All In

So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. (Galatians 3:26)

I didn't grow up far from God. My grandmother lived with us, and she read the Bible with me every single night. Then Alzheimer's took her, slowly and completely, until the woman who sang in church didn't know my name. I couldn't watch it. So I put God on a shelf and walked away.

For the next twenty years I ran one operating system: deals, deadlines, workouts, money, ambition. And it worked. College football. A company doing millions. A beautiful family. Awards on the wall. I had it all. And at the peak of it, I was empty, with one thought I couldn't outrun: there has to be more than this.

A lot of people come to Christ on their knees after hitting rock bottom. I walked to Him on my feet, longing for something deeper. And when I finally opened a Bible again, here's what I found: He doesn't ask for a compartment. He claims all of it. The desk, the bank account, the gym, the marriage, the ambition. All of it, or He isn't really Lord of any of it.

That's what this publication is. Every Monday, one piece of the whole life, put back under the One it was built for.

The divided life ends here.

JT

Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path. (Psalm 119:105)

Colossians 1:16–17 (NIV): "For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."

Paul wrote this to a young church in a small town being told that Jesus was one spiritual power among many: useful for religion, optional for everything else. Sound familiar? It's the same pitch our culture makes: keep your faith, just keep it in its lane.

Paul's answer is four verses of demolition. Everything was created through him. Everything was created for him. And then the line that carries this entire publication: in him all things hold together.

Look closely at that last phrase, because the tense matters. Paul doesn't say Christ held things together once, at creation, and then handed the keys back. The claim is present tense, happening now, continuously. The picture behind the phrase is of something being actively held in place: the way mortar holds a stone wall, the way power holds a screen lit. Remove it and the thing doesn't gradually decline. It comes apart. The lights don't dim. They go out.

Which means the "secular" part of your week is a fiction. There is no meeting, no invoice, no workout, no hard conversation happening outside of Christ. He is not waiting for you in the church parking lot on Sunday. He is presently holding together the room you're sitting in.

You don't bring Christ into your work life. You wake up in a world He's holding together.

Here's the practice for this week. It takes ten minutes on Monday and thirty seconds a day after that.

Find your loudest hour.

Open your calendar. Look at the recurring blocks: the commute, the standing meeting, the workout, the budget review, the school pickup. Now be honest about which one is loudest. Not the hardest hour. The fullest one. The hour where life gets every one of your thoughts and Christ gets none of them.

Circle it. That's your block.

Every day this week, before that block starts, pray one sentence over it. Not a production. One sentence: "This hour is yours. Hold it together." Then do the hour. Do it well. Do it as work that belongs to Him, because according to Colossians, it already does. You're just the last one to find out.

By Friday, notice what changed. Probably not the hour. Probably you. The point of the practice isn't to make the hour holy. Christ already sustains it. The point is that in your noisiest sixty minutes, one sentence now runs the other way.

One block. One sentence. Five days. Start there.

"Your Way's Better" by Forrest Frank. The sound of admitting the thing this whole edition is about. Play it loud before your loudest hour.

This is the first edition of All In Christ. There will be one every Monday, and every one of them will be about living our whole lives under our whole Lord: work, money, marriage, health, ambition, all of it.

Whatever this week throws at you: the deal that stalls, the workout you skip, the conversation you're dreading. None of it is happening outside Him. He's got this. And He's got you.

See you next Monday.

Stay all in Christ.

JT

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.