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The Undriven Life—The Christian Difference, Part 9
It’s not uncommon for those birthed into the Kingdom of God to go back to practicing the external driven-life. The Galatian Christians tried to mix the driven-life with the following-life and Paul’s rebuke to them was the key to my own personal acceptance of the miraculous, Christian Gospel. He said, “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying…
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The Undriven Life—The Christian Difference, Part 8, by Carolyn Cote
The undriven-life is a peaceful though dependent one. The driven-life can’t be peaceful because it’s rarely at rest because peace comes through activity and activity empowered by your own resources is eventually exhausting. Following Christ requires discerning His call to act and this discernment is honed by knowing what He values and what He doesn’t value. In John 15:16 Jesus says, “that your fruit should remain.” Use this to begin to decipher what sorts of works are of the eternal kind. Are your works the burnable wood, hay, stubble or are they those which remain: silver, gold and precious stones? When I designed what Bethesda Pregnancy Services would focus on…
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The Undriven Life—The Christian Difference, Part 6, by Carolyn Cote
At 22, I suppose I was unusual to take on such a multi-faceted task as founding and directing a crisis pregnancy center but once you’ve become driven to do good, nothing is too daunting. Good works are like an energy drink—they fuel you. They also tick a lot of those boxes which are common motivators for most endeavors: public approval, happy and grateful customers, a sense of purpose, a creative outlet and money. I volunteered; I felt that to accept a paycheck diminished the goodness of the work but the other motivators were there, lurking, in my subconscious. Prayer? I didn’t pray. Though I’d been a born-again Christian for five…
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The Undriven Life—The Christian Difference, Part 4 by Carolyn Cote
In a nutshell, this is the driven-life: “That’s what Christians do.” No sane person would question the relationship between doing good and Christianity. The two are inseparable; one cannot exist without the other, right? A more important question is, “Can I do good without Christ?” The driven-life sources its power to “do” from your personal resources. You see, you think, you decide, you do. You drive it all, from conception to birth. The following-life sources its power to “do” from Christ. You see, you pray, you obey. You humbly accept that you don’t know what is good or nice; only Christ knows and you must follow Him. “Remain in me,…
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The Undriven Life—The Christian Difference, Part 3 by Carolyn Cote
The impromptu speech I gave that day was thought-provoking but not genius. Abortion became legal by a Supreme Court ruling on January 22, 1973. Average Americans were stunned and Catholics led the protests. They helped expose the truth of what abortion truly meant: innocent babies being killed with saline or dismembered in their mother’s wombs. Making abortion illegal again appeared straightforward—show America what abortion really was and they would never support it. In some cases, this informative approach worked but before long, clinics opened nation-wide and were performing an average of 4000 abortions a day. Still, the information campaign continued. The pro-abortion folks rebuffed every exposing truth: it’s not…
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The Undriven Life—The Christian Difference, Part 2 by Carolyn Cote
If “awesome” has a perfect opposite it would be something pretty close to “awful.” Becoming undriven is a process and that process is necessarily an awful one. If you’re in the midst of awesome’s antonym, this teaching will make your heart soar with hope. If you’re not, well, awful will come because the Lord disciplines those He loves. Seasons of awful are seasons of an autumn-like dropping of those dead things no longer needed to sustain the tree’s life. The winter which follows is a renewing stillness where Truth Himself fills you with what you will need for the seasons of fruitfulness to follow. This fruitfulness is the Lord’s holy…
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Choosing the Lamb of God Over Barabbas
“‘Barabbas’ means ‘son of the father,’ His very name is a kind of caricature of the ‘Son of the Blessed,’ and his character and actions present in gross form the sort of Messias whom the nation really wanted. He had headed some one of the many small riots against Rome which were perpetually sputtering up and being trampled out by an armed heel. There had been bloodshed, in which he had himself taken part (‘a murderer,’ Acts iii. 14). And this coarse, red-handed desperado is the people’s favourite, because he embodied their notions and aspirations, and had been bold enough to do what every man of them would have done…
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Being Salt and Light Without Guilt
Have you ever experienced a sigh of shame when you hear or read Christ’s words about salt and light? “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that…
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The Baptism of Water
If I asked you, “What are we washing off with the Baptism of water? What had been added to us that needed to be washed away?” You would answer correctly, “What was added in the garden! The deadly knowledge of good and evil!” Yes. We’d all agree, evil must be washed away. But can I ask you to consider that the knowledge of good must also be washed away? John the Baptist cried to the so-called goodness experts, “And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax…
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Social Justice Burnout
In 1986 I was 26 and very busy serving the needs of the teen moms in our rural county. This younger me, the one sure of the answers, the one full of confidence and the one who possessed a small bit of talent had founded Bethesda Pregnancy Services and I was proud–of myself. My calling, as I called it, had begun much earlier when I gave my first ever impromptu speech as a high school freshman. My impromptu subject? Abortion. I had just five minutes to prepare but I knew exactly what I would say because I’d been pondering the abortion debate from a young person’s perspective. I mounted the…
