Undivided

Closing The Faith-Life Gap

Graham Hooper

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781844746248
• eBook ISBN:
  9781844749140
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Christianisme

Let's be honest: there are gaps everywhere in life - the gap between who we are and who we would like to be; the gap between the Christianity we profess and the Christianity we practise; the gap between us and those we love; the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. We feel disconnected from God, from one another and from ourselves. How do we close those gaps? How is God working to make us whole? This book brings the gospel to bear on the gaps in our lives. Drawing on a highly unusual lifetime's experience living out the Christian faith in more than twenty countries, Graham Hooper shows how we can be made whole in the struggles and joys of everyday life - work and relationships, success and failure, service and weakness.

PART 1:
EXPOSING THE GAP

1. The problem

I never cease to be amazed and amused by the gap between the public face of what’s known as Christianity and the way things actually are for people who call themselves Christians.

Adrian Plass1

Questions

It was after church one Sunday morning, about ten years ago. I had left feeling strangely unsettled and dissatisfied.

Was it the fault of the preacher: his voice, his style, the length of the sermon and its content? Was it the form of service? Perhaps it was the worship leader, who seemed particularly annoying that day, or the selection of music? Was it other people in the congregation that I found difficult to relate to? Or could it be me? Was it that I was simply in the wrong mood, spiritually out of tune, or just plain depressed?

Driving home, I found myself observing people going about their secular Sunday morning business: jogging, gardening, car washing, relaxing with a coffee and a newspaper. I felt overwhelmed by the huge gap between my one-hour experience in church and what was going on outside in the world. Clearly there was a ‘dis-connect’ somewhere. How was it that the great majority of people seemed to be so un-interested in the Christian gospel?

Certainly most people had other priorities that Sunday morning. Why? Surely not because they were particularly lazy or sinful. Was it that their material world was so comfortable that they felt no need of God, at least until they faced a personal crisis? Statistically, it was likely that a large number professed to believe in God or to possess some sort of faith. So was it just that they didn’t see the relevance of the church and Christianity to their lives?

Was that because of the poor quality and inconsistency of the witness of Christians they knew? Had they ever been confronted with the good news that there was a God who had made them and who loved them? Was the gap between what Christians professed to believe and how they actually behaved most of the time so big that the message of the gospel was being undermined? Sinful human nature is alive and well, even in the best of people. Was that why the majority of the population was outside the churches rather than inside that Sunday?

Back at work the next day, it was almost a relief to stop contemplating the meaning of life and get back to the routine. I quickly immersed myself again in the pressures of my job. Spiritual things were moved firmly onto the back burner. How was I to relate my church experience of the previous day to the pressures and challenges of my work as a manager in an engineering business? Perhaps the simplest thing was not to worry about it, just to keep church life and business separate. There seemed to me a big gap between church and work, between the Christianity professed in churches and the Christianity practised by many churchgoers, and I was not at all sure that I was closing that gap.

At home that evening, I watched the news on TV, with its usual catalogue of disaster, exploitation, violence and cor­ruption. I felt helpless in the face of the gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be. Why didn’t God ‘wave a magic wand’ and fix all the problems? What impact was the church making on the world’s problems? What impact was I making? How much difference did my faith really make to the way I lived?

Why couldn’t we achieve peace in the Middle East? Why couldn’t people get on with one another? Closer to home, why was it that relationship problems sometimes made the work environment, and even family life, so complicated and difficult?

It is always easy to criticize others. But if I accepted Jesus’ premise that the problem could be the log in my own eye rather than the speck in someone else’s, then I also had to face up to the gap between the inconsistencies and shortcomings in my life and the person I wanted to be, at least in my better moments. Why did I find it so difficult to live consistently and to live up to God’s standards? Like most people, I was reluctant to let my guard down and allow people to see the ‘real me’. So I also had to face the gap between the way I wanted others to see me and who I really was.

At the root of all these problems lay the big question, the elephant in the room: Why did God often seem so far away? Why did he not seem to answer my prayers? Why was there such a gap between him and me?

