The chasm between profession and practice in our lives as believers and followers of Jesus is sometimes huge. Disastrously, the empty space is growing as churches and Christians alike fail to see the connection between faith in Jesus and life in the world. This happens when we see our faith as being merely another category of life rather than life itself. Or when we understand Jesus as being relevant to Bible study, church, and prayer but not to mathematics, sports, what we wear (or don’t wear), how we eat, making a buck, what we view on the internet, retirement, politics, and even Craig’s List. It is as though we cannot see how our faith in Christ connects to the totality of our lives. We, like young children told to connect the dots so as to find the picture in a coloring book, struggle because we are so intently focused on the individual dots—we can’t see how they connect and obviously miss the big picture. And because we can't see the big picture of how our faith in Christ is to relate to all of life we are not able to live in the world as functional believers. In other words, when it comes to being salt and light in the world we are often dysfunctional.
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 living life apart from Christ is unwise, ignorant, incomplete, disjointed, full of gaps, and really an inferior way to live. Furthermore, if, as the Bible makes the point, that "in God we live and move and exist" (Acts 17:28) then to try to live our lives or even a part of our lives apart from God can only result in frustration, anger, depression, and eventually spiritual disaster. It is even 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 our Christianity to every area of our lives 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 homework to the family meal, will result in a spiritually dysfunctional family which produces spiritually dysfunctional children who become adults who, while perhaps claiming the title Christian, see none or very little relevance between it and the lives they are living and desire to live.
Until we as Bible-believing Christians start becoming more Bible-applying Christians who see the relevance of our faith to and in every area of life and thus, cease compartmentalizing our 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!
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