Clinging in the Ordinary

I once heard a pastor say that the most dangerous word in the Christian vocabulary is “spiritual.” I think he had a point; we’ve done some real damage with that word.

For many men and women, their lives are mostly divided into two categories. There’s the spiritual half, which includes thing like their quiet time, Sunday service, prayer meetings, and for the most part, the moments when we feel close to God and are consciously thinking about Him. On the other hand, there’s everything else. Things like our jobs, our marriage, our kids, the dishes, the drive to work, some arguments, grocery lists, and even the exhaustion at the end of a long day.

We call the first category “spiritual” and we call the second category “ordinary.” By doing this, I think we’ve made a serious mistake. Indeed, the Reformation spent a century trying to correct this error, but the modern church has, in a lot of ways, began to embrace it again.

The Bible, on the other hand, doesn’t divide life like this. The God of Scripture isn’t just the God of Sunday mornings or special quiet times. No, He’s the God of the whole week. He’s the God of every part of our life and the clinging He calls us to isn’t something we do in certain set-apart devotional times and then hit pause while real life happens. No, a life that clings embrace the truth that God is supposed to run through everything.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s that most of my life is, in fact, ordinary. I’m a husband and a father of 3 children. Beyond that, I go to work, teach Sunday school, and write when I can find the time. So, if clinging to Christ only happens in them rare quiet times, then this means, most of my life is happening without Him. But, I don’t believe that’s how it is.

Work Before the Fall

Before we get to Luther and the Reformation, we need to go back further, all the way to the sixth day of creation. The mistake that Luther[1] tried to correct was a misreading of what God said about work before sin ever entered the world.

“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’” (Genesis 1:28)

In the beginning God gave human beings a job before the Fall.  It says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). Adam was responsible for tending the garden, naming the animals, bringing order to creation; he was responsible for the “ordinary” things of life. More than that, none of these things were a punishment. God in His good design planned all of these things for Adam and Eve. Work was a holy thing before it was ever a hard thing. But when sin entered the picture, it made work painful, sweaty, and added to it, thorns and thistles (Genesis 3:17–19). But don’t hear me wrongly. Just because work was more difficult, that doesn’t mean that it was bad.

What this means then, is that the man who plows a field, the woman who nurses a baby, and the carpenter who builds a table are all doing something God called good at the first. Before the fall. In our day we need to understand that ordinary work isn’t just an inconvenience that pays the bills in between our “spiritual” activities. Instead, it’s one of the ways God provides daily bread for His creatures, and one of the ways people made in His image reflect Him, by shaping, ordering and caring for the world He made.

Luther and the Recovery of Vocation

When the Reformation came, one of its most precious gifts to the “ordinary” Christians was recovering the truth about their work. We call it the doctrine of vocation, from the Latin word for “calling.”[2]

Before Luther, the idea of a holy calling was mostly reserved for people who had entered some sort of religious life. These people were monks, nuns, and priests. Ordinary work, on the other hand, was tolerated and even necessary, but it wasn’t “sacred.” Rather, the truly spiritual person was the one who stepped out of their “ordinary” life and into the monastery, away from the world.[3]

Luther, with all his might, tore this distinction to the ground. He argued that every lawful role in human life, whether the farmer in his field, the mother with her child, the judge in his court, the cobbler at his bench, was a calling from God, a place where God Himself was at work through ordinary hands to care for their neighbors. For Luther, there weren’t two classes of Christians that so many people are prone to embrace, the spiritual and the secular. Indeed, there was one people group, called to glorify God and serve others wherever God had seen fit to place them.[4]

Paul says it this way,

“And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17).

It is “whatever you do” and never “if you only do.” Paul doesn’t limit any of it to just certain spiritual or ministry activities. For Luther and for Paul, work and rest, meals and chores, and whatever you do, all of it is meant to be done in the name of the Lord Jesus.

A few verses later Paul even says,

“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:23–24).

I love that, “you are serving the Lord Christ.” And he was talking about the simple ordinary work.

More than this, Paul is addressing bondservants and people with very little control over their work and very little recognition for even doing it. If anyone could have said their work didn’t matter to God, it was these people. Yet we watch Paul encourage them with the opposite. He points out that the Lord Christ sees it, and He’s the one they’re really serving.

So, what about the things we consider “spiritual?” Does this make these things, like the ordinary means of grace, less important? No, indeed the Word, prayer, the Lord’s Supper, and the gathering of the church, are the roots of the ordinary tree that sways in a life of God glorifying wind. But we must understand that what grows from those roots should reach into every corner of ordinary life. The clinging you and I cultivate with our Bibles open in the morning is supposed to be the same clinging that shapes how we talk to our spouses at breakfast, how we treat a difficult coworker, and how we parent our kids at bedtime.

[1] Luther’s discussion of the Fall and the nature of work before it is found in the commentary on Genesis 3, pp. 150–180 in the American Edition (Vol. 1)

[2] In Latin, vocare means “to call,” and vocatio is the noun form, often used in religious, philosophical, and moral contexts to refer to a divine or moral call to a particular role, duty, or path. Dictionary.com, Etymology.

[3] Gene Edward Veith Jr., God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002), 17–19.

[4] Martin Luther, "To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation," in Luther's Works, vol. 44, ed. James Atkinson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 127–29; Martin Luther, "Psalm 147," in Luther's Works, vol. 14, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (St. Louis: Concordia, 1958), 114.