How did he intend all these gaps to be closed?

Answers?

As I turned more and more to the Scriptures for answers, I found that, while I came to God with a long list of questions, he clearly had some to ask me! In the Bible we find that in many crunch situations God’s Word to his people comes in the form of a question, one to which he clearly knows the answer. He asked Adam, ‘Where are you?’ (Genesis 3:9). He asked Cain, ‘Where is your brother...’ (Genesis 4:9). He asked Elijah, ‘What are you doing here...?’ (1 Kings 19:13). Jesus asked Peter, ‘Do you love me...?’ (John 21:16). God wants us to face life’s big questions.

It’s easy to drive through life for long periods on cruise control. We can try to focus only on the positives and dodge the big issues, but at some point, maybe in a family or personal crisis, God will speak to us through his Word and by his Spirit, by asking us questions: ‘Where are you really at?’; ‘What is the state of your relationship with others?’; ‘Do you really love and trust me...or is that just religious talk?’

God cares for us. So he calls us back from the religious fantasy world in which we sometimes like to operate to show us the reality of our lives as he sees them. We may try to paper over the gaps and pretend they are not there, but we are only kidding ourselves. The nagging feeling that all is not as it should be will not go away. Real crises in our lives quickly tear away the veneer of a merely superficial Christian faith and expose the gaps.

Studying the Scriptures, I found it very encouraging that God’s people down the centuries have all struggled with these gaps. Many of the Old Testament psalms are songs of praise, but there are also many songs of questioning, of desperation, even of anguish. They are written by believers who sensed a big gap between themselves and their God (Psalm 88); people who could not understand why the life of faith was such a struggle when others seemed to have it so easy (Psalm 73); people who questioned why God seemed to ignore their cry for help (Psalm 13); people having to face up to their own spectacular failures (Psalm 51). In other words, they were written by people like us who were asking big questions and not always getting the answers they wanted. At least they were being honest with themselves, and with God. Let’s look and learn.

As you read this, I hope it challenges you to face the gaps that are so obviously there, rather than go on living in some unreal world in which you never ask any of your biggest questions. We need to ask the big questions, even if we don’t receive all the answers. We also need to face the big questions with which God confronts us. We need to live authentic lives.

Learning on the job

My job has taken me to live and work in several different countries. My wife and I have had the privilege of belonging to churches of various denominations and in different cultures. What follows in this book has come from spending most of my adult life as a Christian working in the secular world. I try to relate the Bible to life, to link the secular with the sacred, to make sense of what we do and say in church, and how we live the rest of the time.

It is a work in progress. It does not produce, or even promise, a quick-fix solution, because there isn’t one this side of eternity. But as I share what I have learned, and go on learning from God, through the Scriptures, through other Christians (and non-Christians), and in life’s school of hard knocks, I hope you will be able to relate to these gaps and be encouraged, as you experience God working in your life, and in the world, to close them.

When I came to faith in Christ in my twenties, I was told that to grow as a new Christian I needed to read the Bible, to pray and to join a church. True! But that is not the whole story. What I was not told so clearly, and what I have since learned, is that we grow closer to God as we go through tough times in which our faith and hope are tested. Looking back on his life, the apostle Paul wrote these magnificent words: ‘I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation’ (Philippians 4:12). How did he learn that? Not in a book or a lifestyle seminar. No. He learned it through personal experience of hardship and testing, in which he had to rely wholly on God. Even Jesus, the perfect Son of God, ‘learned obedience from what he suffered’ (Hebrews 5:8). We have much to learn.

But it is not only through tough times that we learn and grow. God calls us to make a difference in the world. As we take on tasks and responsibilities to which we believe God is calling us, whether at work, in the community or in the church, we find enjoyment and fulfilment. We also learn to rely increasingly on God’s guidance and daily strength. As our faith is stretched in that way, we learn about, and experience, the power of God, and so the gap between us closes. We grow closer to him.

