God Is Interested in Your Work by Rick Warren
"It's in Christ that we find out who we are and what we are living
for. Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, He had
His eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living, part of the
overall purpose He is working out in everything and everyone"
(Ephesians 1:11-12 MSG).Many Christians don't make the connection between Sunday and Monday.
They compartmentalize their life. They think, "Well, I've got a
spiritual life and I've got a secular life. My spiritual life is when I
read the Bible, when I pray, when I go to church, when I do good things
for others. That's my spiritual life." And that's over in one
compartment.So then, they think, over in another compartment: "This is my secular
life. That's my work, my job, my career, my business decisions, my
finances, my pension plan; all these things are my secular life."God says, "No, that's wrong. All of life is spiritual." The word
secular isn't in the Bible. It all matters to God; everything in your
life is important to God. God is as interested in your work as He is in
your prayers. In fact, I would suggest that He might be more interested
in your job because you spend more time working than you do praying.The fact is, your relationship to Christ is like marriage. Marriage is
a full-time relationship, and so is your relationship with Christ. What
do you think would happen if I came up to my wife and said, "Honey, I'm
going to act married only when I'm at home"?The fact is, all of life is important to God, and you can't separate
your Christianity from your work, just as you can't separate your
Christianity from your life.
I read the devotional above last week, and it's rattled in my brain for the rest of the week. Warren talks about how we can't separate our Christianity from our work and lives, and even uses marriage as an example. But this got me thinking…how do we live our Christian lives in a spiritually unequal marriage? Do we compartmentalize it, as Warren talks about, living it only on Sundays in order to avoid conflict? Do we live our faith in the shadows out of necessity (and some of us do…)? Or have we taken this route, because, well, it's easier?
These are the questions going through my mind right now. Come back Tuesday for more about living our faith out loud when we feel like we have to be quiet. I hope you'll explore this topic with me in the weeks ahead.
Praying and believing,
Dineen
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