What does living a life worthy of the gospel actually look like?

I hear words like “live a life worthy of the gospel” and intellectually I know what it means. But if you pressed me to describe what it actually looks like, I’d probably end up waffling for a bit about obedience and faithfulness and then….. “you know, it’s the vibe.”

What I absolutely love (as a history and theology nerd) is learning the nuances of what we miss by not speaking the same language as the written original letters of scripture. So when Paul tells the Philippians in 1:27 to conduct themselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ (NIV) (translated in the ESV as “let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ), there are some intricacies of the original Greek that are lost to our modern and English reading.

Alistair Begg (Truth for Life) points out that let the manner of your life/conduct yourselves comes from the Greek verb politeuesthe. “The root of this word comes from polis, which means ‘city’, and gives us other words like police and politics. In a very real sense, Paul is concerned with Christian citizenship and conduct.”

This made something suddenly click into place at the back of my brain. The Romans were very preoccupied with the rights of citizenship and how a Roman citizen conducted themselves. It is this preoccupation that Paul is tapping into. But we have the same, whether we realise it or not. There are a set of real laws and regulations that we live by. We know we are supposed to observe road rules, to make sure our kids are attending school above a level of 90% attendance, we are supposed to pay for the goods and services we acquire and not just take them, we are supposed to get planning permits for particular actions on our property and so on. Then there is a set of unwritten rules that govern our whole lives: we know we are supposed to be dressed every day, that when we need to go to the toilet, we’ll go and find a bathroom, we’ll eat when we’re hungry and, if we have kids, we will feed and clothe them, we will shower and keep ourselves clean, we will pay for goods that we buy and have, to differing degrees, good manners (or certainly have an opinion about what we think they should be). These are expectations and social conventions that we know so well that they barely register as proper conduct in the country or city/polis in which we live.

Now, if living a life worthy of our calling were to involve a set of attitudes, behaviours, demeanours and actions that came so naturally to us that they barely register to us as proper conduct, then perhaps we would be achieving the aim.

That means that we need to practice those attitudes, behaviours, demeanours and actions so consistently and for so long, that they merely become part of our operating rhythm, or our muscle memory. What that looks like might vary between contexts but if we were living without slander, malice, anger, foul language, drunkenness and living with humility and seeking holiness, we would be living by the laws and regulations of the land (God’s land) that we are actually citizens of. If we were to live by the fruits of the Spirit, loving God and our neighbour more than ourselves, we would be living by the proper conduct of our spiritual city.

This is not something we can do on a whim. But it is something we can decide to do.

This is not something we can do without context. We can only achieve this by being in God’s word, by being in community with believers and in active relationship with Christ, and it takes personal focus and continued course correction.

But we live in the world in a way that is so natural to us that we don’t even think about it, which means it is possible to achieve. So with decision, context, and the enabling Spirit of God, it is something we can get better and better at over time until more aspects of that conduct becomes instinctive.

We live as citizens of heaven in the world. So while we live by the rules and conventions of the world, we also live by the rules and conventions of our spiritual home. The former comes naturally. The latter does not. But it is the latter that really counts. It shows our faithfulness and obedience. It is a witness to others. It shows the fruit of our relationship with Christ.

It is practice for when we are home.