Common Transcendence

The 5:00am bible hour is a transcendent moment full of God’s presence. And an isolated hike through the mountain range spent in prayer makes us feel like Moses himself. Or perhaps we find our ecstasy in different but similar scripts. There’s nothing better than listening to a devotional sermon about the love of Christ that brings us to tears, right before being taken up into the clouds while singing “Just as I Am” with our hands held high.

We feel closer to God in those precious moments, and so we hold them to be sacred. Spirituality has been sainted by the church, imbued with holiness, and anointed with oil drippings straight from the beard of Aaron. We can’t wait for the moment when our big toe is last to touch the dust of the earth as we ascend our way up to heaven. And so, while still stuck on earth, we live for those heavenly encounters. The ordinary world of work, food, and family is deemed to be at best an opportunity to demonstrate our ethics and evangelism while we’re here in the slump, and at worst a distraction from the things God really cares about. There is no transcendence in the common. Or so we think.

Sure, God cares about our survival and our physical well-being. But not as much as He cares about our souls, right? If we want to get serious about our faith, we need to trade our material opportunities for spiritual ones. Sacrifices must be made. War-time lifestyles must be lived. Haven’t you read John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Life? The poem he quotes is all you need to know.

Only one life, ’twill soon be past,

Only what’s done for Christ will last.

C.T. Studd

If you must work a job, do it quick and then get to what really matters. Wartime means extravagance is wasteful. Good wine is expensive. Prime steaks are excessive. From dust we came and to dust we shall return. Our soul is what’s eternal. Work and food are a distraction. But, unfortunately so, it’s still necessary for this toil of a life under the sun. We need to feed our family somehow. We toil away, ever feeling guilty for not devoting our time to the mission-field. We wish we can spend our days doing Kingdom work. It would be sublime to figure out a way for others to fund our life in Kenya, so that we can really focus on God’s kingdom. Work is necessary, but maybe somebody else can do it on our behalf so that we can serve the Lord.

The few moments of Bible devotions and time in solitude that our guilt-ridden souls do get, bring us to passages like 1-Corinthians 10:31. In it the good Apostle, that truly committed and sacrificial church planter, tells us to do all to the glory of God, including eating and drinking. This doesn’t sit quite well with us. But we believe the Bible, so, we must attempt to instill some spiritual telos into our physical meanderings. Eating and working are not holy acts in and of themselves, but maybe we can sanctify them by connecting them to a spiritual end.

Perhaps we can have streams flowing out of Eden into our physical lives, to bring eternal purpose to our ordinary. Maybe we can eat with unbelievers and have opportunities for evangelism. The food itself doesn’t matter, of course, but it can provide opportunities for Kingdom work. Or, we can demonstrate our ethics and morality on the job by being honest in our dealings and sharing the good news of Jesus while there. Work could be our mission field. We can shine our light at work, so that our co-workers can see our good works. Oh man, this could be paradigm-shifting stuff. We should do a conference about this.

The work that we do – the products we make, the service we provide, and the profit we make – is a means to an end. Like a lion hunting his prey, our work simply gives us an opportunity to get close to pagans, so we can then snatch them into the Kingdom. Whether we balance the books, or install siding, or run a CNC machine, it doesn’t really matter. Ethics and evangelism is what justifies our time here on earth. As long as we connect our physical life to a spiritual end, we will hear the Lord say, “Well done.” In this way, our lives have purpose. Otherwise, it will be wasted. Don’t waste your life!

If my above attempt at extended sarcasm has not been coming through as successfully as I’d like it to have been, I will clarify my position on the matter now. Differentiating between the physical and the spiritual world, in a way that defines the material either as morally burdensome or morally neutral is a mistake rooted in one big deceptive lie – that Christ doesn’t care about material reality. We believe a lie when we think that Jesus doesn’t care about the way we frame a house, or make a sale, or create a spreadsheet. It’s a lie to say that He doesn’t care about what our food tastes like or what our paintings look like.

Moral neutrality in the physical realm is a lie that blows it’s attack straight at the center of the Gospel. When we snap a line down the middle of our lives and divide our existence into “Sacred” and “Secular,” we are not living an insignificant lie. When we say that God cares about our Bible reading hour more than about us contributing to the production of an airplane, we are lying, and not just a little bit. Putting education, politics, science, art, and business into a morally neutral category, calling it “secular,” and saying those areas don’t have religious association strikes a direct hit at the core message of the Kingdom of God.

At the center of the good news of salvation is the proclamation that Jesus is Lord.

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” – Rom. 10:9 ESV

The Lordship of Christ is the pulse of the Gospel, sending streams of lifeblood throughout His domain. For what does his Lordship entail? The confession “Jesus is Lord” does not end at the boundary of the Church. Nor does it stop with our personal ethics. The Lordship of Christ extends far beyond, past the 4 corners of the earth, and includes all things.

“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.” – Col. 1:16-20 ESV

Soteriology does not set the boundary for Jesus’ reign. Jesus is Lord of all things, including the things we find and do here on earth.

We do not need to spiritualize the physical in order for it to become morally good. There already is a transcendent reality in the common. Transcendent moral value is not limited to our 5:00am Bible hour or our prayer-hike through the mountains. When we smell the aroma of bourbon, or cut into a tender filet mignon, or listen to a violin virtuoso; whether we’re putting a shovel in the soil with some of the dirt etched into the creases of our palms, or erecting a pre-framed wall, or laying down a weld bead like butter on bread; if we’re rebalancing our company’s accounting books to create order out of chaos, or struggling through a math problem with ink stains on the side of our hand, or toiling in search of the right words to say – in all of these things we honor God directly, not by connecting them to a spiritual end, but just by doing them, because God cares about all things.

But how? How can there be God-honoring transcendence in the ordinary every day? Don’t pagans do all of those things as well? Are they honoring God? Well, without faith it’s impossible to please God. So, no, not exactly. The results of their labors can and do bring Him glory, but they themselves are not honoring Him with their life.

So, then, what differentiates a Christian from everybody else in the common aspects of life? How can a Christian see transcendence in the ordinary the way nobody else can?

“God created [marriage and food] to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.” – 1-Timothy 4:3-5 ESV

What opens our eyes to the transcendence in the ordinary is one central concept: gratitude to our Maker. Everything created by God is good, because it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer, and we are not to reject any of it, if we receive it with thanksgiving. Receiving God’s gifts by faith and being thankful for every sip is how we demonstrate common transcendence. Gratitude for the ordinary is a godly endeavor.