So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. (The Message)
At the Springs, we like to frame the life of a Christ-follower in terms like holistic, complete, investment, all-in, 24/7. We speak about the dangers of "compartmentalizing" your faith. In case some of you have ever asked, here is where that comes from. It actually comes from everywhere in the bible, but here is a passage where it is even more clearly defined than some.
You see, for some people, their faith is something that they have confined to a church service they attend once a week, or maybe even once a month. That is the place where they "go to worship." They rely on that one hour or so per week to "get them through" the rest of the week until they can do it all again. In many ways it's like a sort of vending machine. I'll put my dollar in on Sunday and hope God blesses me during the rest of the week. During the week, though, they aren't putting in daily investments to keep the relationship strong. Can you imagine making this sort of deal with your spouse?Paul insists that following Jesus is about releasing your whole life - your everyday, ordinary life - to Jesus in all that you do. To drive home his point he mentions sleeping, eating, going to work and walking around. To show this is not something new, look back at Deteronomy 6:4-9 to see what instructions God gave the Israelites. As followers of Jesus, we are expected to follow with all of our lives - our sleeping, eating, going to work and walking around. As parents who follow Jesus, we are to teach our kids the ways of Christ in all of their lives - when they wake up, go to bed, sitting at home or driving around town.
Where in the world did we pick up the idea that we could relegate our faith to one day a week and not have it affect our daily rituals? I think this may be one of the most damaging deceptions that we have bought into because it robs us of the more and better life that Jesus promised in John 10, and keeps us blind to the things of God during 99% of our week.
How does God impact your everyday life? How have you made the move from compartmentalizing your faith to holistically experiencing your faith on a daily basis? Is this even realistic to expect as much in today's world?
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