All Of Life For Christ

Rev. Leo Douma. Trowel & Sword. December 1995

Preamble: It is a commonly held view in our society that there should be a separation of church and state. It is one of the main reasons Christian Political Parties have never succeeded in Australia. If all people claiming to be Christians voted for a Christian Party, Australia could be a different country, as could New Zealand. Would they be better? That is a different question and perhaps a topic for another day. In this article Leo looks, among other things, at how our thinking is influenced by our world view. However it is telling that often our actions don’t match our beliefs. For evidence of this take note of how people, both Christian and non-Christian celebrated Easter this weekend. Could you tell the difference?

All Of Life For Christ

One of the giants in Reformed history, Abraham Kuyper, made clear that “All of life is for Christ”. As he put it, “There is not one square inch in all the universe of which Jesus Christ does not say ‘This is mine!””

While Kuyper developed this understanding, he was not original in this. As we saw last month, the Reformation’s reclaiming of the “priesthood of all believers” opened the way again for all believers to come directly to God in whatever area of life they were dealing with and make it an act of worship.

The idea that all parts of life are to be done in worship to God is seen clearly in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. We will pick out some of the main points of this passage which shows Moses preparing the Israelites to cross over the Jordan River to enter the Promised Land. Vs.4: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD (Jahweh) our God the LORD is one”, or as can also be translated the “…only one”. The stress is that the Lord is the only God, as opposed to the idea of many gods, such as the river god, the fertility gods or the other gods of the time.

Therefore as the only God He alone is to be served, and the Israelites were to serve Him with everything that they were and had. That is the point of vs.5: “You are to serve the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength”. Note the repeated “…all”. Note also that the words ‘heart” and “soul’ and “strength” do not refer to various parts of a person, but each term on its own refers to the total person from a particular perspective. So we have a typical Hebrew repetition. The point cannot be missed: that God as the only God is to be served by the believer’s whole being. 

This is further brought to us in vs.6 when Moses says, “These commandments I give you today are to be upon your hearts.” So not just upon their “minds” as things to consider. Although to be fair, this distinction was unknown to the Hebrews who had no word for “mind”. The word used was always “heart”, which referred to the “seat of motivation” and thus to the whole person. If the commandments were “upon the heart”, then the Israelites would always be directed by those commandments, because they directed their very motivational source. And that being the case the Israelites would have the ability to constantly teach their children, as Moses says in vs.7, “When you sit at home, when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.’

In vs. 8 & 9 Moses says of the commandments of God: “Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your house and on your gates.” That meant that God’s word was to give direction for all living. The “hands” refer to life at work, the “forehead” to that which was seen, what was read, how life was viewed. The “doorframes” refer to life at home, the marriage relationship, and that with the children. The “gates” refer to life in the community, social issues and politics. The city gate in the Hebrew village was, of course, where the elders met. It was the place to make the decisions and settle disputes, the political and court system, if you like.

So as Moses puts it, a person’s belief was not something private, but something that referred to and effected “all of life”. Now it may be suggested that Moses was an Old Testament leader dealing with Israel as a theocracy, where the whole nation was seen as God’s people. Does it apply to the New Testament church? Well, Jesus made it clear that the Old Testament principles still applied when He gave the summary of the law: “To Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind (note ‘mind’ is now included to show the total person) and strength.” And Paul writes in Colossians 3:17 : “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do it all in the Name of our Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.”

For many Christians the approach advocated here is different to what they have come to understand. The tendency in our communities is to say that one’s faith is private, and should remain so. The problem in our culture is that we divide life in two – the religious and the rest. So we think religion has to do with “faith”, and the rest, such as science and technology, politics and business has to do with logic, dealing “neutrally with facts”. But the truth is “all of life is religion”, because we approach everything we do from our faith perspective, either from a heart that is for God, or against God.

To be able to appreciate the last idea, and to understand how our Christian faith can apply in the work place or other activities in life, not just in terms of evangelism and good moral behaviour, but to the activity itself, to the thinking involved in our studies, or for the job at hand, we need to come to terms with the concept of “world views”.

