is an essential not an optional devotional attitude and aptitude in my own spirituality – and for better or worse.

So as a motto, ‘to serve God wittily in the tangle of our minds’, provides a number of perspectives on my personal discipleship. However, in case I get too serious about this, serving God wittily could also mean humorously, good humouredly, and with hilarity. Fun and laughter being an essential presupposition of healthily, gladly, en-joy-ably, serving God. That sets me thinking about the spiritual discipline of fun - is there a discipline of fun, an obligation under God to be a gladness maker?!