Wednesday: Putting God into the Total Life
WEEK 12
WEDNESDAY
PUTTING GOD INTO THE TOTAL LIFE
Acts 6:8-10
We are considering the division the apostles made between the spiritual and the material by separating themselves for prayer and the ministry of the word and turning over to the seven the administration of food. By doing so they turned life into two compartments—the sacred and the secular. That division is not found in the Gospels or in the Acts up to this point. It was foreign to the Christian faith. Jesus taught, healed, and fed people, all as a part of the coming of the kingdom of God. Life was a unified whole.
But the apostles here separated what God had joined. They became more “spiritual” than their own Master, who fed people as a manifestation of the love of God and the fulfillment of human need. In separating the two, the apostles impoverished both. The spiritual was supposed to be on a higher plane but lifted out of material relations. It did not take shoes and walk; it took words and talked. It made for unreality. And it impoverished the secular; it was supposed to be on a lower plan, to be carried out by people with a lower calling, in a lower spirit and motive.
That division between the sacred and the secular has been the most disastrous move religion has ever taken. Its effects are more and more manifest every day in Christendom. It is news instead of the normal when a man puts God into his business. And it is news not normal if a minister works alongside the workers in a factory or on a project. And this division has made possible the Communists’ move to allow religion to function as inner mystical experience or as worship in collective experience while they control the other parts of life—the economic, social, and political. Religion is pushed into the innocuous. The apostles in this move laid the foundations of that. And this is at the basis of the frantic attempt to get God back into life—the total life.
We will not get God back into the total life until we abolish, and abolish completely, the distinction between the secular and the sacred. All legitimate life has to become sacred again, and all legitimate occupations a manifestation of the kingdom.
O Lord, we your foolish children err from your ways like lost sheep. Help us to listen to your voice and to take your ways, and then life will click into total meaning. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Everything that I touch today will be sacred, and I shall touch everything.