What is a world view? Perhaps we can best explain it with an illustration. Imagine one person wears blue glasses, and another wears red glasses. They are both asked to look at a yellow sheet of paper. What colour would each person see? Well, obviously the person with blue glasses will see a green sheet, and the person with red glasses will see an orange sheet. Why do they see different colours? Because they look through different glasses.

All human beings look through a set of “coloured glasses” which are different depending on the culture they are in or the religion they hold to. Some Reformed writers have made the following descriptions of world views. Albert Wolters says “World views deal with our basic beliefs about things. They have to do with ultimate questions.” James Sire describes a world view as “a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or sub-consciously) about the basic makeup of the world.” And Francis Schaeffer says “People are unique in the inner life of the mind – what they are in their thought world determines how they act.

….People have presuppositions… by (which) we mean the basic way an individual looks at life…, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists.”

So our world view has to do with our basic beliefs about all that exists. Whenever we think about something we do so on the basis of what we presuppose life is all about. For example, a Christian sees an interesting rock formation and praises God for his wonder in creating. A non Christian might marvel at the sight for the power of the evolutionary forces it shows. The two “see” things differently because what they presuppose about how the world began is different. We can not say that one is more scientific than the other. Both views come by faith. That is, the Christian by faith accepts that God created. The non Christian, by his faith, simply presupposes that there is no God, that it all began by evolutionary forces. Neither view can be proven scientifically – that is by observation and repeated experimentation. To be able to think about anything we need to start on the basis of things we presuppose. But our different presuppositions lead to different conclusions.

A world view is a set of beliefs that helps us see how all of life hangs together. A world view answers four basic questions: 1. Who am I?  2 Where am I?, 3. What is wrong? 4. What is the remedy?”  So for example, to illustrate how these four questions work to make up a world view, as Christians we believe we are creatures of God, made in his image, in the world He created. The world is a mess because of sin, but in Jesus there is salvation and the hope of restoration. But, in contrast, a modern view (existentialist) says we are chance products of evolution in a chaotic world. Our problem is our lack of control over the forces surrounding us, and the best we can do is to find as much meaning in life as we can, each to his own. 

A world view acts as a guide to our life, like a compass or a road map. It orientates us in the world and gives us a sense of what is right and what is wrong. Whenever one of us thinks about anything, casually or profoundly we do so from a world view. Many people would not have an answer when asked what their world view is, yet their basic beliefs emerge quickly enough when they are faced with emergencies and tragedy or convictions that clash with their own. These trigger a response that provide indications of what a person really believes.

World views never belong to just one individual. World views are always shared. Indeed true community is possible only when people are bound together by a common way of life that comes from a shared belief. Political activities, economic activities, marriage, family and child-rearing practices are all expressions of the common world view(s). These practices will themselves socialise the children to live in terms of that view of life. So most people gain their presuppositions, their beliefs, from their family and surrounding society.

Now where there are several prevailing world views in a society, that can generate a kind of spiritual schizophrenia, in which one part of life is led by one view and another by a different set of beliefs. This is the split life, or dualism, that many Christians live with, as they struggle in a culture that is basically secular and has no time for God, while they themselves believe He is creator of all. This dualism has led to the problem mentioned earlier of keeping religion private. We often feel that we are worlds apart from other people, or that someone seems to live in a different world from us. And often that is precisely the case. Another person’s world view is a different world and the various beliefs are like a map to that world. That is why it is often so difficult for people of different beliefs to understand each other. They really are in different worlds and cannot penetrate each other’s world. For a person to change from one world view to another is like a conversion experience, a totally different way of life. That is what happens when we believe in the Lord Jesus. We are converted by the Spirit through the Word. In our repentance we are completely turned around and live and think and act differently. We change from one world view to another. Our calling as Christians, through our sanctification, is to have all we think and say and do, done for God’s glory. To do that we need to develop our world view, to consider a consistently Christian approach to all of life. That is what we will consider in the coming months, to look at a Reformational world view, under the three main headings of “Creation, Fall, Redemption”.

Rev. Leo Douma

We look forward to receiving feedback about any of our posts. We also encourage you to share our posts with family, friends and acquaintances; in fact anyone you think may appreciate and/or benefit from the knowledge and wisdom handed down to us from the past.   To view previous posts visit our website at www.tsrevisited.com