Think different

In 1996 Steve Jobs made his infamous return to the helm of Apple. He did so with many industry and media experts predicting the imminent demise of the computer company.

The next year Apple launched an advertising campaign based on two words: Think different. It was a stunning success. It not only won many advertising awards, but it was a turning point in Apple’s business fortunes.¹

The campaign revolved around a poem of sorts—an ode to misfits, rebels, troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes, “the crazy ones”. The ones who see things differently.” It ended with this line: "Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do".

Ad posters showed black and white photos of famous people who Apple thought embodied this spirit of thinking differently: Mahatma Gandhi, Jim Henson, Albert Einstein, Amelia Earhart, and others.

I can only presume Apple’s marketing executives didn’t put the Apostle Paul on one of their posters because there was no easily obtainable photo to use. If anybody was regarded as a little bit crazy in his time, a bit of a round peg in a square hole but who ultimately changed the world, it was Paul (Acts 26:24-25; 2 Cor 5:13).

Of course, Paul wouldn’t have made so bold a claim. He knew it wasn’t him changing the world; as far as he was concerned, if the world was being changed, it was God who was doing the changing (2 Cor 4:7).

But he certainly was conscious of thinking different. For example, he was now regarding people in a very different way, now expecting a profound change to take place in a disciple of Jesus because such a person is a “new creation” (2 Cor 5:16-17). 

The truth that generated this profound rethink was this one: “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Cor 5:14-15).

This is such a revolutionizing truth that those who ‘get it’ will become the misfits—the crazy people who don’t fit into the world’s way of thinking—and thus those used by God to change the world.

Paul is highlighting in these two verses the truth that life has ended for those in Christ. When Jesus died, we died. When Jesus rose, we rose. As a result, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).

This is why there can be no agenda for my life, because my life came to an end when I became a Christian. It is now Jesus’ life in me that I live. It is his agenda I seek (in all my weakness, of course).

That’s the revolutionary key to being a disciple according to Paul: realizing that if there’s going to be any agenda that shapes my choices and decisions, it needs to be Jesus’ agenda for his ongoing life in me.

This is also the key to becoming a disciple-making disciple—those who, by God’s grace, change the world as they take on God’s agenda. The “crazy ones”, who are controlled by the love of Christ (2 Cor 5:14).

Here’s an interesting example of a church that is working on this mindshift:

Footnotes

1. There is a fascinating insider account of how the campaign was conceived and pitched to Jobs: ‘The real story behind Apple’s Think Different campaign’.↩