CHRISTIANITY & CULTURE

'To say “This world is not your home” to a person who’s fully alive and alert to the wonders of the world is like throwing a bucket of water on kindling’s blaze. We should fan the flames of that blaze to help it spread, not seek to put it out. Otherwise, we malign our God-given instinct to love the earthly home God made for us. And we reduce “spirituality” into a denial of art, culture, science, sports, education, and all else human. When we do this, we set ourselves up for hypocrisy – for we may pretend to disdain the world while sitting in church but when we get in the car we turn on our favourite music and head home to barbecue with friends, watch a ball-game, play golf, ride bikes, work in the garden, or curl up savouring a coffee and a good book. We do these things not because we are sinners but because we are people. We will still be people when we die and go to Heaven. This isn’t a disappointing reality – it’s God’s plan. He made us as we are – except the sin part, which has nothing to do with friends, eating, sports, gardening, or reading...

...These experiences are not Heaven – but they are foretastes of Heaven. What we love about this life are the things that resonate with the life we were made for. The things we love are not merely the best this life has to offer – they are previews of the greater life to come.’

Randy Alcorn, Heaven, p.167.

HEAVEN

‘Every kingdom work, whether publicly performed or privately endeavoured, partakes of the kingdom’s imperishable character. Every honest intention, every stumbling word of witness, every resistance of temptation, every motion of repentance, every gesture of concern, every routine engagement, every motion of worship, every struggle towards obedience, every mumbled prayer, everything, literally, which flows out of our faith-relationship with the Ever-Living One, will find its place in the ever-living heavenly order which will dawn at his coming.’

Bruce Milne in Randy Alcorn, Heaven, p.134.

WORK

'You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,

you only have to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,

wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.'

WH Auden in Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, p.87.  

WORK

'Thinking our work will glorify God when people do not know we are Christians is like admiring an effective ad on TV that never mentions the product. People may be impressed but won't know what to buy.'

John Piper in Julian Hardyman, Maximum Life, p.78.

WORK

'The vast majority of Christians feel that they do not get any significant support for their daily work from the teaching, preaching, prayer, worship, pastoral, group aspect of local church life. No support for how they spend 50 percent of their working lives.'

Mark Greene in Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Everyday Church, p.104.

THE CHURCH & WORKERS

'Ordinary Christians working in business, industry, politics, factory work, and so on, are "the Church's front-line troops in her engagment with the world," wrote Leslie Newbigin. Imagine how our churches would be transformed if we truly regarded laypeople as frontline troops in the spiritual battle. "Are we taking seriously our duty to support them in their warfare?" Newbigin asked. "Have we ever done anything seriously to strengthen their Christian witness, to help them in facing the very difficult ethical problems which they have to meet every day, to give them assurance that the whole fellowship is behind them in their spiritual warfare?" The church is nothing less than a training ground for sending out laypeople who are equipped to speak the gospel to the world.'

Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, p.67.  

EXPECTATIONS

'By and large, my grandparents' generation expected much less out of family life, a career, recreation, and marriage. Granted, this sometimes made them unreflective and allowed for quietly dismal marriages. But my generation is on the opposite end of the spectrum. When we marry, we expect great sex, an amazing family life, recreational adventure, cultural experiences, and personal fulfillment at work. It would be a good exercise to ask your grandparents sometimes if they felt fulfilled in their careers. They'll probably look at you as if you're speaking a different language, because you are. Fulfillment was not their goal. Food was, and faithfulness too. Most older folks would probably say something like, "I never thought about fulfillment. I had a job. I ate. I lived. I raised my family. I went to church. I was thankful."'

Kevin DeYoung, Just Do Something, p.31.

WORK

'The action of a shepherd in keeping sheep is as good a work before God as is the action of a judge in giving sentence, or of a magistrate in ruling or a minister in preaching.'

William Perkins in Julian Hardyman, Glory Days, p.117.

WORK

'There is no work better than another to please God. To pour water, to wash dishes, to be a shoemaker, or an apostle, all is one; to wash dishes and to preach is one, as touching the deed to please God.'

William Tyndale in Julian Hardyman, Glory Days: Living the whole of your life for Jesus, p.117.

WORK & REST

'Work hard, and play hard, but never confuse the two.'
Margaret Carson in DA Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor, p.93.

WORK

'In nothing has the Church so lost her hold on reality as in her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments , and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world's intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion. But is it astonishing? How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to Church on Sunday. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes on him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly - but what use is all that if in the very centre of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare say, came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth.'

Dorothy L Sayers, 'Why Work?' in Creed or Chaos? p.58.

WORK

'...what you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that's about to fall over a cliff. You are not restoring a great painting that's shortly going to be thrown on the fire. You are not planting roses in a garden that's about to be dug up for a building site. You are - strange though it might seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself - accomplishing something which will become, in due course, part of God's new world. Every act of love, gratitude and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one's fellow human beings, and for that matter one's fellow non-human creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed which spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies hoiliness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honoured in the world - all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation which God will one day make.'

Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope, p.219.

THE WORLD

'This world is not simply a theater for individual conversion narratives, to be discarded at the end when we all go to heaven. No, the ultimate purpose of Jesus is not only individual salvation and pardon for sins but also the renewal of this world, the end of disease, poverty, injustice, violence, suffering and death.'

Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God, p.110.