The Unity of The Secular and The Sacred: by E Stanley Jones

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:31
 
I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. "Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.  So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches?  And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own? Luke 16:9-12

In those days when the number of disciples was increasing, the Grecian Jews among them complained against the Hebraic Jews because their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food.  So the Twelve gathered all the disciples together and said, "It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables.  Brothers, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them  Acts 6:1-3

One of the most disastrous divorces that ever took place in Christendom was the divorce between the sacred and the secular. In early Christianity they were one. When the disciples wanted men to look after the food arrangements, they said they must get men "of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom," to look after this matter. Wisdom and the Holy Ghost were to be carried into the so-called secular and were to make it sacramental. All life was to be saved.

Now we have divided life into the sacred and secular, sacred callings and secular callings, sacred days and secular days, sacred buildings and secular buildings, sacred books and secular books. We thought thus to preserve both. In doing so we have impoverished both. The secular has become materialized, and the sacred etherialized, with the emphasis on the "ether."

It has been the very devil's strategy thus to divide and rule. And he does rule where they are divided. We can never live victoriously as long as we try to live a compartmentalized life. They must be brought together. They need each other.

Wrote an earnest missionary: "When you write, show us how to live victoriously in such dull commonplaces as the keeping of books, attending to uninteresting details such as a missionary has to do. Can we not make the whole thing vicarious by the thought, that, if I do these things someone else will be spared the drudgery of them?"

Very beautiful. And yet was there not still the lurking thought that the material was less and other than the spiritual, and that one goes into it as one takes up a cross? Instead, should it not be looked on as a part of one's spiritual life that the spiritual life cannot be manifested except in and through the material?

The word must become flesh or die as a word.

O Christ, in whom everything became one and in whom the commonplace was no longer the commonplace, but glowing with meaning and purpose, help us to make them one this day. Amen.