What God has united, let no man…
It’s easy to separate life into categories…that which is spiritual and that which is not.
I doubt I have to take much time though to prove that it’s also completely unbiblical. Quoting one author, “The Biblical worldview is holistic in the sense that the physical world is never understood as being disconnected or separate from the spiritual world and the rule of the God who created it.” All life belongs to GOd.
I wonder, even though we know that, I just wonder if we took a step back and objectively tried to look at the way most of our churches function in practice whether we’d see that basically we as the church have bought into that dichotomy hook, line and sinker.
I know I to a certain extent did.
How could I as a pastor be really, really concerned about the grave lack of injustice in the world, about the fact that 1 in 6 people in Africa don’t have access to clean water, about poverty? I’m supposed to be concerned about the gospel.
That’s true. I am supposed to be vitally concerned with the gospel, and I would just say, that I am beginning to realize and understand more than ever that it’s actually because I’m concerned about the gospel that I need to be concerned about all that.
After all, there’s that little verse which says the two greatest commands are to love God and to love your neighbor. Plus there’s that whole thing Jesus says about the judgment day and the separation of the sheep and the goats.
To give you something to think about I’ll quote Bryant Myers once again in Walking with the Poor and if you want, tell me your reaction:
“Modernity’s separation of the physical and spiritual realms is part of the explanation for how we have come to understand Christian witness, and specifically evangelism, as being unrelated to community development. Loving God is spiritual work, and loving neighbors takes place in the material world. So evangelism (restoring people’s relationship with God) is spiritual work, while social action (restoring just economic, social, and political relationships) is not. In the final analysis this false dichotomy leads Christians to believe that God’s redemptive work takes place only on the spiritual realm, while the world is left, seemingly, to the devil.” (From his book on Transformational Development, Walking with the Poor)
