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Weekly Newsletter: Activate Your Whole Life
If we’re going to see the Great Commission fulfilled in our lifetime, we have to tackle the crippling power of the Sacred-Secular Divide. This heresy has left so many of us on the Kingdom sidelines 40-50 hours a week, living as if our spiritual life and our everyday work life are from different planets.
When many Christians step into their day-jobs, they mentally, emotionally, and spiritually step out of their sacred Kingdom calling. This has left a vast number of Christ-followers living Gospel-anemic, purposeless, and missions-oblivious lives.
I stumbled onto this quote from Eugene Peterson in the Wisdom Book Preface to his Message Translation of the Bible. I think it’s an appropriate challenge for us this week:
“It is fairly common among people who get interested in religion or God to get proportionately disinterested in their jobs and families, their communities and their colleagues – the more of God, the less of the human. But that’s not the way God intends it. Wisdom counters this tendency by giving witness to the precious nature of human experience in all its forms, whether or not it feels or appears ‘spiritual.'”
–Eugene Peterson (The Message, Preface to the Wisdom Books)
That doesn’t feel like much of a Great Commission quote, but I think it’s foundational for activating our whole lives as believers. As followers of Jesus, we must orient our entire existence toward God’s Kingdom. The Gospel redeems and resurrects all things (Colossians 1:19-20), including our marketplace work.
If you have a job in the marketplace, you are not on the Great Commission B-team just biding your time in the secular world waiting for a potential call-up to the “Sacred Leagues.” You don’t have the luxury of offloading missions to the “professionals.” The Good News of Jesus will only reach the ends of the earth when we all awaken to our common calling as the people of God. That includes those of us who go to work every day in the marketplace.
THIS WEEK ON THE WEBSITE:
ARTICLE: Is the Great Commission for Today?
A missionary practitioner serving on the field shares the inspirational story of Lilian Trotter and how it keeps her motivated toward the difficult and dangerous work she and her husband do every day.
VIDEO: Business as Mission (BAM)
Business as Mission is not something new, it’s actually recapturing something very, very old.
Accelerating the Great Commission through the Marketplace,
Erik Cooper | The Stone Table
Erik Cooper
After starting his career in the business world, Erik spent 12 years in full-time ministry, both on staff at a large suburban church and as a church planter in a downtown urban context. In addition to his role at The Stone Table, he also serves as the Vice President of Community Reinvestment Foundation, a nonprofit real estate company that provides high-quality affordable housing all over Indiana while investing its profits into missions through The Stone Table.
