Things Sacred and Things Secular
J. A. Jacob, D. D. Colossians 3:17 And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. It is one of the most precious effects of Christianity that it gives interest and dignity to commonplace life. Think how it would bear on the obscure toilers of Ephesus, Corinth, or Rome. Artizan, labourer, soldier, slave, would learn the truth that God cared for him, and designed him for a glorious destiny. It is through Christ that life is worthy of the name of life. The distinction between things secular and things sacred has wrought unspeakable mischief. Involves one rule of life for the person in holy orders, and another for the man who has not received a religious vocation. The monk or the nun is a "religious;" if any be not a priest, or monk, or nun, that person need not be so religious. It is a detestable, an irreligious distinction. I. IT IS A DISTINCTION WHICH WOULD HAVE BEEN UTTERLY FOREIGN TO THE MIND OF AN EARLY CHRISTIAN, AND IS QUITE OPPOSED TO THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Christ, therein revealed, has laid hold upon the whole of life. He has consecrated what we call secular employments by Himself engaging in them. Possible to eat and drink to the glory of God. II. THIS DISTINCTION IS BAD, BECAUSE IT VANISHES ON NEARER OBSERVATION. We find it perfectly impossible to draw a sharp line. Art, science, politics, business, everyday duty, instead of being detached from religion, have such intimate relations with it that they are, or may be, and ought to be, themselves essentially religious. A bad sermon on the text, "Behold I stand at the door and knock," is (it would seem) sacred; but to paint the well-known picture illustrating same text was secular. To write hymns sacred. Then was it a sacred or a secular work to write "Paradise Lost," Wordsworth's "Excursion," or Cowper's "Task"? Surely, too, all great music is most truly religious. Again, is it a sacred or a secular work when a young girl, under a deep sense of duty, consecrates her life to attendance upon a suffering mother? Contrariwise, consider what are generally classed as sacred works — praying, preaching, administering sacraments, visiting the sick. How intensely secular they may become I How mean and perfunctory the spirit in which they may be performed! How easily may their motive come to be that so well expressed in Bible words — "Put me into one of the priest's offices, that I may eat a piece of bread." III. THIS DISTINCTION IS RADICALLY IRRELIGIOUS, Implies that all things are not of God. Churches are, but not houses we live in. Clergymen, but not men of other professions and employments. Sunday, but not other six days. But Christ claimed the world for Himself and His Father, in the sense that He claimed everything in the world. Factories and railways, camps and courts of law, mansions, museums, and picture-galleries, to say nothing of the world of trees, and rivers, and birds, and flowers, form part of the world which belongs to Him, the Heir of all things. This is the only religious view of life. IV. SEEK, THEN, TO MAKE YOUR WHOLE LIFE RELIGIOUS. Pure religion is when the sense of God's love, of the vastness of His claims, of the breadth of His commandments, so works through the life as to make it one organic whole, and when the poor unworthy distinction of secular and sacred is forgotten; when what is most religious is most human, and what is commonest is ennobled and justified by the grace which flows from "Christ our Life." (J. A. Jacob, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him. WEB: Whatever you do, in word or in deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father, through him.