A living kingdom

I wanted to share with you a passage from The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer that I came across this past week:

One of the greatest hindrances to internal peace which the Christian encounters is the common habit of dividing our lives into two areas, the sacred and the secular.
…Our trouble springs from the fact that we who follow Christ inhabit at once two worlds, the spiritual and the natural.
This tends to divide our total life into two departments. We come unconsciously to recognize two sets of actions. The first are performed with a feeling of satisfaction and a firm assurance that they are pleasing to God. These are the sacred acts and they are usually thought to be prayer, Bible reading, hymn singing, church attendance and such other acts as spring directly from faith. They may be known by the fact that they have no direct relation to this world, and would have no meaning whatever except as faith shows us another world, “a house not made with human hands, eternal in the heavens.”
Over against these sacred acts are the secular ones. They include all of the ordinary activities of life which we share with the sons and daughters of Adam: eating, sleeping, working, looking after the needs of the boy and performing our dull and prosaic duties here on earth. These we often do reluctantly and with many misgivings, often apologizing to God for what we consider a waste of time and strength. The upshot of this is that we are uneasy most of the time. We go about our common tasks with a feeling of deep frustration, telling ourselves pensively that there’s a better day coming when we shall slough off this earthly shell and be bothered no more with the affairs of this world.
…Let us think of a Christian believer in whose life the twin wonders of repentance and the new birth have been wrought. He is now living according to the will of God as he understands it from the written Word. Of such a one it may be said that every act of life is or can be as truly sacred as prayer or baptism or the Lord’s Supper. To say this is not to bring all acts down to one level; it is rather to lift every act up into a living kingdom and turn the whole life into a sacrament.

May God challenge us with these words and may we find a deeper understanding of what it means to have faith and be a follower of Jesus in this world and at this time.

shine!
Jason