by Mark Greene
The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity
www.licc.org.uk
Does our daily work matter to God?
After all, work is not some peripheral issue, or some topic that has only popped onto our screens in the last five years. Work – paid and unpaid purposeful activity that contributes to the common good – is something that everyone does. Indeed, the vast majority of people spend a huge chunk of their lives engaged in work as employees. Furthermore, work is critical to the flourishing of every community and every nation. You would therefore expect us to be particularly alert to it when we read our Bibles. But overall the opposite is true.
That is the power of SSD. It blinds us to seeing what is plainly visible in the Bible.
The problem, however, is not only that SSD has blinded us to seeing work as biblically significant, it has blinded us to seeing all of everyday life as biblically significant.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It’s as a creator – a worker – that God is first introduced to us.
The failure, for example, to teach work well is part of a wider failure to offer a whole-life gospel to non-believers. No wonder so many people, especially in the West, fail to be truly gripped by the gospel. The gospel we’ve been presenting rarely includes any compelling vision for the transformation of ordinary daily life, wherever people spend time, whatever they do. And it ignores the means by which such transformation is possible.
This is particularly important for young people between 14 and 35. As research has shown, they are yearning for an authentic, whole-life vision for their lives. They don’t want to be one person on Monday and another on Sunday. They don’t just want a job. They want purposeful work that makes a positive difference to people’s lives and the planet we inhabit. They don’t just want to live for the weekend. They want to live for today. And make something beautiful of it.
The great writer and thinker Dorothy L. Sayers put it this way, back in 1942:
How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life?
They want their whole lives to count.
And in Christ, of course, they do.
The gospel is not just a dazzling invitation to forgiveness of sin and eternal life in the glorious presence of the triune God. It is a divine summons to join a movement to change the world in and through all they are in Christ and all they do in Christ, Monday to Sunday, in the places the Lord already has them. SSD has, however, left us with a shrunken vision and that is reflected in how we do church together.
A few years ago I was asked by Graham Kendrick, the great Christian singer-songwriter and worship leader, to analyse the themes and theology of contemporary hymns and songs, with particular reference to whole-life discipleship. His concern was this: ‘Are we perpetuating an abstract spirituality?’ Broadly speaking, the answer to his question was, ‘Yes’. You certainly won’t find many songs that express the kind of gritty engagement with daily life that you find in David’s psalms, with his frequent references to his work and the tools of his trade, and his constant alertness to God’s involvement and intervention in his daily life as shepherd, soldier, husband, adulterer, fugitive, father, general, king…
Similarly, SSD affects our prayer life, individual and corporate. How rare it is for congregational prayer to include issues facing people in their Monday to Saturday contexts beyond the domestic. (Or their Sunday contexts, if that’s a working day.) And while a home group may well pray by name for the church’s overseas missionaries, it might never even know the names of the boss or colleague or grandchild of anyone in the group, never mind pray for them.
The sacred-secular divide limits our sense of where God might work, and how he might work. Yes, God may heal someone physically in a sanctuary or a home group, but does it occur to us that he might heal on the factory floor or in the offices of an advertising agency? Well, he certainly healed my former boss’s PA in my Madison Avenue office. Furthermore, the idea that Jesus might actually be discipling us in our primary arena of occupation rarely hits our radar. But where are the challenges to Christlike character more acute – in a factory or a home Bible study? In which context is it more difficult to display the fruit of the Spirit or think in ways that do not conform to the surrounding culture?
In your daily life, ask yourself questions like:
How have I seen God’s hand at work here?
What is God teaching me?
What do I sense he might be doing here?
How does my faith change how I view this place?
And let’s ask each other, ‘Where do you spend your time in the week?’ and then support each other for the contexts we find ourselves in. Right now, on the whole, we aren’t.
Indeed, you can see the impact of a focus on leisure-time in the way that SSD affects the practice of our devotional life. Think, for a moment, about how much devotional material revolves around taking time away from the frontline of family, work, and school – quiet times, fasting, silence, retreats. All these are healthy spiritual disciplines of separation. But there’s been much less emphasis on material that helps us connect to God, hear his voice, and practise his presence in the midst of life, out on the frontline: the spiritual disciplines of engagement. Prayer is 5G – anywhere, anytime.
The impact of SSD goes deeper still.
It affects our understanding of our very humanity.
SSD makes people believe that art, music, and the multifarious ways in which human beings express their God-given human creativity have no place in the kingdom of God – unless they have overtly Christian themes.
Similarly, SSD leads to a negative view of the body, and of physical pleasures. By contrast, the Bible affirms the material world as created by God, reminds us that Jesus had a body and does still, promises that eternal life includes a new resurrection body and involves a new earth, as well as new heavens. The Bible also celebrates the emotional and psychological pleasures of good wine, bread, and oil, not just their physiological benefits. Wine is given to ‘gladden the heart’, Psalm 104 tells us, not just to reduce the likelihood of a heart attack. And it is surely not merely for symbolic reasons that Jesus’ first sign in John’s Gospel was to provide a great deal of rather excellent wine to keep a wedding party humming.
SSD, however, ignores the way the Bible affirms enjoyment of the beauty of God’s creation and of people’s creativity and prowess. They’re refreshing, restorative, providential gifts from our heavenly Father. So we’re free to relish the rich, relaxed ‘chook-chook-chook’ of a blackbird, the breathtaking originality of Hendrix’s guitar solo in All Along the Watchtower, a really good joke, or the velvety smooth sweetness of a Lindor chocolate.
In our Creator’s good world, none of this is a waste of time.
Indeed, holiness, as the book of Leviticus makes abundantly clear, is far from being some ethereal, otherworldly spirituality. Holiness manifests itself in how we live out our lives in the physical world. It’s about disease control (Leviticus 12–16); godly relationships (Leviticus 18); honest scales and weights (Leviticus 19:36); telling the truth, avoiding slander (Leviticus 19:11, 16); ensuring the poor have food (Leviticus 19:9) – doing all to the glory of God.
This is not about giving God’s people some teaching on a few key topics, but about giving God’s people new eyes to see the scope of their calling as followers of Jesus.
Living in the grip of the great divide is like squinting at a
grand view through a millimetre crack.
What you can see looks great.
But imagine what it feels like when the door is flung open.
Oh, the joy when you realise God cares
about every bit of your life.
He is with you, in every moment, in every task,
in every encounter.
Life pulses with new possibilities.
To Be Continued …
From: The Great Divide
By Mark Greene
https://licc.org.uk/resources/the-great-divide/
The London Institute for Contemporary Christianity
www.licc.org.uk