THE GREAT DIVIDE

There is a huge chasm existing in the lives and families of many today who claim the title Christian, those being, people who believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and are trusting in Him and His work on the cross to save them from their sins.  This canyon is found between their profession and their practice.  It is flanked by what the Bible teaches and understandingly applying what the Bible teaches to every area of their lives and families in every arena they venture into which obviously will include work, education, recreation, consumption (as in eating, drinking, buying, the using of resources), apparel or decoration, if you will, and of course church life.

 

For many in the church today their understanding of how their faith in Christ is to relate to each and every area of their lives is terribly deficient and in many cases non-existent.  They see their faith as being merely another category of life rather than life itself.  They see Jesus as being relevant to Bible study, behavior, and prayer but not to mathematics, sports, what they wear (or don’t wear), how they eat, making a buck, retirement, and Craig’s List.  It is as though they cannot see how their faith in Christ connects to the totality of their lives.  They, like small immature children told to connect the dots so as to find the picture in a coloring book, struggle because they are so intently focused on the individual dots—they can’t see how they connect and obviously miss the big picture.

The fact is, our faith in Christ affects every one of the dots in our lives so as to not only connect them to each other but to connect them to Christ so as to create the Big Picture also known as a Biblical world view or philosophy of life that is indeed Christian or Christ-centered and therefore spiritually functional.  The apostle Paul makes it very clear that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ (Colossians 2:3).  This essentially means that any kind of learning process, regardless of where that education is supposedly taking place, apart from Christ is at best incomplete, disjointed, full of gaps, inferior and at worst—demonic.  It is demonic in the sense that Satan’s intent from Genesis 3 has always been to separate man from the relevance of God to his life so as to distort and eventually destroy the Big Picture of Life.

 

This means that living a life apart from seeing and applying the relevance of your Christianity to every area of your life will result in an inferior and spiritually dysfunctional life.  Family life lived and practiced apart from seeing the relevance of Christ to every aspect of family life all the way from the T.V. to soccer practice to what the purpose of the family meal is all about to living separate lives within the same household will all result in a spiritually dysfunctional family which produces spiritually dysfunctional children who become adults who, while perhaps claiming the title Christian, see no or very little relevance between it and the lives they are living and desire to live.

Until Bible-believing Christians start becoming Bible-applying Christians who see the relevance of their faith to and in every area of life and thus, cease compartmentalizing their lives between the secular and the spiritual any positive and spiritually constructive Christian relevance we might have in this world and in our own families is fairly trivial.  We must do away with the “Great Divide” between what we know and how we live, between the church and ball field, between manna and math, and between making a living and making a life.  We must sack this unbiblical thinking that sees faith in Christ as just another aspect of life when it is clear from Scripture that Christ is our life—which is all-inclusive of every fragment of our lives (Colossians 3:4; Galatians 2:20). 

Until our faith in Christ oozes through and out of the church into where we live out the vast majority of every hour of every day, the Christian and the Church alike have no essential beneficial bearing or positive influence for Christ anywhere.  Faith without works is indeed dead because an unapplied faith in any area of the believer’s life is a dead faith in that arena of life.  And the influence of a dead faith is much the same as a dead body left to decay—it stinks!