Author: Jayson Fisher, Texas A&M BYX Alumnus, Former BYX National Advisor
One of the most misunderstood aspects of the Christian life is placed on display across our campuses. The idea of living a consistently spiritual life in the midst of what might look to be consistently secular greatly hinders how we are to redeem the time we spend doing the things we need to do in order to graduate. We segregate our lives into two silos—the sacred and the secular—and we miss out on countless hours of being able to worship because we are solely focused on that psychology exam tomorrow.
God calls us all to a career, and a vast majority of us will not work full-time in ministry. We will be placed in a place where we are filling out spreadsheets, attending meetings and working on projects that will take up a vast majority of our life. We will spend five out of seven days at work, and if we do not understand that the Christian life is meant to be spiritually lived in a secular world, then we are missing out on a crazy amount of opportunity to worship God in the midst of the mundane day-to-day life.
Brother Lawrence lived in a monastery, and you would think that being a monk would entail spending a vast majority of his life in prayer or copying some portion of Scripture. The job that Brother Lawrence received was to be a full-time dishwasher in the monastery kitchen. His job couldn’t be more mundane, and he did that for hours upon hours every week. Instead of seeing his job as just washing dishes, he redeemed his time working by praising the Lord and worshipping him while standing over his sink. He even wrote a hymn about his experience washing dishes,
Lord of all pots and pans and things,
since I’ve no time to be a great saint
by doing lovely things,
or watching late with Thee,
or dreaming in the dawnlight,
or storming heaven’s gates,
make me a saint by getting meals,
and washing up the plates.
Warm all the kitchen with Thy Love,
and light it with Thy peace;
forgive me all my worrying,
and make my grumbling cease.
Thou who didst love to give men food,
in room, or by the sea,
accept the service that I do,
I do it unto Thee.[1]
Right now, you are most likely on a campus and are majoring in something that seemingly has nothing to do with the spiritual life. What often happens is that you rely on your spiritual disciplines like reading the Bible or praying when you can, often being inconsistent because of your crazy schedule. Then Sunday comes along and you want to have some type of great experience at church to keep you going for the rest of the week. That is not how the Christian life is meant to be lived. Chapter meetings and church services are meant to be times where we as believers come together to worship Christ, and then are released to worship him individually in our daily tasks. You will not have any sort of depth in your relationship with Christ if you rely solely on weekly experiences to drive it. You have to be able to worship him in your daily tasks. Psalm 150 is the final psalm in the book, and it begins with,
Praise the Lord!
Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens! Psalm 150:1 (ESV)
This verse means we praise God everywhere, not solely in his sanctuary. God is ruler of all things, and not isolated to a building. In John 4, Jesus meets a woman at a well and explains to her where God will be worshipped:
19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” John 4:19–26 (ESV)
We do not just worship at our coffee table or in a service, but when we sit down to study the history of the world and see what God has done in the past. Or when we study thermodynamics and see the complexity of God’s design, or the anatomy of the human body and see his most cherished creation on display. That approach to studying and working towards getting a degree not only should boost your grades because you can see a purpose in what you are doing, but it will also invigorate your relationship with Christ. Be faithful in the mundane tasks, and let the services and experiences be an overflow of how you have been walking with him this past week.
We as believers need to double-down on this aspect of worship because the mundane tasks of life are so frequent and our time set apart for solely focusing on Christ in relation are so few. Watch what happens to your faith as you engage with the world with eternal lenses, and worship him in the mundane work that is studying on your campus.
[1] Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God
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