I’m continuing to study Revelation and just spent the last few months teaching the first half of the book to a small group of friends. As I continue to go deeper into the truths contained in this last book of the Bible, and those truths continue to seep into the cracks and crevices of my mind and heart, I am consistently faced with the contrast between how we portray the Christian life (at least in the context of evangelical America) and how John exhorts his own audience. How we portray the Christian life to others is important. And many times that is influenced by our own culture and what seems to be popular.

For the past several years people have been talking about dopamine and its relationship to the technology we use. Apparently the social media companies know all too well what will keep our attention and bring us back. They give us hit after hit of mindless entertainment, fear inducing conspiracy, or lust enticing images. The question I’m asking is this – do we present the Christian life in the same way? Or do we allow the ethos and exhortations of Scripture to direct us in how we pursue Christ?

According to one interpretation, which I am finding to be rather convincing, chapters 6-20 are depicting parallel and intensifying cycles of judgments that occur during what is called the ‘interadvent’ period. In other words, John is giving his audience and us multiple angles from which to see and understand what is going on from the time of Christ’s ascension until his Second Coming. If this interpretation is correct, then it makes perfect sense of John’s repeated mentions of and exhortations to patience and endurance. (You can read those in 1:9; 2:2; 2:19; 3:10; 13:10 and 14:12.)

If we’re being honest, endurance and patience are not appealing in a world that has us feeding off quick bursts of dopamine and promises of bigger, higher, more epic. Let’s tell it like it is, endurance and patience just aren’t sexy concepts. But they are patently biblical. Patience and endurance are two necessary components of a Christian life that is waiting and trusting in God’s sovereign purposes in a world filled with deception and chaos, threatening to undermine our faith and seducing us to believe its lies. Patience and endurance are needed to keep us on guard against the temptations of the world, the flesh and the devil. Quick hits of spiritual inspiration just don’t fuel us for the long haul.

I used to run ultramarathons. Maybe some day I’ll be able to get back to them. What I found so fascinating about them was all the spiritual parallels. You can run a 5K without much training and without any fuel. But as you increase the distance, 10K to half marathon, half marathon to marathon, and marathon to 50K and beyond, you need to train your body to get used to the constant pounding. You need to take care to fuel it consistently. You need to learn how your body and mind react to the low points and you need a strategy to deal with those. You also need some crazy friends to help you keep going when you feel like quitting. If the apostle John were familiar with ultramarathons, he may have used that analogy when exhorting his audience to endurance and patience.

How do you see the Christian life? What are your unspoken expectations about how its supposed to go? Don’t let the culture (and sometimes the messages of church culture) dictate those expectations. The Christian life is not supposed to be an unbroken string of mountain top experiences. We’re not always going to be ‘on fire’ for Jesus or live as radically as others exhort us to. I prefer John’s exhortation to endure with patience. I think that’s what Eugene Peterson had in mind when he called the life of faith a “long obedience in the same direction.”