I visited two churches last Sunday. The first church was a
non-denominational Christian church that I have liked and have visited
four times. It feels like more, since I sometimes listened to the
church’s sermons during the week! The second church was a small Baptist
church. We sang old hymns, and that felt nostalgic. I also noticed
that on one wall there were prayer requests, and on the opposite wall
there were pieces of paper about answered prayer. I thought that was
cool!
If there was a common theme in the two services, it was about making
Christ the center of one’s life. At the non-denominational church, the
pastor’s daughter was preaching. (And, by the way, it does impress me
that two of the pastor’s children are serving God as pastors of this
church.) She was going through the Book of Ezra. She was talking about
how the Jews returning from exile wanted to create a community that
worshiped God, and they were disciplined and fully committed to that
vision. This church does have its share of prosperity Gospel rhetoric,
but the speaker was saying that life is not about making money and
having a good job and living in a nice house. It is about worshiping
the God who made us. She told us about a book that she was reading, in
which the author lamented that so few people are willing to commit to a
cause larger than themselves. She said that Christians have as part of
their DNA (figuratively speaking) a desire to be part of something
larger, of bringing others to the worship of God.
She also said that many Christians like to box up their Christianity
and treat it as something that they do on Sunday mornings, when it is
supposed to permeate their entire lives. That reminded me of a sermon
that her dad preached, which I heard earlier that week. He had an
interesting interpretation of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
in Genesis 2-3, and why God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from it. He
said that eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil put
Adam and Eve in the position of deciding for themselves when they wanted
God to be a part of their lives, and when they did not. And that
reminds me, somewhat but not totally, of what Abraham Kuyper said about
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in his book Common Grace: that it had to do with Adam and Eve deciding for themselves what was good and evil, rather than accepting God’s standard.
The pastor at the Baptist church was preaching about Matthew 6:19-21, which states (in the KJV):
“Lay
not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for
yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth
corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where
your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
The pastor was saying that we should place our current desires and
the things that we treasure within the context of eternity. We should
value eternal things, because eternity lasts forever. He painted a
pretty compelling picture of how short this life is.
Ordinarily, I get defensive when I hear sermons about being 100 per
cent committed to God. I doubt that is even possible: after all, we
cannot spend all of our time in prayer, or in church, or reading the
Bible. Many of us have to work! And is it wrong to have time that is
non-religious? Do we have to be thinking about religion all of the
time?
These sermons did not put me on the defensive, though. It’s all
right to have a job and hobbies. But I believe that people should also
devote time to the spiritual. And, yes, I would also say that all that a
person does should proceed, in some sense, from a person’s spiritual
life. A Christian employee should be a hard worker. When a Christian
watches a TV program, she does so from a Christian worldview, one that
is in reference to God. When a Christian plays, at some point he should
give thanks to God for giving him the ability and opportunity for
recreation. A Christian should continually place life in a larger
context, and God should be an integral part of his or her everyday life.
The part about being committed to a larger cause, which was in the
first service, certainly stood out to me. There was a time when I was a
committed evangelical, rooting for people to come to Christ. Nowadays,
I am not so much. I wonder if I truly am rooting for a larger cause,
at this stage of my life. Part of me fears people converting to
conservative Christianity: will they become right-wing zealots who think
it’s their way or the highway? I don’t particularly want to wrestle
with that struggle right now, so I will stop here!