withallyourmind.net

I listened to a wonderful lecture last weekend (and I intend to listen to it several more times) by Vinoth Ramachandra entitled Who is Jesus Christ for Us Today?. I was intrigued and convicted by his condemnation of today’s Christians, especially in America, for believing only in a “God-of-the-Gaps”. I had previously only heard this term in connection with the scientific fallacy of saying “God did it” whenever something seems on its face to be unsolvable (or difficult to solve) by natural means. Ramachandra, however, pointed to another way that Christians confine God to the gaps by pushing His influence and importance to the edges of our existence and only appealing to Him when our own knowledge or resources fail. The principle way we do this is by making the imaginary divide between sacred and secular. We imagine that how we perform our occupational duties, participate in the larger culture, and spend our money are unaffected and in a separate realm altogether from what we ‘believe’ or sing about in our churches on Sunday. We want our pastors to teach us how to think about the Bible and what it says, but only insofar as it refrains from making us uncomfortable by daring to put limits on how we spend our leisure time or which way we vote. And we do evangelism by selling a spiritual experience that both begins and ends with the one-time utterance of a simple prayer that makes everything right.

Contrary to these things, what the Bible calls us to is a complete submission of our entire beings to be used for God’s glory and the spread of His kingdom. To be a Christian is not to have a one-time experience and then be done with it. It is to be a follower of Christ, the God who became Man in space and time and stood for justice and mercy in a culture that was short on both (much like ours). And this changes everything. As George Grant has said, Jesus’ emphasis in the Great Commission was that “we need to make disciples who will obey everything that He has commanded, not just in a hazy zone of piety, but in the totality of life…when the Christian’s task is limited to snatching brands from the flickering flames of perdition, then virtually all Christian influence is removed from the world.” (Micah Mandate, p. 54) Christians are called to be salt and light - to preserve and to season, and to expose the darkness of, the world in which they live. And if we are ever going to fulfill this calling, we must recognize that we are not called by a God-of-the-gaps, but by the God who created and is at the center of everything.