With God
1 Corinthians 7:24 - “So, brothers, in whatever condition each was called, there let him remain with God.”
In the 1600s, a young man from France named Nicolas Herman served as a soldier during the Thirty Years’ War. He was badly wounded and later walked with a limp that remained with him for the rest of his life. For a time, he worked as a household servant. Then, at about twenty-six, he entered a Carmelite monastery in Paris, took the name Lawrence of the Resurrection, and was assigned to the kitchen. He spent fifteen years there.
By his own admission, he disliked the work intensely. But what he learned among those pots and pans is the reason we still know his name four centuries later. He discovered that he could be with God in the kitchen just as truly as he could be with God in the chapel. Eventually, the hour of work and the hour of prayer stopped feeling like different hours at all. In the account of one of his conversations, he is quoted as saying: “The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer.” Even amid the noise and clatter of the kitchen, with people calling for different things at once, he said he possessed God with the same tranquility he knew when kneeling in prayer.
Paul has now said some version of this three times in eight verses. Walk in the life the Lord has assigned you. Remain in the condition in which you were called. And when he says it the third and final time, he adds two words that weren’t there before: “There let him remain with God.” Everything hinges on those words. Without them, the passage might sound like little more than advice about accepting your lot in life.
But Paul isn’t telling you merely to remain where you are. He’s telling you how to remain there: with God. That doesn’t mean circumstances can never change. Paul already allowed for that. But what it does mean is that you don’t have to escape your present circumstances before you can know God, worship God, or live a life that matters to God. The kitchen isn’t necessarily a sentence you are serving out. It may become a place where God meets you, and where even the noise and clatter can be turned into prayer.
So, contentment was never really about our circumstances. It’s about the Presence inside them. And this is why the gospel makes contentment possible at all: Christ went into the worst circumstance any human being has ever faced, and He did it so that we would never again be anywhere without Him. He is Immanuel, God with us, and He doesn’t leave when the season runs long. So the invitation is simply to be where you are, with Him, and to live, and love, and give like Jesus right there in it. In the kitchen, on the job site, in the waiting room, in the house that hasn’t gotten any easier.
This is part of why we gather on Sunday. We come in from very different circumstances, sit down together, and remember out loud that God has been in every one of them. Some of us are walking through open doors this week and some of us are staying put in hard ground, but all of us are with Him. So bring the life you actually have into that room and worship the God who has been with you in it all week. Then go back to your “kitchen” and practice His presence there.
Today: Pick the most ordinary task you will do today (the dishes, the commute, the inbox, the lawn, the shopping) and do it with God. Every so often say quietly: Jesus, You are here. And remember to carry that same awareness into worship today.
Prayer: “Lord, You are here, in this house and this work and this ordinary day, and You have never once left. Thank You that contentment was never something I had to manufacture, because it was always found in You. Teach me to stay with You right where I am, joyfully. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK