Do you feel a tension within yourself, a heart devotion to Christ that finds it difficult relating itself to other aspects of life? Do you feel like a hypocrite who professes one thing and yet lives another? This is the challenge of consistency which every believer must deal with. The German pastor Helmut Thielicke had a few words about it:
‘Perhaps we hear a sermon on loving our neighbor and are even gripped by it. Yet no sooner do we get outside than we merrily continue the quarrel with our neighbor, with our colleague, or with our competitor as if that quarrel hadn’t a thing to do with the message we had just heard. Our heart is like a cabinet with drawers that are strictly separated from one another. In one drawer lie our business activities;in a second are family affairs; a third has leisure activities; and a fourth contains inner matterssuch as our faith and the pious impulses which occasionally come over us when we hear organ music. All of them, however, are neatly divided from one another and remain without mutual contact and exchange.
This is why we need to make the effort (with earnest prayer, of course) to develop a christian mind. We need to see all life as entirely under God’s jurisdiction. There is no secular realm; all is sacred. Made by God, preserved by His power, everything must be run in agreement with his will as revealed in the Bible.
Dayo Adewoye 