I wonder why we tend to pit certain things against each other that are supposed to go hand in hand?
For example, being Spirit-led isn’t antithetical to being orderly.
Yet from time to time I’ll hear someone say something along the lines of:
“We need to throw out all of our church programs and strategies and just let the Spirit have His way…”
I understand the sentiment. I agree that we need to stay open to the spontaneity of God. But to draw a dividing line between human planning and the initiative of the Spirit is to discount the possibility that the Spirit can work through our strategies just as well as He can work in spite of them.
Another dangerous dichotomy is our frequent separation of prayer and action. Don’t get me wrong, we all need to rely a lot more on God and less on self effort in our day to day lives. But that doesn’t warrant the divorce of prayer and action. Doesn’t God often call us to action in direct response to our prayers? Aren’t the two supposed to work in tandem? Aren’t they as inseparable as wet and water? Then why do we approach them like two opposite extremes? Why do we insist on stopping to pray? Shouldn’t prayer and action flow naturally from one another? Isn’t this the pattern of Scripture?
I feel the same way about faith and works, as well as grace and justice.
They’re two sides of the same coin.
It would simultaneously simplify and enhance our understanding of God’s ways if we’d drop our false dichotomies. We have to embrace the tensions that the vast character of Christ are guaranteed to create.
