For The Ninth Day Of Christmas: Living By The Values Of The Future

The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks

I heard George Brunk III, former dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary, once say, “Our faith is not so much about preserving values from the past as it is about living out the values of the future.” 

In other words, we’re not simply to resist change and hold on to our heritage, good as that may be, but we’re called to radically demonstrate a way of life here and now that has never been, except perhaps in the Garden of Eden. 

As a people of God, we are to be an advertisement about what the future will be like when God is fully sovereign, when God’s will will be done on earth as it already is in heaven. We are to be a people who refuse to wait, and who are already living by the rules of the forever future, when people everywhere will live by the prophet Isaiah’s vision in the Bible and will “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” and will “study war no more.” 

In the age to come “the wolf will lie down with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child shall lead them.” and “they will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.” 

That’s a future we can all live with, and one we’re being enlisted now to join in becoming an Exhibit A, a showcase of what God’s forever world will inevitably be like. If we believe that, live with that gleam in our eye, everything about our life now will change.