Niyi is the head usher at his church in Ikeja. On Sunday mornings he is at the main door by half past seven in a pressed white shirt and a navy tie, shaking hands, finding seats for latecomers, bending down to greet the children by name. Visitors remember him. More than one person has told the pastor that the first thing that made them feel welcome was “that smiling brother at the door.”
On Monday mornings Niyi is somewhere else entirely. He runs a phone repair stall in Computer Village, the crowded electronics market off Allen Avenue where thousands of phones change hands every day and almost everything can be negotiated. His neighbour on the left is Mallam Idris, an older man who sells chargers, cables and power banks and who has shared a wall with Niyi for six years. They greet each other every morning. They watch each other’s stalls when one of them goes to pray or to buy food. Some months earlier, at Niyi’s invitation, Mallam Idris had even attended the church’s anniversary thanksgiving and had sat quietly near the back while Niyi stood at the door.
One Monday a university student came to Niyi’s stall with a cracked screen. She was clearly nervous about money. Niyi fitted a cheap replacement, the kind that would fade within a few months, and told her it was an original part. He charged her the price of an original. She paid, thanked him warmly and left.
Mallam Idris had heard the whole conversation. He said nothing until the afternoon, when the market had quietened a little. Then he leaned over the low partition between their stalls and asked, in a tone that was more puzzled than accusing, “Niyi, the man I saw at the church door that Sunday, where does he keep himself on Monday?”
Niyi laughed it off. But he told me later that the question followed him home that evening, sat beside him at dinner, and was still there when he lay awake at two in the morning. He could not stop hearing it.
It is a fair question, and it is not only Niyi’s. Many believers live with a quiet division between the person who worships and the person who works, trades, drives, argues and posts. The church building gets the best version of us. The market, the office, the kitchen and the road get whatever is left. This teaching is about why that division cannot stand, and why the life we receive in Christ is meant to walk out of the church door with us on Sunday afternoon.
One person in two places
Nobody sets out to live a divided life. It usually happens by degrees. We learn early that church has its own language, its own posture and its own expectations, and we learn to meet them well. We know when to stand, when to lift our hands and how to answer “How are you?” with “I am blessed.” None of that is wrong. But if we are not careful, those expectations become a costume we put on at the gate, and the real person underneath remains untouched.
Then Monday comes, and a different set of expectations takes over. The market has its rules. The office has its culture. The family WhatsApp group has its habits. We adjust to each of them in turn, and before long we are speaking one way to the pastor, another way to the house help, and a third way to the driver who has just cut in front of us at Ojota.
PunchlineThere is a Nigerian expression for the result: the “Sunday-Sunday Christian.” It is said with a smile, but it carries a sting, because the people who use it are usually describing someone they have watched closely from the outside. Mallam Idris was not a theologian. He simply had eyes.
The New Testament never imagines a believer whose faith is confined to a building. The early church did not even own buildings for most of its first three centuries. Believers met in homes, courtyards and rented halls, and then went back to their shops, fields and households. When the apostles wrote about holiness, they wrote about husbands and wives, masters and servants, buying and selling, speaking and listening. They assumed that the same person who sang hymns on the first day of the week would carry the life of Christ into every other day.
That is the claim of this whole article. The worship service and the working week are two places, but they hold one person. And that person has received a new life that is meant to show up in both.
The grace that appeared to all men
Paul’s letter to Titus is a good place to begin, because it was written to believers living in a culture with a poor reputation for honesty. Titus was serving on the island of Crete, and Paul does not hide what the islanders said about themselves. He quotes one of their own poets: “The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies” (Titus 1:12). The young churches there were surrounded by a public culture where deception was expected and laziness was a joke. Some within the church were no better: “They profess that they know God; but in works they deny him” (Titus 1:16).
So Paul writes a chapter about ordinary conduct. He addresses older men and older women, young women and young men, and finally servants. His instructions to servants are strikingly practical. They are to be honest workers, “Not purloining,” which means not pilfering from their masters, “that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things” (Titus 2:10). The word translated adorn is the Greek kosmeo, from which we get cosmetic. It means to arrange, to beautify, to set something off so that its beauty is seen. A servant’s honesty with the household goods made the gospel look as beautiful as it really is.
Then Paul explains why all of this matters:
For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works.
Notice first that the grace of God “hath appeared to all men.” Paul is thinking of the coming of Jesus as an appearing, like the sun rising over the hills. It was public. It happened in history, in a real place, among real people. The grace of God did not stay hidden inside a temple. It came out where everyone could see it, ate with tax collectors, touched the sick and walked the dusty roads of Galilee. A grace that appeared in public produces believers whose lives can be seen in public.
Notice too what Christ gave Himself to create: “a peculiar people, zealous of good works.” Peculiar in the King James sense does not mean strange. The Greek word periousios describes a treasured possession, something that belongs to its owner in a special way. You are God’s own people. And the evidence of belonging is a zeal for good works, the kind of eager goodness that does not wait to be pressured into kindness or honesty.
The order here is essential. Christ “gave himself for us, that he might redeem us.” Redemption comes first. The good works are the purpose and fruit of the redemption, never its price. Niyi did not need to become honest in order to be accepted by God. He needed to recognise that he already belonged to a Saviour who had redeemed him “from all iniquity,” including the iniquity of a dishonest sale, and who wanted his life to show what that redemption looks like.
NuggetChrist redeemed you to make you His own treasured people. Your conduct outside the church building is where others see what belonging to Him looks like.
