Whether Ye Eat Or Drink

He did the arithmetic on a Sunday afternoon, because he is that sort of man, and the number has not left him.

Church is roughly two hours. His reading in the morning is maybe fifteen minutes on a good day and he has perhaps four good days. Grace before dinner, if the children are not already eating, is about eleven seconds.

So call it three hours a week, generously, of what he would describe as time with God.

There are one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week.

Which means that on his own accounting, the part of his life that has anything to do with God comes to under two percent, and the other ninety-eight percent is work, and the drive, and the shopping, and the pipe under the sink, and the thing with the car insurance, and the four hours on Saturday putting up a shelf that took four hours because it always does.

He is not lukewarm. That is what makes this worth writing about. He would like more. He has tried to get more, in the way men try, with a system, twice.

What he has never questioned is the categories.

If you have got a percentage like that, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to suggest you add a fourth hour.

Paul picks the two most ordinary verbs available

Here is a sentence that would end the problem if anybody read the first four words as carefully as they read the last five.

Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.1 Corinthians 10:31

Everybody quotes do all to the glory of God. Fine. It has been on a great many kitchen walls.

But look at what he leads with. He could have picked anything. He is a man who has just written several chapters on serious matters, and when he reaches for an example of the ordinary he chooses eating and drinking.

That is not an accident and it is not filler. Eating and drinking are the two most involuntary, unglamorous, animal things a human being does. Everybody does them. They cannot be made impressive. Nobody has ever had a profound experience of drinking a glass of water.

And Paul takes those two and puts them in the same sentence as the glory of God, and then, in case anybody wants to argue the boundary, adds or whatsoever ye do, which closes the door on the whole idea of a boundary.

The categories he has been running his life on are not in the verse. They are not in the chapter. They come from somewhere else entirely, and they have quietly written off ninety-eight percent of a good man's life.

You have not been living two percent of a life with God, and you never were. 1 Corinthians 10:31 is where that sits, in a sentence built out of the two least spiritual verbs available, and the same Spirit who moved Paul past every dignified example to reach for eating is the one who hands a man back his own week.

What the shelf on Saturday actually was

Now let me be concrete, because a man who thinks in percentages will want to know what changes and the answer is not what he expects.

Nothing on his Saturday changes. He still puts the shelf up and it still takes four hours. The pipe under the sink is still the pipe under the sink and God is not about to make it interesting.

What changes is the accounting.

Because there are two ways to have four hours under a sink. One is: four hours of dead time in the ninety-eight percent, endured, with the real life waiting on the other side of it. The other is four hours of a man doing something for his household, in the presence of God, who is present in that cupboard on the same terms He is present everywhere else.

The hours are identical. The plumbing is identical. What is different is whether the man is in the room with anybody.

And note what this is not. It is not a technique for making chores spiritual, and it is not an instruction to think holy thoughts under a sink, which nobody manages and which becomes one more thing to fail at by Wednesday.

It is simply that the two percent was never a boundary line. It was just the part he had been told counted.

You have been with Him in the ninety-eight percent the whole time, and it was already so before you noticed. He promised it, in the sentence about a God in whom we live and move and have our being, which does not carve out a zone (Acts 17:28), and His Spirit does not step out of a room when a man picks up a wrench.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing in this article asks anything of your household. Nobody else in that house has to change one thing, nobody has to be told anything, and nothing here should make dinner later or make anybody's evening harder. If a practice costs the people you live with, it is the wrong practice.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You are not one step behind anybody, and you never were. Scripture settled that where God accepts according to what a person actually has (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's percentage.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.