We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

Don’t Be a Functional Atheist at Christmas

Image by Brian W. Tobin via Flickr

Image by Brian W. Tobin via Flickr

All of us raised in Western culture have been strongly conditioned by what is called a secular worldview. The word secular comes from the Latin saeculum, meaning “the present world.” A secular worldview, therefore, is one that focuses on the present physical world and ignores or rejects the spiritual realm. To the extent that one is secularized, spiritual realities like God, angels, demons, and heaven don’t have a significant role in one’s thought or life.

Of course many of us continue to believe in things like God, Jesus, angels, demons, heaven, and hell. But as every study on the topic has shown, our beliefs tend to have little impact on our lives. The majority of Western people hold some sort of spiritual beliefs, but nonetheless continue to live much of their lives as functional atheists.

Let’s be honest. Most of us don’t think about God in most of our waking moments. Still fewer consciously surrender to God in most of our waking moments. Even fewer experience God’s presence in most of our waking moments. Our day-to-day lives are, for all intents and purposes, God-less.

This is the tragic affliction of secularism.

The Gospels tell us that the birth of Jesus is all about the presence of God. His name is “Immanuel” which means God with us. The Incarnation of God introduced the Kingdom of God as Jesus perfectly manifested the reign of God. Jesus did this through unbroken communion with the Father. He never did or said anything except what he saw and heard the Father do. His life was an unbroken act of obedient surrender to the Father’s will. In other words, he lived out the absolute antithesis of a life lived according to the secular worldview. Instead of thinking, living, and experiencing reality on a moment-by-moment basis as though God does not exist, Jesus thought, lived, and experienced the world as though it is continually permeated with God’s presence—because, as a matter of fact, it is.

You are, right now, enveloped by God’s loving presence like a molecule of water in the middle of an infinite ocean. His loving presence presses in on you like the water pressure on a submarine three miles beneath the ocean. Right now, simply become aware of this truth. Let the reality of God’s loving presence be a canvas against which you experience and interpret the world around you.

The most insignificant details of our life take on eternal significance when they are integrated with an awareness of God’s continual presence. In God’s presence, the “secular” world disappears as it is enveloped by, and permeated with, the “holy.”

As I’ve practiced the presence of God, (I write about this in my book Present Perfect) there have been moments when I’ve suddenly become aware of the beautiful mystery of every detail of my surroundings. It’s like the Kingdom breaks through my habitual, false, “secular” view of the world and explodes it from the inside out. In these moments I sense the mind-boggling miracle of existence in everything around me. A leaf twitching in the wind; a bird flying overhead; a ladybug on a blade of grass—it’s all unfathomable miracle. In these moments I am tangibly aware that all things are at every moment held in existence by “[God’s] powerful word” (Heb 1:3). I am struck with childlike wonder. I feel like I’m looking at the world for the first time.

Don’t let the secularized worldview of functional atheism dull your senses. Surrender to his love. Acknowledge his presence around you. Pay attention to the nudges in your heart. God is present.

—Adapted from The Myth of a Christian Religion, pages 163-170.

Related Reading

The Cruciform Way of the Lamb

In this video, Greg offers insight into how to read the Bible with the cross at the center of the revelation of God, thereby reframing how we interpret the violent and nationalistic passages of the Old Testament. Travis Reed from The Work of the People did a series of interviews with Greg a while ago and…

Kingdom Sightings: God and Guinness

Evan Leeson via Compfight Here’s a unique Kingdom initiative from one of our readers that we wanted to share with you. If you’re in Ann Arbor, check it out! Starting in January, one of the pastors at our church (Kevin Davis, of 242 Community Church in Ann Arbor, MI) will be starting a new initiative…

What “God Loves You” Actually Means

From the beginning, God chose to have a people who would be the object of his eternal love, just as Christ is the object of his eternal love. God sought to acquire a “bride” for Christ who would receive and reflect the love of the triune community (Eph 5:25-32). And the only qualification for being…

God’s Big Toes

Last weekend, Greg preached a sermon on what it means to function as the body of Christ. You can visit the Woodland Hills Church website to download audio or video as well as presentation slides. We hope you’ll enjoy this call to serve one another the way Christ has called us to serve.

Urgent!

Jeff Goins invited blogger Sundi Jo to share some thoughts on The Power of being Present in an Age of Urgency. It’s a call to slow down and notice what we really care about. It’s a call to prioritize our lives so that the things that really matter rise to the surface and the things…

God is Not What You Expect

Jesus came, in part, to finally reveal the absolute truth about God. He is the way and the truth (alethia) and the life (Jn 14:6). The word “truth” means “uncovered.” And what we find once God is uncovered is that he’s completely different than what we fallen humans generally expect God to be. As we…