Seven Days of Faith, 2d Edition

R. Paul Stevens

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781725284814
  9781725284821
• eBook ISBN:
  9781725284838
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

These days, people talk about their schedules filling up 24/7--twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We wear busyness like a merit badge, as if the more we do, the better we become. But R. Paul Stevens says this is not biblical. Nor is it helpful. For Christians life isn't about checking off "to-do" lists. It's about connecting with God and infiltrating thoughtful, biblical faith into our everyday lives. Sometimes that means activity, but sometimes not. Everyday spirituality--the subject of the book--embraces purposeful times of work, relationships, and rest, centered on God instead of personal or cultural expectations. But how can you do it? It's not easy exiting the fast track to practice a slowed-down yet down-to-earth holiness. Stevens understands this, and offers practical insights to developing a "subversive spirituality"--a meaningful faith that seeps into your work, family, sexuality, friendships, outreach, aloneness, and leisure--and fills you with joy. But most importantly, it motivates you to lovingly abide with God seven days a week. Matthew the Poor, an Eastern monk in Egypt, once said that "life is but one single way that leads to the kingdom of God."

Part One

The Day at Work

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

1 Corinthians 13:13

“We continually remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”

1 Thessalonians 1:3

Faith: Doing God’s Work

Love: Recovering the Amateur Status of the Christian

Hope: Making Our Mark on Heaven

1

Faith

Doing God’s Work

”There is no work better than another to please God; to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a souter [cobbler], or an apostle, all are one, as touching the deed, to please God.”

William Tyndale

If I cannot find God in the middle of my work—where my concerns and worries, pains, and joys are—it does not make sense to try to find Him in the hours set free at the periphery of my life.”

Henri Nouwen

Some time ago I finished building a cedar deck for our tiny country cabin. It has a tempered glass perimeter so our grandchildren can safely push their noses to the glass while they look at the constantly-changing sea dazzling in reflected light below. An arbutus tree grows awkwardly through the middle exactly where a table would normally be placed. But the tree belongs. So we will sit around the tree. The day I finished building the deck, I repeatedly walked out the front door to view it from different angles. Over and again I said to myself (and to God?), “It is good! It is beautiful!” echoing God’s satisfaction over his own labors (Gen 1:10, 12, 18, 25, 31). I wondered if God enjoyed and appreciated my deck as much as I did! For simple satisfaction in a job well done turns into egoism if not returned to God. But if it is returned to God it is multiplied into praise. So even something as mundane as building a deck can become an act of worship.

Far from being a diversion from the spiritual life, work takes us directly to God through its creative possibilities and its purifying pressures. The professor in Ecclesiastes concludes when he examines his life “under the sun” that work does not fully satisfy because we will probably be followed by a fool, and our work is toil, anxious striving, grief, and pain (Eccl 2:17–24). So the relative meaninglessness of work makes our experience of labor into an evangelist inviting us to find our fulfillment in God through our work, rather than finding our fulfillment in our work through God, an important though subtle distinction.1 Our experience of work shows us that man does not live by bread alone. But some work, namely work commonly associated with ministry functions, seems to be dealing with bread for eternity, not bread for today. This raises a fundamental question: What makes a person’s work Christian?

In “The Day at Work” we will explore one biblical answer: what makes work Christian is faith, hope, and love. A sermon can be delivered for the devil’s glory and a sweater knitted as a sacrament. It is faith, hope, and love that make the difference. It is not the exterior form of the work that makes it Christian but the interiority of it—the spirituality of work. This approach is contrary to the spoken and unspoken message of the church. Exploring working in faith (in this chapter), love, and hope (in the next two chapters) will provide a spiritual understanding of work that is based on the Word of God. It is an important question, partly because work occupies such a large part of our lives.

The average North American person spends some 88,000 hours on the job from the first day of full-time employment until retirement. Work occupies about 40 percent of his or her waking life. In contrast, a dedicated Christian is estimated to spend as few as 4000 hours in a lifetime in church meetings and church-related activities.2 Concentrating on this latter, the church has made spirituality into a leisure-time, discretionary-time involvement that provides a welcome relief from the boredom of much work, or from the idolatrous demands of the marketplace. But true spirituality is more subversive than that. It sneaks into the center of our lives rather than the circumference, compelling us to find God in the down-to-earth rather than the up-in-heaven. We have a down-to-earth God who went through the complete human experience from conception to resurrection. So to be God-like people we must become equipped to work for God and, as we shall see, to work with God. For both God and humankind are workers and work is a powerful link between the Creator and his creating creatures.

God at Work

The first worker is God. Work is a place to meet God. Indeed we actually do the work of God and we do this with God. The Bible opens with God hard at work, crafting things and people. God scrapes up dust (which he had carefully made) and breathes into the molded clay (Gen 2:7), imparting his interior being into an artistic expression of himself: shaping, separating, speaking, and forming. The Bible ends with God still at work recreating and transfiguring what he and his creatures have made—a city with beautiful metals and precious stones extracted from the earth now shaped exquisitely to embellish our ultimate environment (Rev 21–22). Apart from keeping Sabbath, which turns out to be the inner meaning of both his work and ours, God never stops working. Nor does Jesus (John 5:17); nor should humankind. For work is not only our duty but our dignity.

“Doing the work of the Lord” is often thought to be things like preaching, evangelizing, and giving pastoral care. But the Bible shows us that God’s work in creation, sustenance, redemption, and consummation is much more than religious activity. God is a shepherd, potter, homemaker, vinedresser, farmer, craftsperson, metal smith, and tentmaker.3 By inviting humankind to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen 1:28), to “rule over . . . every living creature” (1:28), and to “work [the garden] and take care of it” (2:15), God includes people in God’s own work. This involves designing, building, beautifying, embellishing, maintaining, providing hospitality, nourishing, informing, evaluating, communicating, revealing outcomes, mending, healing, bringing meaning, making cultures, and bringing joy. We are like God—made in God’s image—in our work. The first recorded work of human beings was a scientific one—taxonomy—naming the animals.4 There is hardly a human occupation that does not in some way involve being a co-worker with God: plumbing, garbage collecting, data processing, hairstyling, politics, art, newspaper reporting, town planning, landscape gardening, lab technology, and, of course, preaching and equipping the saints (Eph 4:11–12). Why then is work so hard—even so-called “Christian work”—and why is it so difficult to “find God in the middle of my work” as Henri Nouwen proposes in the words cited at the beginning of this chapter?

Working for Jesus

The idea that Jesus is our boss is not a new one in Christian circles; but it is seldom understood. At a very preliminary level it means that we are ultimately accountable to Jesus for the stewardship of the gifts and talents with which he trusted us. The parable of the Talents would lead us at least that far (Matt 25:14–30). It is a sin to squander what God has given us to use, or to wrap up our talents, our ideas, and our dreams in a handkerchief and bury them for fear of losing them through a risky experiment or doing our work incorrectly. We are accountable for the investment of our lives. We may sympathize with the one-talent person but w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Mere Spirituality: Introduction, 2d Edition
• Part One: The Day at Work
• Part Two: The Day with the Family
• Part Three: The Day with Brothers and Sisters
• Part Four: The Day with the Neighbor
• Part Five: The Day Alone
• Part Six: The Day in the Wilderness
• Part Seven: The Day of Rest
• Epilogue