At the risk of sounding sensational, I want to tell you about how to transform your Christian life. 

I recently have been writing about the crisis of spiritual formation in the church today. Last week I gave three simple steps anyone can take to help increase their spiritual calorie intake. Picture three conveyor belts flowing into your soul: (1) spiritual edifying content, (2) spiritually destructive content, and (3) spiritually neutral content.

Here is the hack: there is no such thing as spiritually neutral content.

The Theater of God

There is only the illusion of neutrality. 

Picture yourself sitting on a park bench on a brisk Autumn afternoon. You are watching your children play on the monkey-bars under red and orange leaves. You breathe in crisp air and feel the sun on your face. Or, imagine yourself reading on a hammock in June when you feel your eyelids become heavy and lay the book aside for an unhurried nap. Or think about the last time you ate a delicious meal, laughed, watched a really good show, kissed your spouse, or finished a project you had been working on for a long time.

None of these things involve taking in overt Christian content. You are not listening to a sermon, reading theology, fasting, or praying. You are just living life. Yet, if you have eyes to see and ears to hear, you have a treasure trove of worship.

Consider Paul’s teaching:

For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen. – Rom 11:36 (cf. Col 1:16-17)

There is no dimension of human existence that does not run on, lead to, or flow from God. That doesn’t mean that we need to tape Bible verses onto our hammocks or force every conversation with our children into a systematic theology lesson. It means that we recognize that…

All things are from God: we receive the glorious is-ness of the created world around us as a gift from a generous, creative, and loving Father. We don’t deserve it, but we can enjoy it with the appropriate gratitude it deserves.

I remember hearing N.D. Wilson once say that we live in a world where a tree can use sunshine, water, and air to transform a flower into an apple. That’s magic. John Calvinconsidered the created world we live in to be a “magnificent theatre…replenished with numberless wonders.” It is a stage for God to display His power and goodness. God could have made a world without cellos, French toast, mountains, or sex. But He didn’t. He filled this world with a trillion incredible things, numberless wonders, all to make us say, “Wow…thank you.”

All things are through God: Whether you sit down with your grandmother in the senior-care home and eat Jell-O together, or hike to see the sunrise for an early prayer, all things come through God. This means I am aware of God’s providential work to make this event—however special or mundane—happen. The Bible tells us that in Jesus Christ “all things hold together” (Col 1:17) and that Jesus “upholds the universe by the word of his power,” (Heb 1:3). This world doesn’t run on its own steam, God is the great foundation of reality, the one who moment-by-moment sustains all things.

All things are to God: we know that God is the ultimate point of why everything exists. Paul tells us, “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God,” (1 Cor 10:31). There is no un-spiritual realm of your life. When Paul says that all things are to God, or that we must eat and drink to the glory of God, I don’t think that simply means “Don’t sin” or “Don’t commit gluttony or get drunk.” Sure, it means that at a bare minimum. But I think it also means that we see that God is communicating something of His own nature and being—His own glory—in the gift He has given us. When I bite into a juicy peach, I should be grateful for the peach. I shouldn’t commit gluttony with the peach. But I also should see that the sweetness of the peach itself is revealing something to me about God. Two excerpts help illuminate this thought:

Gratitude exclaims… ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations [flashes] are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.” (C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom)

Whatever we find lovely in a friend, or in a saint, ought not to engross [us], but to elevate our affection: we should conclude…that if there be so much sweetness in a drop, there must be infinitely more in the fountain; if there be so much splendor in a ray, what must the sun be in its glory! (Henry Scougal, The Life of God in the Soul of Man)

Extra Ordinary

We have been trying to grow pumpkins for three years now. We have three raised garden-beds in our back yard, and one has been dedicated to a pumpkin patch each year. But, year after year we have had squash bugs wipe out our crop, leaving nothing but desiccated yellow-leaves behind. We don’t want to use pesticides, so we have tried planting marigolds (supposedly a natural repellant), but they haven’t worked. The only option we had left was to inspect each plant by hand for the pests. They lay eggs on the underside of the leaves in small clusters that you can scrape off with your fingernail. And if you water the plant, if there are any grown squash bugs hiding, they will scurry out of their holes to flee the water. That’s where you get ‘em.

Over the summer, every night, my wife and I would go out to our garden, hose it down, and then diligently thumb our way through the wide leaves and prickly stems. To see the bugs you need to squat down till you’re about eye level with the soil and you must look carefully because they blend in easily. The heat from the day would be blunted, but the wood planters still radiated some of the sun’s stored warmth, enough that the water sprayed over everything felt deliciously refreshing. 

Night by night, what at first seemed like a tedious chore, turned into one of my favorite rituals. Not because I enjoy squishing bugs (that was gross) but because it forced me to slow down and pay attention to the wonder of what is before me. Poking your head into the garden, seeing the universe that exists down there, the plant stalks pushing up through the black soil, was a simple, but awe-inspiring moment. The smell of vegetation and wet earth, the labor of tending to something that would not survive without my care, the satisfaction of seeing the plant grow, even the obnoxious pests puttering around: all of this struck me as a wonderfully beautiful thing. God didn’t have to make the world this exquisite, but He did. He made it lovely, satisfying, and the loveliness and satisfaction of it shows me something of what God’s own loveliness and satisfaction is like. If this is the drop, what is the ocean like?

Now, let’s imagine I don’t chase the sunbeam up to the sun as I work in my garden. What if I just rush through the job, thinking about other things, maybe frustrated, mindlessly picking bugs out. It seems like I am now doing something that is spiritually neutral, but really I am actually participating in a species of worldliness. “All things were created through Him and for Him,” (Col 1:16). My garden was made through Jesus and for Jesus. So if I work in my garden blind to the garden’s ultimate point? I am actually misusing it. I am operating on the world’s ideology that believes that there are domains of life which God has nothing to do with. It’s just a chore.

But that isn’t the worldview the Bible presents. Everything is for God. That’s why there is no such thing as “spiritual neutral” content. We either see everything in the light of God, from whom, through whom, and to whom are all things, or we misuse these things. And the longer we misuse those things, the more diminished our delight and joy in the Lord will be.