Balance

Keeping one’s balance is a constant Christian challenge. It is the secret of successful tight-rope walking. It is also the great secret of Christian living. As a tight-rope walker can fall either to the right or the left, so it is with any believer. J. I. Packer thinks we are not very good at doing that.

“We Christians are in fact abysmally bad at avoiding extremes,” he says. “We are like pendulums, constantly swinging from one extreme to the other.” Indeed, the power of reaction is one of the powerful forces in all of human life. Packer says it works like this: We see or hear, or think we see or hear, something we dislike and we back away from it as we would from a poisonous snake in the grass. We fix your eyes upon it while we put as much distance between it and us as we can. Walking backward from the snake we soon reach an extreme opposite danger that we are likely not to notice, like a cliff or a hornet’s nest. Avoiding one extreme spawns an opposite sort of extreme. Or as Packer delightfully quips, “The reaction of man does not work the righteousness of God.”

We can see this pendulum swing in the epic struggle between legalism and antinomianism. Another area is the struggle between the dangers of compromise with the world and retreating from the world, an ethos of assimilation to one of detachment by containment and safety.

Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 10:16 helps us maintain balance in our Christian life, positing an ethos of shrewd harmlessness. Jesus was instructing his followers to be crafty at the same time he was commissioning them for ministry in the world. Are there Biblical examples? Yes, Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon are excellent role models of this balance. Shrewdness and craftiness calls for a knack, a flair for fitting oneself into the world. Not avoidance or witlessness of the world. Shrewdness includes good judgment, discernment, and attentiveness.