How many times have you heard the story? A kid has a bright idea, drops out of college, and starts a business borrowing on credit cards because he is ready to follow his passion with abandon. After overcoming all the doubters, he now leads an amazing start-up where he inspires others so that they can also escape their mundane lives. This is the new story-line of the American dream.

It’s nearly a cultural axiom that we all hold extraordinary talents and should pursue our dreams with total abandon. The problem, of course, is that we can’t all be extraordinary. Someone has to be normal. Whether you ought to pursue a specific dream or not is your decision. My concern is where this vision of life touches our own thinking. Might Christians also feel like failures unless we achieve some kind of extraordinary “success,” largely defined as holding the attention of lots of people who think we’re amazing?

And to that unhealthy pressure to be successful, Scripture proposes a radical normalcy. There is great good in “aspiring to live quietly, mind your own affairs and work with your hands…” (1 Thess. 4:11). In other words, God chooses to use heroic figures like Peter and Paul, but this isn’t the norm. It isn’t as though you would bring in another Pentecost if you could just work up enough faith like them. God used extraordinary individuals at an extraordinary moment to accomplish extraordinary things. For the vast majority of Christians His calling is much simpler, much more pedestrian, and much less heroic. Be faithful; work hard; share the gospel at every chance you get.

But that doesn’t erase the bigger house, nicer car and much more exciting sounding life of the guy next door. So consider another metaphor: an immense tree. Solid and immovable. Blowing past it is a tumbleweed, completely without roots, strength or stability, pushed and controlled by every changing current of the wind. If you don’t recognize it yet, it’s from Psalm 1. You’re supposed to be the tree. And without God’s truth, the guy next door has no footing for life. Consider three insights:

  1. It’s a contrast that ends with destruction for one man and total blessing for the other. But what causes the difference? I would have answered something like “the godly man is blessed because he lives obediently,” but God goes deeper. It actually goes back to thoughts. One man is blessed because he always has God’s Word on his mind. The other man isn’t because he’s too busy listening to his friends.
  2. Godly listening isn’t passive. In other words, blessed living doesn’t just happen automatically, because biblical thinking doesn’t just show up in people’s brains. It takes concerted action—ignoring the other voices; sticking your head in the book day and night; loving God’s Word until it’s your favorite thought. The other voices (the counsel of the wicked) is all around you every day, yelling in your ear. You won’t keep your thinking biblical without constantly, aggressively fighting back. Whole generations of young Christians have assumed themselves as arbiters of biblical thinking because they know the stories. Your thinking isn’t biblical unless you’re constantly thinking Bible. If you think you’ve achieved it, you aren’t there yet.
  3. There is a radical divide between everything about the wicked and the godly. It’s pretty popular to talk about engaging the culture or being relevant. Apparently that seems to require that you’ve watched all the blockbusters and can sing the top songs on the charts. I don’t particularly try to be weird or out of touch. But truthfully, that kind of “cultural relevance” sounds a lot more like “walking in the counsel of the wicked.” Whoever has my ear for most of my alert time will control my thinking. I want that to be God, not the scoffers.

Earlier, I proposed that instead of all being famous, we ought to be content with normalcy. But ironically, this kind of living isn’t normal at all—either in its choices or in its results. If Scripture calls us to be content with normalcy, it also calls us to be anything but normal against the expectations of our culture. The ideas are actually closer than you might think. Against a world telling us to passionately pursue self-actualization and world-wide recognition, we ought to be content with something much bigger—the recognition of God.

Last Sunday night I held my three-year old son on a church platform as he recited this psalm. At such times I sometimes find my mind running backwards over years. How did I end up on a platform in the Philippines, stumbling through a language that isn’t mine, living in a culture that doesn’t come naturally to me? Pursuing missions was hardly a strategic move to bolster our net worth or open up big personal opportunities. But listening to my little boy recite the Divine wisdom of the ages clarifies a lot of things. I’m a long way from Psalm 1 oak tree status. But every choice I’ve made in God’s way has led to blessing; every choice in step with the wicked has harmed me. Whether that leads to being an oak tree at the back of the forest or otherwise isn’t really relevant. I just need the approval of God Himself.

That, in fact, is a passionate dream worth sacrificing everything to pursue.