End of compartmentalizing

I know you didn’t ask, but I want to answer you anyway. I go to church principally to be challenged in my spiritual walk and my understanding of spiritual things. That pretty much happens every time I go. When you learn to tune your soul’s ear you will discover a lot of challenges even when others wonder what is going on.

That prelude to introduce something I learned this morning. As Ecclesiastics 1:9 says in part … there is no new thing under the sun. What I got isn’t really new. But like many of the vehicles I have owned, new to me, in a new way.

There are in Christendom many phrases that sound good, or illustrate points, or get lodged in our brains as catch phrases, but aren’t in closer examination, good theology.

I refer to my pastor a lot in this blog, I realize, but most of what I hear spoken comes from him. So without meaning any disrespect I’ll refer to him simply as Kerry here in this blog only.

This morning Kerry jump started my thinking. And while being jump started in your thinking in the midst of a message is often counter productive because the brain goes off on its own journey while the speaker continues on theirs. So when it happens to me I try my hardest to not lose my new avenue of thought but also stay engaged in the message. At my age, difficult.

In an age when we live lives that are very compartmentalized, we need to re-examine whether we try to put salvation in compartments.

Kerry made a statement something to the effect that Christ shouldn’t be the center of our lives. Now before you jump headlong off the parapet yelling treason and landing in the moat of murky waters and among, as Dennis so eloquently put it in The Search for the Holy Grail, “strange women lying on their backs in ponds handing out swords ...” think this through with me.

If something is at the center of a body, then by definition it is surrounded by that body. Therefore if we would examine that something, that core, we would necessarily have to go through the insulating and filtering layers of the body.

With me so far?

If I wanted to see a trophy kept in an inner room you have in your house, I must first weave my way through the roads and byways to your neighborhood, through your property, into your house, into where this room is positioned within your house. It is there, after getting through the insular layers that I would gaze upon this trophy.

Whatever paths and obstacles I encountered is likely to influence what I think about your trophy. If it was a difficult and arduous journey, I may be less inclined to believe your trophy was worth the trip.

Therefore, I believe that Christ being in the center of our lives is a fine statement but a little misleading. I believe many people try to live with Christ as their central focus, but never quite get rid of themselves that surround this Christ. I know it is true in my life. I try to have Christ in my center, and all the while I’m nowhere near where He wants me to be in a spiritual geographic sense.

When we speak of God wanting all of us, that pretty much describes it. Forget this idea of God being central. I think God wants to be our all.

OK, now practically, how does that happen? I can not say I have achieved it, but here is what I think it means. When we ask God to take our lives we need to, at that point and as well as we know how, abandon, leave behind, our hopes and dreams and aspirations for our lives, and let God be our lives.

I know it is tough. We have to work to provide. We have to be fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and on and on. We live in a physical world that demands a lot. It can and will demand ALL of our time and ALL of our resources if we let it.

But…and here is the second thought from this morning, and it made me smile with excitement. Isn’t it amazing that God so arranged the solar system and the miniscule part that we know much about so that every day, for as long as we know about, a new dawn has come every day? In fact, a day's beginning is defined by the dawn. A reminder that from our entrance into the kingdom of God and taking on Christ, not at the center of our lives, but in place of our lives, we are constantly renewed with a new dawn.

I may chew on this a while.