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News | Nate Talks: Having it all
8 June 2009
By Nathan Morgan Locke, Christianity Explored's youth evangelist
On Monday evenings the boys come round to my flat for food and Bible study. We call it Manna House. We share many jokes. The same kind of jokes shared in boys’ Bible study groups around the country, hilarious in-jokes that bemuse the uninitiated. But allow me to initiate you into our favourite:
One boy who comes along is called Max.
One week we had some Pepsi Max to drink.
So someone said, “Would you like some Pepsi…Max?”
And how we laughed.
I’m sure that your friends provide a similar hotbed for comic genius, but it is not dangerously sharp witticisms to which I want to draw your attention. It is to the fact that in the early 90s someone at the Pepsi Cola company decided to name their new drink Pepsi Max (aka diet Pepsi).
It’s because the word “Max” (apparently short for maximum) is a really cool word, which young people like. This is because it has an x in it. And the letter x is cool, really cool. So cool that it sometimes replaces the letters c-k-s to make a word cooler (the letter x is also in the word ‘sex’ but don’t tell anyone I told you or I might not get to write any more “Nate Talks…”). The letter x is cool. But the definition of maximum is cooler because it means that something is full or complete or could not get any better. And stuff that could not get any better is definitely cool.
Living the life
I once saw a sign for a church youth group that said it was looking at the second part of John 10: 10 (a homonumeral, you may notice!) and the verse had been written,
“I have come that you may have life and have it to the max.”
The idea was that by going along to the youth group you would discover life that could not get any better. I didn’t go in, I was doing something else that night. Something else I can’t remember now - presumably I was out living my life to the max. But one of the major problems that we face as Christians is that we are not, in fact, living life to the max. If anything, we are living numb, compromised, guilt-ridden lives.
Our young people are no different.
Part of the problem comes from a misunderstanding of what Jesus’ means in the second half of John 10:10. We often think we can have it all; that Jesus has come to give us everything we ever wanted; that being a Christian means enjoying everything all the time; that actually our lives as twenty-first century Westerners are nearly there and that Jesus has just come to top things up, to the max. But this isn’t true.
Week 7 of the CY course looks at Jesus’ conversation with his disciples around Caesarea Philippi from Mark 8, in which he says this:
“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”
Yes, Jesus promises life to the max but we can never access that life unless we lose the one we already have.
If we don’t lose the life we have through denial of self and cross carrying (following the example of Jesus) then we lose out completely; we’ll never enjoy the pleasures of the flesh like the rest of the world because we’re filled with guilt and we cannot enjoy the "life to the max" that Jesus promises because we refuse to let go of our sin.
I’d better tell Max.
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