Living the Wholly Christian Life

I am being convicted of the fact that I live two seperate lives. At work and with secular friends I want to be liked and I tend to blend in on whatever may be being discussed. I do not stand up for what I know to be right and I allow myself to be sucked in to the conversations that do not build others up and glorify Jesus. How do I change? I cannot do it but the Holy Spirit can. Any work I do to try to change the way I operate will be for nothing. I can take steps to prepare me for the working of the Spirit such as disciplined Bible reading, prayer, contemplation, Sabbath observation, devotions, discussion. I read an article that really spoke to me that I would like to share in hopes that it will inspire us to live a whole life in Christ. Mark.

Too many of us are "partial Christians." Our Christian convictions apply only to a small part of our life-and that portion is shrinking. It will continue to shrink unless we regain a comprehensive vision of life that helps us reunite what modern life breaks apart. Listen.

- "My Sunday life has nothing to do with my life in the rough and tumble of law," said the young lawyer, scrambling to establish her practice.

- "My work as a scientist is seperate from my life as a Christian," asserted a professor at a college.

- "The therapist told me to go ahead and have an affair to get the attention of my husband," a christian friend shakily told me.

- "I make investments totally with regard to the profit-making capacity of the firm, not with regard to what it makes or how it acts," offered another Christian friend.

- "I judge telivision programs strictly according to their entertainment value," said a member of a near by congregation.

- "Religion and politics have to be kept seperate," remarked an older acquaintance.

- "Religious convictions should have nothing to do with our hiring policies as a college," asserted a colleague.

- " Our Lutheran social agency cannot allow religious convictions to directly enter into our treatment of the disturbed young people we are dealing with," declared an executive aquaintance of mine.

- "We need to market this senior-citizen facility as a comfortable and attractive nonsectarian enterprise," argued a consultant hired by a Lutheran facility.

Divided Lives and Souls
As the above quotes from personal and institutional life suggest, our modern world breaks us apart. And it does so in two ways. First, it seperates our lives into independent sectors that are governed by the principles developed in and by those sectors. Education is education, politics is politics, economic life is economic life, and each is understood and governed by independent ways of knowing and acting. Even private life is often understood according to the principles of psychology and sociology.
Western history has been the long story of each sector of life declaring its independence from the control and presence of religion. Admittedly there is much good that has occured because of this secularization process. Knowledge and efficiency has definitely increased in each of these sectors. But this process also has had its costs: Our lives are no longer whole. We are often forced to become partial Christians.
But our modern world breaks us apart in a second way. It seperates us from the heights and depths of our lives. Because it has had such enormous success manipulating natural forces, science is expected to understand and provide guidance for each area of life. Thus our lives are reduced to a series of causes and effects that science can describe and predict. This seems to leave little room for human freedom, let alone for the mystery of God's presence and action.
Thus our lives in business, education, and politics become increasingly this-worldly, flattened into one dimension. Even our personal lives are understood in purely one dimensional terms. Sex is understood as physical functioning. Relationships become little more than need fulfillment as described by psychology and sociology. Even dying and grief are reduced to five stages, wringing the mysterious depth out of the experience.

Partial Christians
These two processes dividing life into independent spheres and draining our esperience of transcendence can never be totally successful. Humans seek wholeness even as they seek the mysterious "something more" their spirits demand. So religion continues to prosper.
In the modern world, much religion is highly individualistic. People concoct their own brands. Our church traditions continue to survive, however. People want the church and its perspective when births, marriages, and deaths occur and when they want their children to have stron moral values.
But often people do not live wholly Christian lives. Their god is a "god of the gaps" God fills in the meanings for those parts of life that are not accounted for by economics, psychology, and sociology-or Ann Landers. Indeed our churches are inhabited by many of those folks. They are partial Christians not because they are unmotivated but because their Christianity applies only to a small part of their lives. They are succumbing to the compartmentalized secular world.
The most impressive churches I know recognize how people have been affected, and they are busily constructing counterattack. They know that Christians have to be whole people, living out a comprehensive vision of life that gives meaning and guidance to all they do. These churches also know that Christians need depth and and transcendence in their lives. They need to be in touch with God-the Ground, the Origen, and Aim of our lives.

To Transform Our Lives
Only the Holy Spirit can enable us to live wholly and in God's prescence. But we can work to make things open for the working of the Holy Spirit in our individual and churchly lives.
Practically, alert congregations concentrate on Christian education especially for adults. Partial Christians need a holistic Christian vision of life to live wholly. One way to do this is to anchor people in the biblical vision of life. The Bible reveals God as living and moving through all of life and history. This God who is active in all areas of human life also demands and elicits human response in all those areas.
Another way to impart a whole view of life is disciplined theological study. Theologians have thought through the faith comprehensively. They have schetched out how God relates to our complet lives. To study a popular theological writer such as C. S. Lewis or a more technical theologion such as Reinhold Niebuhr will make clear to serious seeker that the Christian meaning system applie to all life, not to a few gaps left over after the world has done its job. Serious churches mut be in the business of helping members develop a comprehensive vision of life.
Many Christians need help to relate the biblical or theological vision of life to the "independent" sectors in in which they spend most of their waking time. Thus churches who truly understand their task have courses that help laypeople make the connections between Sunday and Monday. After all, these connections do not come automatically.
Finally, churches must help Christians plumb the heights and depths of their lives in a world increasingly flattened into one dimension. It is essential that churches offer worship services that are a "foretaste of the feast to come." They must do all they can to provide a worship life that includes the transcendent. Fine music, Liturgical excellence, robust singing, and beutiful sights, sounds, and even smells are essential to such worship.
Worshipful and frequent celebration of the Eucharist provides connection with the living Christ, a connection that adds depth and richness to the spiritual lives of participants. As eucharistic practice becomes central to the lives of individual Christians and of whole congregations, they begin to perceive all of life as sacremental. God is discerned more and more in the ordinary.
Personal devotional practises are also crucial. Laypeople often need help and direction in establishing disciplined Bible reading, prayer, contemplation, Sabbath observation, devotions, discussion. These activities enable laypeople to recover the spiritual heights and depths of their lives. These dimentions are already touched in the moments of birth, marriage, Baptism, and death, but Christian lives are not whole until sacramentality is extended to common life too. This does not mean that Christians live in spiritual ectasy all the time, but it does mean that lives are touched by the Spirit more plentifully than merely in the gaps, as important as those might be.
Christians need to live their lives wholly. May the Spirit bring that wholeness into our individual and churchly lives.

Robert Benne Reasonable Ethics (St. Louis: Concordia, 2005), 125-29.