Pioneer Christian Monthly - September, 1978

Unless The Lord Builds The House
John Heeg

Psalm 12 7:1-2

The summer months are almost behind us again. Vacation time for many is over. The calendar says back to work ... back for another school year ... back for another exciting Church year with all its planning and associated activities. The question, however, is: Is it really all that exciting as it appears?

Many of us begin the new school year, the new church year, and our work after a pleasant vacation with much enthusiasm and seeing it as a fascinating adventure. But then gradually, imperceptibly, as a result of disappointments, through the deadening effect of routine, even without realizing why, it becomes a burden, just a duty to be performed, a habit, a prison rather than an adventure. What did really happen?

We are living in a time in which man has made again in our western culture the greatest harmful distinction between our professional lives and our spiritual lives, as if we can divide humanity into two neat compartments. Today the biblical faith has become irrelevant to issues of social and public morality and is limited to private life. We leave God out of the picture of all our human labours. Men work for material reward in the form of profits and wages. We see our work, our education as a service for our own concern as an end in itself. Today we live in a culture which has lost the vision that all our human activities and efforts get their final meaning from a relationship anchored in the Divine will.

Modern man is re-building once again the 'old Tower of Babel' of so many years ago (Gen. 11: 1 - 9). As it happened then, so it will happen today. "Unless the Lord builds the house those who build it labour in vain."

As God's people in the midst of God's own world, we have to learn once again to see all our work whether it be scientific, technical, commercial, educational, artistic, industrial, agricultural or manual, has its appointed place in the divine adventure of the world. Christ is the centre of everything!

Dr. W. Brunat of Lyons once said: "I used to look upon myself as the servant of science; now I realize that I am in God's service, and that science is my servant to that end." This is what the psalmist discovered in his life in the time in which he lived. This then should be the task of every Christian to discover this same truth in our modern times. For only then will our work, our educational efforts, our church activity find meaning when we place it in the hands of our Lord Jesus and use it to His Service and the upbuilding of His Kingdom! When we see our work as an intricate part of God's great plan for His world, our lives will never become dull or unappealing. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we will indeed learn that the true value of all our activities is not in what we do but in doing it with God, in entering into the creative adventure of God, in entering into intimate fellowship with Him!!!

The answer then for the great adventure of life is found in the Surrender of our lives to God. He will bring one adventure to an end only to open another one to us. For an adventure with God continues, it even overcomes the shadow of death itself, and leaps into a new adventure of the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband (Rev. 21: 2).

Praise the LORD for such an adventure!

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