The Unity of the Secular and the Sacred

E. Stanley Jones was a missionary, a theologian, and a prolific writer. In his devotional book Victorious Living he shows how the distinctions between secular and sacred are artificial:

"One of the most disastrous divorces that ever took place in Christendom was the divorce between the sacred and the secular. In early Christianity they were one. When the disciples wanted men to look after the food arrangements, they said they must get men 'of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom,' to look after this matter. Wisdom and the Holy Ghost were to be carried into the so-called secular and were to make it sacramental. All life was to be saved.

"Now we have divided life into the sacred and the secular, sacred callings and secular callings, sacred days and secular days, sacred buildings and secular buildings, sacred books and secular books. We thought thus to preserve both. In doing so we have impoverished both. The secular has become materialized, and the sacred etherialized, with the emphasis on the 'ether.' It has been the very devil's strategy thus to divide and rule. And he does rule where they are divided. We can never live victoriously as long as we try to live a compartmentalized life. They must be brought together. They need each other.

"Wrote an earnest missionary: 'When you write, show us how to live victoriously in such dull commonplaces as the keeping of books, attending to uninteresting details such as a missionary has to do. Can we not make the whole thing vicarious by the thought, that, if I do these things someone else will be spared the drudgery of them?' Very beautiful. And yet was there not still the lurking thought that the material was less and other than the spiritual, and that one goes into it as one takes up a cross? Instead, should it not be looked on a part of one's spiritual life--that the spiritual life cannot be manifested except in and through the material? The word must become flesh or die as a word.

"We cannot leave this cleavage between the sacred and the secular without pausing another day, for if we still keep them divided, then we are defeated indeed, and defeated where it counts most.

"We often quote with approval the man who said that he made shoes to pay expenses while he served God. But should he not have thought of serving God through the making of the shoes? Was not that material thing itself to become the manifestation of the spiritual? Is not the thing that attracts us to Brother Lawrence the fact that he practiced the presence of God in and through the washing of his pans and the scrubbing of his floors? The Old Testament says that every pot in Jerusalem shall have 'holiness unto the Lord' written upon it. And was not this the thing that Brother Lawrence fulfilled? His pans had just that written on them.

"The business man must be able to handle his ledgers with the same sense of sacredness and mission as the minister handles the sacred Book in the pulpit. Of course that would mean the scrapping of many a business, for you cannot handle crookedness with sacredness. But it would be far better to scrap a business than to scrap one's soul. But legitimate business can be made a sacrament. 'The extension of the incarnation' should mean just this: here today I stand in this embodiment of the spirit of Christ in this situation. I shall work out His mind and spirit in my relationship with things and persons. As Peter offered his boat to Jesus to teach the multitudes from, so I offer to Him my boat, my business, my life from which He may teach in this situation the meaning of the Kingdom. I am an extension of the incarnation."