God Will Watch Your Soap Opera

"The great danger of biblical discipleship is that we should have two religions:

a glorious, biblical Sunday gospel that sets us free from the world, that the cross and resurrection of Christ makes us eternity alive within us, a magnificent gospel of Genesis and Romans and Revelation;

and, then, an everyday religion that we make do with during the week between the time of leaving the world and arriving in heaven.
We have the Sunday gospel for the big crises of existence.
For the mundane trivialities-
the times when our foot slips on a loose stone,
or the heat of the sun gets too much for us,
or the influence of the moon gets us down –

we use the everyday religion of the Reader’s Digest reprint,
advice from a friend,
an Ann Landers column,
the huckstered wisdom of a talk-show celebrity.
We practice patent-medicine religion.

We know that God created the universe and has accomplished our eternal salvation. But we can’t believe that he condescends to watch the soap opera of our daily trials and tribulations; so we purchase our own remedies for that. To ask him to deal with what troubles us each day is like asking a famous surgeon to put iodine on a scratch.

But Psalm 121 says that the same faith that works in the big things works in the little things."

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Eugene Peterson (Page 44)