Paul says that Christ is before all things and that in Him all things hold together, yet it is difficult to believe that God could be a part of something as ordinary as cleaning toilets, as tedious as reading yet one more rendition of Goodnight, Moon.
Yet if we are to abide in Christ, as I wrote about last week, these are exactly the kinds of activities in which we are to look for Him. If God is present in the singing of a hymn, He is also present in the folding of a spouse’s shirt.
A.W. Tozer, in The Pursuit of God, directs our eyes to Jesus, pointing out that if Christ’s claim to only do the things that please the Father is true, then this would also include such prosaic activities as eating, sleeping, and being with friends.
Tozer writes that Paul anticipated an objection to his command to “do all to the glory of God”. The objection is that there are sacred and secular separations in our lives, and Paul fully negated that objection by specifically including eating and drinking in his command. Every act of our lives should be done to God’s glory.
Turn the whole life into a sacrament.
It is a beautiful idea and one that fits perfectly with Scripture. God clearly cares about the menial details of our lives.
If any doubts this, he only must read the book of Leviticus.
In Leviticus, God gives minute instructions to the Israelites concerning how to go about daily life, from how to care for articles of clothing to how to work in a vineyard. He tells them how to clean cooking pots that have come into contact with an insect and what to do when their tent gets moldy. He tells those who work the land not to harvest the fields too thoroughly but to leave a little for the poor.
It turns out that He does indeed care about every moment; He cares about even our everyday routine. He cares so much about us that He wants to be present to us in everything we do.
There is, it turns out, no separation between sacred and secular. All is made sacred and all is in Christ.
So how do we become awake to His presence in our daily lives? How do we learn to abide in Jesus so that there is no place of our lives in which He does not dwell, no place in which we walk without dwelling in Him?
After all, as Evelyn Underhill says, “The spiritual life is simply the life in which all we do comes from the centre, where we are anchored in God.” How do we live anchored to God?
Largely, though not entirely, through the Spiritual Disciplines.
As we practice the Holy Habits, we learn to become aware of God’s presence in every area of our lives. We wake up to God’s presence and His purposes in our lives and our world. Rather than going through our days mindful only of the world we can see, as we weave in the Holy Habits we become more fully conscious of how completely intertwined are the physical and spiritual worlds.
A.W. Tozer speaks of this intertwining in The Pursuit of God. He says that the spiritual world is real in the same sense that the visible world is real.
Tozer tells us that the Kingdom of God is not some distant future promise, but a present reality, a parallel to the seen world. The Spiritual Disciplines help the eyes of our soul to see this kingdom everywhere we turn.
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The Word is and the Word reveals what is.
God breathed the Word and life blazed out.
Life exploded into being and revealed God to man.
The life of the heavens and the life of the earth revealed.
They revealed His invisible qualities to all who cared to look.
It is the nature of words and the Word to reveal.
God sent the Word and new life blazed out.
Jesus was the Word and He spoke the words that revealed God to man.
The Word revealed the heart of God far more than life ever could.
As the people received the Word, new life exploded into being.
They were formed by the Word.
The Word formed the people into new life, a new creation.
This new creation then spoke the same Word and new life again blazed out.
As we receive the Word, we are formed by the Word.
We, too, become new life. We, too, then speak the same Word.
The revelation of the heart of God continues through the generations.
The Word reveals what is.