Thursday, September 11, 2008

The Spiritual Life

Do you think anyone ever asked the question to Jesus: "how is your spiritual life going? Are you spending time with God? Have you had your quiet time today?" Probably not.

Jesus understood that every part of his life was spiritual, not just sections of it. He, like others in the early Christian church as well as the Jewish people, understood that everything was spiritual. In fact, there is no Hebrew word for "spiritual". It was a foreign concept. If you defined something as "spiritual" then that would mean that other things would not be. It implied there was an nonspiritual part of life. They believed it was all or nothing.

Early Christians knew that all of life was spiritual - either all spiritually good or all spiritually bad. Either connected as a whole to Christ or not at all. There were not certain areas that were reserved for God and others for the world. That means you can't say, "God, you can have my heart, but not my finances. You can have my vocabulary, but not my thought life. You can have me on Sunday, but the rest of the week is mine."

There wasn't a difference between church life and other life. After all, you ARE the church. There wasn't a quiet time. It all was to be God's time. There wasn't a prayer time. It was an all day conversation. A good friend once told me that he didn't say "amen" in his prayers until he went to bed at night as a reminder that all day was to be a constant contact with Jesus.

How is your spiritual life? Maybe the question should be, "is your life spiritual or not?"

"And whatever you do, whether by speech or action, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him." Colossians 3:17

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