To Be Before Doing

Here's a chicken and egg question- but a very important one.  Your answer may reveal how much of the message of Jesus and the Bible you really understand and live.

So here it is:  Do you DO in order to BE, or BE in order to DO?

Justin Taylor (among others) presents this issue and question with fancier words:  Imperatives (to Do) and Indicatives (to Be). - Imperatives – Indicatives = Impossibilities

The dominant mode of evangelical preaching on sanctification, the main way to motivate for godly living, sounds something like this:

You are not _____;
You should be _________;
Therefore, do or be ________!

Fill in the blank with anything good and biblical (holy; salt and light; feed the poor; walk humbly; give generously; etc.).

This is not how Paul and the other New Testament writers motivated the church in light of the resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit. They did give imperatives (=what you should do), but they do so only based on indicatives (=what God has done).

The problem with the typical evangelical motivation toward radical or sacrificial living is that “imperatives divorced from indicatives become impossibilities” (to quote Tullian Tchividjian). Or another way that Tullian puts it: “gospel obligations must be based on gospel declarations.”

This “become what you are” way of speaking is strange for many us us. It seems precisely backward. But we must adjust our mental compass in order to walk this biblical path and recalibrate in order to speak this biblical language.

Only when we know who we are in Christ (to Be) can we then Do, i.e. follow the imperatives, out of gratitude and from a position of acceptance and grace. Biblical spirituality is always response to who He is and what He has done.  He initiates, we respond.  Any attempt to initiate on our part is mere religious works, not Christian spirituality.  If you know who you are in Christ, then you begin to live out of what He has done and whom He has made you.  Indicatives precede imperatives. To be precedes doing.