you're not the hero of this story

I was thinking about the Apostles today, and how most of them suffered gruesome martyrdoms for the Gospel of Christ. It never used to seem odd to me, I suppose because I heard about them so often, that Jesus’ dearest friends gave their lives in brutal ways to further His message—but even just in the last two decades of my life I can see such a shift in the way Christian culture views Jesus and the Gospel that re-realizing what the Apostles sacrificed for Him almost stopped me in my tracks.

The centrality of Jesus Christ to the Christian faith is slipping—to the point that it even stunned me, a longtime Bible student, for a moment to run down the list of Apostles and how their lives ended. It’s just not in vogue to think of being a Christian as demanding something from us these days, let alone demanding everything.

Peter—crucified upside down.

Andrew—probably crucified.

James—executed by sword.

John—maybe the only one to die of old age, but Christ’s enemies still attempted to boil him to death in oil.

Thomas—stabbed to death with spears.

Paul—beheaded.

Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Jude, Simon the Zealot—almost certainly all martyred in some horrific way.

Christian culture today seems to ignore these endings, and why wouldn’t it? They don’t fit the new faith that is post-Christian Christianity. This “Christianity” is self-centric and puts us all into the hero’s role of the story. We’re all David fighting Goliath, or we’re Peter or Paul or even Jesus—until they meet their rather disappointing ends. Then we move swiftly into whatever heroic position pops up next.

But that’s not how any of the men and women who spread the Gospel saw themselves. They couldn’t make themselves the hero of the story and be successful in their mission. Every single one of them, even Jesus Christ Himself, looked to a far greater Hero and His far bigger story.

Peter was crucified upside down because he knew he was a supporting actor in an epic that points to Jesus. Paul was beheaded because he was just a messenger to the world that the true Savior had come. Jesus willingly sacrificed His life because He was a vessel for the Father’s purposes.

Now more than ever, when we are spending less time with the body of believers and taking in more and more of the world’s chatter, we must cling to the Truth. And the truth is we are not the main character of the narrative. Jesus isn’t a prop or a sidekick in our story while we pursue what matters to us. We are bondslaves to Him as He does the bidding of the Father—and if we’re not, we need to stop pretending to be on His side.

I come back to this passage from Joshua again and again:

Now it came about when Joshua was by Jericho, he raised his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing opposite him with his sword drawn in his hand, and Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us or for our enemies?” He said, “No; rather I have come now as captain of the army of the Lord.” And Joshua fell on his face to the ground, and bowed down, and said to him, “What has my lord to say to his servant?” And the captain of the Lord’s army said to Joshua, “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so.

Joshua 5:13-15

Joshua was by all accounts the hero of Israel as they conquered the Promised Land—and yet in fact he was only a servant of the Lord, called to humble himself before the real main character of the story.

God is God. He doesn’t have to pick sides. We do.