God calls us to take risks, accept costs, and make sacrifices too. That’s how the gospel moves forward—be it to Rome, to rural America, or to Ricky in the next cubicle at work. Ambition and risk are the human ingredients God uses to put the gospel into circulation.

The word audacious hardly brings to mind serenity or comfort. Nobody ever claims to have an audacious sleep or an audacious moment of poetry reading. Nope, to be audacious is to be bold or daring, fearless, courageous, intrepid, dauntless, venturesome. That’s wild stuff—the kind of stuff that makes people cross oceans to become missionaries or move to the inner city to plant a church. It’s the kind of stuff that leads someone to speak out for Christ in a public space or to adopt a high-risk child. It’s also the kind of stuff defining Paul’s life.
Paul was audacious in his aims. Just listen to his summary of the extent of his ministry.
“From Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ” (Romans 15:19).
Scholars estimate that by the end of his journey to Rome, he had traveled about 15,500 miles–more than half of that by foot! And Paul’s vision didn’t stop in Rome. He told the Romans that he intended to keep going all the way to Spain (Romans 15:28). Paul made it his bold ambition “to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named” (Romans 15:20).
This is so provoking for me. Because the older I get, the more I am tempted to settle. If you can relate to that, join me in answering two audacious questions.
Where is God Inviting Me to Exercise Audacious Ambition?
The unstoppable gospel requires a fierce aspiration to put it into play. For Paul to get the gospel to new places and new people, he had to “make it [his] ambition.” Having an ambition for the gospel pushes us to do things we never expected. It incites us to look beyond the borders of our own comfort and convenience.
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We do not profess a religion that despises the body. Christ speaks of us as his body, a body that spans the globe and extends through time. To disdain our flesh is to neglect the Incarnation and our membership in this historical communal body.

I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or homeschooling curricula. Yet an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection. While they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its “meat suit” (a term they fondly use).
I first caught wind of this striking divergence from Christian orthodoxy in class last year, when we encountered Stoic visions of the afterlife. Cicero, for one, describes the body as a prison from which the immortal soul is mercifully freed upon death, whereas Seneca views the body as “nothing more or less than a fetter on my freedom,” one eventually “dissolved” when the soul is set loose. These conceptions were quite attractive to the students.
Resistance to the idea of a physical resurrection struck them as perfectly logical. “It doesn’t feel right to say there’s a human body in heaven, when the body is tied so closely to sin,” said one student. In all, fewer than ten of my forty students affirmed the orthodox teaching that we will ultimately have a body in our glorified, heavenly form. None of them realizes that these beliefs are unorthodox; this is not willful doctrinal error. This is an absence of knowledge about the foundational tenets of historical, creedal Christianity.
At some point in my Evangelical upbringing, I came across a timeline of world history. The timeline started with Adam and Eve, then moved through significant events recounted in the Old Testament, with a few extra-biblical highlights from elsewhere in the world spliced in here and there. The fulcrum of the timeline was the birth of Christ, followed by details from his life and ministry, then post-Resurrection events from the Book of Acts. All these episodes were demarcated by bright colors, with neat lines stretching upward into the margins, connecting each sliver of color to a corresponding label. After Paul’s ministry, however, this busy rainbow of history dissolved into a dull purple rectangle spanning fourteen centuries, labeled simply “the Dark Ages.”
This is an apt illustration of all too many young Christians’ sense of Christian history. The world after the New Testament is blank and uneventful. Even the Reformation is an obscure blip. They are not self-consciously Protestant, but merely “nondenominational.” Their Christian identity is unmoored from any tradition or notion of Christianity through time.
My students are a microcosm of what I see as a growing trend in contemporary Evangelicalism. Without a guiding connection to orthodoxy, young Evangelicals are developing heterodox sensibilities that are at odds with a Christian understanding of personhood. The body is associated with sin, the soul with holiness. Moreover, this sense of the body, especially under the alias flesh, tends to be hypersexualized.
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Evangelical emphasis on purity, a word that has become synonymous with bodily virginity. Despite the biblical usage of purity as holiness in a broader, holistic sense, including but not limited to sexual matters, the word “purity” has become narrowly sexualized. It is not a virtue to be continually cultivated, but a default physical state that can be permanently lost.
In Evangelical vernacular, “sins of the flesh” denote specifically sexual sins, and these are the evils that dominate the theological imaginations of young, unmarried Evangelicals, far more than idolatry, say, or greed. I can remember one particularly vivid illustration from my Evangelical youth, when I was asked to imagine myself on my wedding day, in a pristine white dress—and then asked to picture a bright red handprint anywhere that a man has touched me. This image of a bloodied bride, of flesh corrupted by flesh, seared into my imagination a picture of the body, rather than the soul, as the source and site of sin.
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We pray “that [Christ] would be pleased so to exercise the kingdom of his power in all the world, as may best conduce to these ends.” Notice the ecclesial logic. The “these ends” have to do with the proclamation of the gospel, the saving of the lost, and the edification of the saints. In other words, Christ rules over all things for the good of the church. The kingdom of power is subservient in purpose to the kingdom of grace (giving way to the kingdom of glory), not the other way around.

In the last several years, we have seen a resurgence of interest among Christians in political theology. On the whole, I believe this has been a good thing intellectually. I’m less certain this has been a good thing ecclesiastically. 
We need smart, well-read Christians talking about natural law, the magisterial Reformers, Enlightenment philosophy, and American history. We need experts weighing in on the differences between classic liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, progressivism, and post-liberalism. Having done my doctoral work on John Witherspoon, I am personally very interested in reading about Locke and the Founders, in analyzing the Declaration and the Constitution, and in examining what political principles we can glean from the Bible and from the wisdom of the church through the ages. More Christians reading deeply and thinking carefully about political theology is a welcome development.
Okay, you’re wondering, so where’s the “but”?
The “but” is about political theology that supplants the centrality of the church. This can happen by deliberate conviction (the political theology calls for it), but it can also happen by the sheer weight of interest in politics. The issue isn’t merely idolatry (“You are too concerned about politics!”). The bigger issue is when Christians—and pastors worst of all—make the church intellectually, affectionally, and teleologically subservient to the world of politics and nation-states, instead of the other way around.
A Little Help from the Larger Catechism
Let me get at this concern in a roundabout way by highlighting a great section from the Westminster Larger Catechism. Question 191 asks, “What do we pray for in the second petition [of the Lord’s Prayer]?” Here’s the answer:
In the second petition, (which is, Thy Kingdom come,) acknowledging ourselves and all mankind to be by nature under the dominion of sin and Satan, we pray that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, the fullness of the Gentiles brought in; the church furnished with all gospel officers and ordinances, purged from corruption, countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrates; that the ordinances of Christ may be purely dispensed, and made effectual to the converting of those that are yet in their sins, and the confirming, comforting, and building up those that are already converted: that Christ would rule in our hearts here, and hasten the time of his second coming, and our reigning with him for ever: and that he would be pleased so to exercise the kingdom of his power in all the world, as may best conduce to these ends.
Notice three things about this answer.
First, the Catechism understands “Thy Kingdom come” to be about sin, salvation, and the church. The Westminster divines do not understand the petition to be about general human flourishing or about national renewal. The focus of the prayer is on the propagation of the gospel, the conversion of the lost, the health of the church, the destruction of the devil, and the renovation of our hearts. More on this ecclesial focus in a moment.
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