Gaps and compartments

It is all too easy (not to mention a massive cop-out) to compartmentalize our lives. We often speak about our ‘Christian life’, our ‘prayer life’, our ‘church life’, our ‘married life’, our ‘secular life’, our ‘family life’, even our ‘sex life’, in a way which unintentionally separates that which is really a whole. The result of the gaps between these compartments is that we increasingly divorce the religious part of our lives from the rest. We start to become one person at church and another at work or at home. Inevitably, then, our lives make little difference for good.

It might be convenient if life could be divided up like that into multiple different compartments, each with its own rules of behaviour. However, real life is not like that. Problems do not confront us one at a time in an orderly pattern, like a succession of waves approaching the shoreline. We don’t typically face relationship problems on Thursday, work problems on Friday, personal issues on Saturday, religious matters on Sunday, and so on. No. Sometimes life is like a stormy maelstrom, with waves crashing in on us from all directions at once.

Indeed, you may be confronted by a whole range of spiritual, personal, relationship and work issues right now. Any twenty-four-hour period of life may include a wide range of feelings and experiences – some good times: laughter, satisfaction in a task well done, reconciliation, times of prayer, and a new sense of the grace of God. But in that same day you may have to cope with many personal battles: worry, difficult relationships, pain, frustration and stress. If you are a Christian, then you probably have a few church-related issues thrown in for good measure.

When you analyse the problems in your life, you probably find that many of them are interrelated. Perhaps your bad day at work was caused by an argument at home. And maybe that relationship problem, in turn, was partially caused by your own doubts, anxieties, feelings of guilt, and a growing distance between you and God. Perhaps the emptiness of your spiritual life is bound up tightly with the conflicts you are experiencing and a sense of missing out on life’s best. We can quickly feel disconnected from God and from one another, and divided inside. These are the gaps! Our church experience and spiritual life can easily become an unreal sideshow or an escape from the ‘real business’ of life. Our time at work can become totally divorced from our experience at church. If you are a pro­fessing Christian, or claim any religious conviction, you may still be going through the motions of worship and prayer, but with a feeling that your faith is increasingly unrelated to the rest of your life.

How are we to deal with all these interrelated problems? It seems impossible to tackle them all at once, but piecemeal solutions are inadequate. We need to bring the whole of our lives, with all their compartments, to God.

The integrity of Jesus

Let’s take a moment to contrast our inconsistent, compartmentalized and disintegrated lives with the wholeness and consistency of Jesus. In thirty-three years on this earth, he showed himself to be, uniquely, a whole person. What came out was what was inside. His words and actions were entirely consistent with his character. His honesty, his compassion, his hatred of injustice and hypocrisy were simply expressions of his true self. He was a man of total integrity.

This amazing quality stands in stark contrast to the values of the world of business and politics, in which perception counts more than truth. Spin doctoring, imaging, market pos­itioning, key messaging, how to mislead without actually lying, how to portray things in the most favourable light possible while massively under-emphasizing the other side of the picture: this is the reality of political and business life in the twenty-first century. At its core, this is simply creating a gap between reality and communication. At its worst, it is dishonesty.

Honesty

One of the great characteristics of Jesus that does not receive a lot of airtime from writers and preachers is his honesty. He spoke directly and with great insight, using words that went straight to the hearts of his hearers. That is why his enemies, the religious leaders who lost out when the status quo was disturbed, hated him. They were jealous of him because he was everything they were not. They saw him as a serious threat to their power, and so they hounded him to death.

In his famous Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 – 7), Jesus calls for honesty in worship. If you are angry with someone, or if you have given someone reason to hold a grudge against you, he says, don’t bother coming to worship God. First put the relationship right, and then come to worship (see Matthew 5:22–24). I sometimes wonder, if every church was challenged with this at the beginning of each service, would half the congregation need to leave, to work on repairing relationships? We do need to take this seriously. Are there some personal visits or phone calls we need to make to put things right with people before we next go to church?

True worship of God is inextricably linked to our God-given daily life. He does not mean us to divorce the experience of the one-hour worship service in church from the other 167 hours in the week spent in the home, the school, the workplace or the shopping centre. According to the apostle Paul, it is committing our whole life in service that is the real act of worship (Romans 12:1–2).

