I must confess I have been among the first to criticize Biola students, including myself, for not acting on the amazing truths in God’s Word that we learn in class.

• What if we loved one another as Christ has loved us? What would it look like for us to actually obey Jesus’ words from John 13:34?

• What if we presented our bodies as a sacrifice to God? What if we transformed our minds instead of conforming to the world? What if we abhorred what is evil and clung to what is good? What if we were kind to one another, giving preference to others above ourselves? What if we did not lag behind in diligence but actually followed the instructions Paul lists in Romans 12?

• What if we became doers of the word and not hearers only, like James commands. What if we who are only hearers stopped living in self-deception, forgetting whose we are: God’s. (1:22-25)

• What if we lived with a healthy fear of God, as Peter teaches, for He has bought us with His precious blood to live holy, as He is holy?

These are hard questions, yet they must be asked. To answer them correctly, however, doesn’t take a plunge into “full-time Christian ministry.” The supposition that such a response equates a nobler calling is absolute bunk. God never divided between “sacred” and “secular” work. He doesn’t deem the teacher profane or the dentist worldly. No great gap exists between the preacher and the physicist, the missionary and the McDonald’s hamburger flipper.

There is only the world as it exists today: created by God, tainted by sin, redeemed by Christ through His blood.

Every Christian is empowered to be a witness to Jerusalem first and to the ends of the earth. Jesus’ last words, in Acts 1:8, indicate this reality.

Some of us will witness to the Jewish coworker, the Lebanese donut man, the Korean neighbor, the East Indian Starbucks barista, the Hispanic Wal-Mart clerk, the Dutch UPS delivery guy and the Nigerian lab technician -— all while being a psychologist in suburban America. Some of us will witness to only one ethnicity -— the Javanese of Indonesia, or the Pardo in Brazil — as foreign missionaries. Some of us will witness to one demographic —- homeless women in Grand Rapids or AIDS orphans in Kabale or gang-vulnerable youth in Queens. Some of us will witness to rabbis and businessmen, single moms and lovebirds, attorneys and ex-convicts — while we wait tables at Chili’s in Brea.

It is good for youth pastors to encourage teens to do devotions. It is good for social justice coordinators to give shoes to poor kids in Argentina. But a Christianity reducible to therapy or activism is, in the end, only sentimentality.

Without the gospel -— the very dynamite power of God as seen in the death and resurrection of Christ that radically calls us to die to self and rise to walk in new life —- we have nothing better than a God who exists only to meet felt needs. And what good is a God crafted in the image of my expectations?

Every Christian is to see the world as Christ does — as His ambassador. We are torn from our expectations and reborn according to His expectations that we might beseech others for Christ to “be reconciled to God” (II Corinthians 5:20).

Perhaps now is a good time to realize that ministry is not extracurricular, not a sideline. It is also not a shunning of the real world, not an immersion only in all things spiritual. Ministry is simply allowing the Holy Spirit to pervade our life in order to glorify Jesus and further the purposes of the Father. It happens on the soccer team, in accounting class. It occurs during when we write papers or finish chapel credits. It is living the everyday as extraordinary. It is reclaiming the mundane as missional.

As Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Worship is a way of seeing the world in the light of God.”

But don’t just be sentimental about it. Unleash the liturgy of a gospel-driven life.

Do not wait until some deed of greatness you may do,
Do not wait to shed your light afar,
To the many duties that are near you now be true,
Brighten the corner where you are.
(1941 hymn lyrics)