DAILY BYTE
So there I was, quite a few years ago now, virtually a brand-new minister, standing at the door of a church and shaking hands after the service. While I was shaking hands, someone said something to me that just stopped me cold. He said: ‘Thanks for the worship service, I really enjoyed it. It’s just such a pity that we have to go back into the real world now.’
Now, there are certain moments in every minister’s life when you want to take a congregation member by the shoulders and shake them until their teeth rattle! I wanted to shake this man and say:
‘But the whole point of faith and worship and everything else we do in church is that it does prepare us for life ‘out there’ and that it does get lived out in the real world! Faith is meaningless unless it dramatically impacts your real world!’
For you see, God IS the world, and God IS all life. There is nothing more relentlessly ‘real world’ than God and his interaction with us. God is a dust-and-dirt God, a born-in-a-stable God, a wrapped-in-frail-flesh God, a weeping-outside-his-friend’s-tomb God.
There is NOTHING more REAL than God!
God has never promised us pie-in-the-sky, maybe the church does sometimes, but Jesus used to say things that people found so tough, so relentlessly real, that they would just walk away from him.
Jesus never promised that faith would be this magic protective bubble around us that life’s difficulties would just bounce off. Jesus never promised that faith in him would necessarily make life easier, but that it might even make life harder in some ways. For example, Jesus warned it might bring us persecution.
Faith is not just for Sunday services, it’s not just for good and happy moments, but faith is meant for those Monday mornings when life goes pear-shaped, and for days when we are swamped by forces beyond our control.
If we never bring our faith into that realm, the realm this gentleman at the church door understood as ‘the real world,’ then quite frankly, our faith won’t last too long and won’t amount to much at all.
So the question I would like you to wrestle at the beginning of this week’s devotions is how ‘real world’ is your faith? How much of an impact on your Monday mornings does your faith make?
PRAY AS YOU GO
Holy God, help us to never separate, even for a moment, our faith dimension from the rest of our worlds. Help us to see that everything is spiritual, and that unless our faith impacts every area of our lives then we are missing the point in a big way. Amen.
FOCUS READING
Ephesians 1: 18-20 (NIV)
I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,