Jesus also calls for honesty in our estimation of our own character. He points out the gap between mere outward observance of laws and inward obedience. In God’s eyes, he says, these should be one and the same thing. If you want to kill someone, then the sin in your life is the same as if you had actually killed. Of course, the effects on others, and the consequences for you and others between the thought and the act, may be totally different. But in God’s eyes there is sin in the evil desire, as well as in the act. He will not allow us the luxury of thinking ourselves good and holy just because we have not done certain things, when we are at least guilty of thinking them (Matthew 5:21–30).

Consistency

Jesus also demands consistency as well as honesty: consistency, that is – not boring predictability. He calls for the consistent application of our faith to life. When I think of this quality, I remember my friend Rob, who was a great example to me in this way. He was described by one of his colleagues as ‘a man who takes Christ to work with him’, a wonderful accolade for a very shy individual. But he was someone with great personal warmth, quiet strength and a lovely sense of humour, whose faith clearly influenced the way he worked. How?

He was an electrician, responsible for maintenance of a defence installation. His consistently high standards of workmanship and his strict ethical values won him the respect of his peers. If you were looking for someone you could rely on to get a job done, or a friend to share a confidence with, someone to be there when it mattered, then Rob was that man. He was also always courteous and respectful to those he met, whatever their position in the hierarchy. In short, he was totally and consistently reliable, qualities that are like gold in any workplace and which reflect the character of God.

In his teaching, Jesus pointed out that in nature there is a consistency between the type of tree and the fruit it bears. He asks, rhetorically, ‘Do people pick grapes from thorn-bushes, or figs from thistles?’ (Matthew 7:16). Apple trees always and only produce apples, not pears or oranges.

Jesus looked in vain for the same consistency in those who claimed to be God’s people, but whose lives produced fruit that showed otherwise. Jesus also exposed the inconsistency of those who expect God to forgive them but will not forgive others, people who are hypercritical and judgmental of the failings of others, but who choose to ignore their own, far greater faults (Matthew 18:23–35). In the prayer Jesus taught us (Matthew 6:9–13), we are reminded to forgive others as we ourselves are forgiven. And in the so-called ‘golden rule’ for interpersonal relationships, we are to treat others as we would have them treat us (Matthew 7:12).

James, in his letter to the early church, is puzzled by a similar inconsistency (see James 3:9–12). He observes that in nature the same spring does not produce fresh water one moment and salty the next. How is it, then, that human beings can speak words of encouragement one moment and curse and swear the next? How is it that one moment we can mouth words of praise and worship of God and the next say things that reveal a much darker side of our character? What is inside us eventually comes out, however much we try to suppress or hide it. If we are rotten inside, our lives will eventually produce rotten fruit: lies, deceit, betrayal, selfishness in our behaviour at work and at home. It is what comes out of us that defiles us, said Jesus, not what goes in (Mark 7:15).

Inside each of us there is something rotten – the Bible calls it sin. It is destructive of personality and relationships.

Wholeness

Wholeness means a relationship with God which expresses itself in honest relationships with other people and in living a godly life in this ungodly world. Jesus emphasized that this quality is not just a matter of regulatory co...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART 1: EXPOSING THE GAP
• 1. The problem
• PART 2: THE GAP IS CLOSED...WHEN WE ARE CHANGED
• 2. Facing the truth
• 3. Loving change
• 4. Growing relationships
• PART 3: THE GAP IS CLOSED...WHEN WE MAKE A DIFFERENCE
• 5. Working it out
• 6. A world of difference
• 7. Wisdom at work
• 8. Enjoying success
• PART 4: THE GAP IS CLOSED...WHEN WE GROW THROUGH TOUGH TIMES
• 9. Recovering from failure
• 10. Tested faith
• 11. Hoping for the best?
• PART 5: THE GAP IS CLOSED...AS WE NEAR OUR GOAL
• 12. Eyes on the prize
• 13. Conclusion: Closing the gap
• Notes