Think about this: How do you think about theology? How to you think about God day in and day out? How do you think about how your family culture is shaped by your faith? How does our Christian faith in the finished work of Christ factor into how we do our jobs? Raise our kids? See those outside the faith?
We in the West are so compartmentalized in our thinking that we tend to literally only set aside Sundays for the worship of God. We have our work-life, our family-life, and our church-life. This is saying essentially: This way of me operating and living and my morals or actions are this way during this time and they are different at other times. And even as we protest that we may think back to how, subtlety, our thinking and actions may be different depending on the situation we find ourselves in.
If we find that we are being "more spiritual" on Sunday mornings (because we can't forget about that great American idol, Sunday night football) and Wednesday evenings than when we are sitting down with our co-workers during our lunch breaks on Tuesday...that's a problem.
Why?
Because in 1 Corinthians 10:31 we see that we are to do everything for the glory of God.
Now in context, the verse is involved in the conversation Paul is having with the Corinthian believers about offending the conscience and Christian liberty. In the larger context of chapter 10 it is nestled at the end of the chapter in which idolatry and meat offered to idols (and therefore eating meat and offending the conscience of someone) and so part of the take away from chapter 10 is the need for believers to look out for the weaker brother and to help strengthen him/her in the faith by helping to bear their conscience. This is essentially Christian living, which, if you read the New Testament, is never done in isolation. We have freedom in conscience, but it is for the service of our fellow believer. We don't eat meat offered to idols because it may burn the conscience of a weaker brother, causing him or her to stumble into sin. We see in this chapter and specifically this verse, that we are to live this way for God's glory. When we start to live this way, with God's glory as the reasoning for doing x, y, and z, we begin to lose the separate compartments that we have built into our lives. Everything we do begins to lose it's own inherent in your face urgency and fades into a daily day long pattern of seeking to bring glory to our Savior and King as we seek to strengthen our fellow believers.
Now how in the world are we supposed to do that? I mean, we have so much fighting against us don't we? The busyness and urgency with which we find our days seems to almost beg that it is impossible to break the cycle of compartmentalization and to see everything as something that can be holy is just hard to do. But there is freedom in fighting through that fight. There is freedom in finding out that doing the laundry in a way that is to bring glory to God (simply seeking to do it well to serve your family and therefore serve God) begins to make the chore itself seem less like a chore over time.
But now hold on, this can still be refined a wee bit more can't it? I mean, doing things for the glory of God? That could be a Jewish phrase, or even a Muslim command, so how does doing things for God's glory look explicitly Christian? Ah, that's a good question, don't you think? What makes our actions "Christian"? Have you ever thought about that? When we reflect on the questions that I posited at the beginning of this post, one thing keeps coming to mind: the finished work of Christ on the cross on our behalf.
Obviously, Christ is what makes us Christian and not Jewish or Muslim. Christ is what makes us believers in the true God and not the false god Allah or the misunderstood (and false) view of God that the Jews have. But it is not simply Christ that we find ourselves anchoring to, but it is the totality of who He is and what He has done. We rest not in the simple person of Jesus of Nazareth the carpenter, but Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who took on the flesh of man, lived the life of perfect obedience to God's Law and because of His Innocence and Perfection, took the place of sinful men on the cross so that through His death, and His glorious resurrection, we may get back everything that was lost in Adam. We rest on this work, on this Person. This means that when we are doing things for the glory of God we are not doing anything to satisfy anyone or anything and attempt to bring about our own salvation or justification, heck, even our own sanctification. We do things for the glory of God and subsequently the love of our neighbor because we have been saved and justified through the work of faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross. We aren't trying to earn anything (heaven forbid!) but everything we do, when done for the glory of God is us rejoicing in His mercy and goodness and trying to show that same to our neighbors.
So how do you think about theology? How do you make your life revolve around Christ and His cross? I don't think it will necessarily look the same for everyone, and that's ok. But we need to prayerfully seek God's glory and set time aside to seek His face and to try to pray through orienting our lives around Him. We need to take the time to fight the fight of de-compartmentalization of our lives and seek to see everything as a means to glorify our God and King through resting in who we are inside of Christ. This means that the best way to be a Christian architect is not to only design beautiful churches, but to do the job in an exemplary way that shows that you take pride in your gifts and talents that God gave you and that you use them to help others and love them in the same way that God loves you.This is being Salt and Light. This is being a Christian. We also need to remember that we if we are Christian architects that we are Christians first that happen to have a job as an architect. The best way for you to be a Christian mother or father or ad executive or whatever it is, is by doing everything out of a love for God and neighbor (whoever that may be) and seeking to bring honor and glory to the God that redeemed us and to seek to do so as consistently as possible throughout our whole lives. We need to seek to love and to show God's love to everyone we meet, to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to seek to lift up and strengthen the family of God that we meet day in and day out through love.
All for the glory of God.
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