"Secular" Isn't a Thing (Controversies #1)

  Secular =❌🚫👎

How often have we heard or spoken phrases like the following:

"I read this book that was really good, even though it was secular..."

"He sold out, he's playing secular music now..."

"Sacred and secular"

"Sacred versus secular"

"In my secular job..."

STOP!

You're a Christian? You have no secular job. What you have is a job out in the world that is your Kingdom assignment, and you can either advance the Kingdom there (not by preaching, but by performing your work with an eternal, ministry, salt-and-light mindset) or you can pass up the opportunity, mistakenly thinking it has no part in your Jesus-walk. 

That book (or music, etc.) was good, but it was secular? Nope. If it was good, there was something of God or his creation in it. Spread that goodness into the marketplace of ideas! But if you can't identify a redeeming quality after all, maybe that song, movie, painting was more exciting, or scary, or clever than actually good. 

You see, life is not divided into sacred and secular. That is a lie from the pit of hell designed to crowd believers into an ever-tinier ghetto called "Sacred," all the while being deceived into abandoning (with their spirits and souls if not their bodies) every area of life except the church as too ungodly to mess with unless they can't help it. Then the devil runs wild, and we have the nerve to complain that he's taken over society when in fact we rolled over without a fight. We shrink even further into our holy bunker, and a vicious cycle begins.*

There's no such thing as secular.** 

First, it's all your Jesus-walk. Second, nothing is neutral. Jesus teaches extensively on this idea in Luke 11. No, the real divider in life is between sin and not-sin.  

Is it sin for any human being? Stay away. 

Is it sin for you? (For example, you're not acting from faith according to Romans 14:23, or God has told you that's not your path.) Stay away. 

Is it not sin, is it in your heart to do it, and has the Spirit not forbidden you? That's Kingdom. For goodness' sake, don't hand it over to the bad guy!

*This may sound like 7-Mountains teaching, and there are similarities, but God gave it to me independently in the late 1990s, in the given concept/language/picture rather than in 7-Mountains terminology or with accompanying 7-Mountains beliefs. For example, I do not believe that Jesus can't return unless the church takes over society. 

**Secular is a legitimate word as the adjectival form of saeculum, meaning "the coming and going of the ages." In any other sense, Christian, kick that word to the curb.