Every movement we make in response to God has a ripple effect, touching family, neighbours, friends, community.
Belief in God alters our language.
Love of God affects daily relationships.
Hope in God enters into our work.
Also their opposites - unbelief, indifference, and despair.
None of these movements and responses, beliefs and prayers, gestures and searches, can be confined to the soul. They spill out and make history. If they don’t they are under suspicion of being fantasies at best, hypocrisies at worst.
Christians have always insisted on the historicity of Jesus - an actual birth, a dateable death, a witnessed resurrection, towns located. There is a parallel of historicity in the followers of Jesus. As they take in everything Jesus said and did - all of it a personal revelation of God in time and place - it all gets worked into local history, eventually into world history.
From Eugene Peterson’s introduction to Philemon - The Message
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