Walking worthy of the calling
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians has a famous turning point. For three chapters he describes what God has done in Christ: chosen us, adopted us, forgiven us, raised us with Christ, seated us in heavenly places, brought Jew and Gentile into one household. There is hardly a single command in those chapters. It is all gift. Then chapter four opens with a “therefore”:
I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
The word translated worthy is axios, which carries the picture of a set of scales in balance. Something is axios when it weighs the same as something else. Paul is asking that the way we walk should match the weight of what we have been given. The calling comes first, and the walk answers to it. A man who has been made a son of the king should not go on living as a beggar in the back streets.
Look carefully at the qualities Paul lists. Lowliness. Meekness. Longsuffering. Forbearing one another in love. Endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit. These are not the virtues of a man alone on a mountain. They are the virtues of a person living among other people who sometimes irritate, disappoint and wrong him. Longsuffering means a long fuse. Forbearing means putting up with someone. You do not need either of these in an empty room. You need them in a crowded bus, a tense board meeting, a shared kitchen and a family compound where three generations live under one roof.
In other words, the first thing Paul says about walking worthy of our calling is about how we treat people. He does not begin with church attendance or spiritual disciplines, important as those are. He begins with the texture of our relationships.
There is a reason for that. Paul has just spent two chapters describing how Christ broke down the wall between hostile groups and made them one. A believer who treats people with contempt is walking against the grain of his own salvation. The gospel he believes says that God received him while he was still an enemy. His behaviour says that other people must earn his patience. Something is out of balance on the scales.
When Paul writes “walk,” he means the whole movement of a life. A few verses later he urges, “that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind” (Ephesians 4:17). Walking is what we do between appointments, on the way to somewhere else, when we are not performing. That is exactly where character is seen.
Truth with your neighbour
As the chapter continues, Paul gets very specific about what a worthy walk looks like. He describes putting off the old man and putting on the new, and then he applies it:
Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: Neither give place to the devil. Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.
The first instruction is about honesty: “putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour.” And the reason Paul gives is a surprising one: “for we are members one of another.” Lying is a betrayal of the bond between people. When Niyi called a cheap screen original, he broke more than a rule. He treated the student as a target to be managed instead of a neighbour to be served.
The second instruction is about anger. Paul does not say that all anger is sinful. “Be ye angry, and sin not.” There is a place for anger at injustice. But he warns against letting it settle overnight, because unresolved anger becomes an open door: “Neither give place to the devil.” Many believers who would never curse in church carry bitterness against a colleague for months. They nurse it, rehearse it and share it with others. That is giving the devil a foothold in the very place where Christ is meant to be seen.
The third instruction is about work and money: “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” Notice how far this goes. Paul does not simply tell the thief to stop stealing. He tells him to become a worker and then a giver. The man who once took from others now works so that he has something to share. That is the movement of grace. It turns a taker into a giver.
In a Nigerian context these instructions land with real weight. Think of padded invoices, inflated quotations, “small something” added for the person who approves the payment, the fuel attendant who adjusts the pump, the trader who sells a phone with a false history. Each of these is a form of lying or taking. Each is very common. And each is exactly what the life of Christ in us is meant to replace. A believer who fixes phones honestly, who quotes a fair price, who tells the customer the truth about a part, is doing gospel work. He is adorning the doctrine of God our Saviour at a market stall.
The tongue that worships on Sunday
James has a blunt sentence for people whose religion stays inside the building:
If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.
“If any man among you seem to be religious.” The phrase points to the outward appearance of devotion: the prayers, the services, the visible practices of faith. James does not dismiss these. But he says that if the tongue is unbridled, the whole thing is “vain,” which means empty. A bridle is the strap and bit that guides a horse. A believer whose tongue runs wild in the office, the home and the online comment section has a religion that looks full and is actually hollow.
Later in the letter James puts the contradiction even more sharply: “Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be” (James 3:10). The same voice that sings “Holy, holy, holy” on Sunday can, on Monday, call a junior colleague useless, insult a driver, mock a neighbour’s accent or spread a rumour in a group chat. James says the two cannot sit together. The mouth that blesses God must learn to stop cursing people “which are made after the similitude of God” (James 3:9).
That last phrase is the foundation of it all. Every person you speak to bears the image of God. The house help bears it. The conductor hanging out of the danfo bears it. The customer who argues about the price bears it. To speak to them with contempt is to speak with contempt about something God made in His own likeness.
Then James defines pure religion in two directions. Toward the vulnerable: “To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.” And toward the self: “to keep himself unspotted from the world.” Both of these are lived out mostly beyond the church building. The widow is in her house. The orphan is in the next street. The pressures that stain a believer are in the market and the office. James is telling us that the truest test of religion is found in the places where nobody is leading the worship.
Strangers whose conduct is watched
Peter writes to believers scattered across the provinces of what is now Turkey, many of them facing suspicion and slander from their neighbours. He calls them by two names that describe their place in the world:
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles: that, whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.
Strangers translates a word for a resident foreigner, someone who lives in a place without being fully at home there. Pilgrims describes a person staying temporarily on the way to somewhere else. Peter is saying that believers live in their cities fully, working and trading and raising families, while belonging ultimately to another kingdom. That double identity is what makes their conduct so visible. People notice the foreigner in their street.
“Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles.” In the King James Version, conversation means the whole manner of life, not merely speech. And honest translates the Greek kalos, which means good in a way that is also attractive, even beautiful. Peter wants the believer’s daily conduct to be the kind of goodness that others can see and recognise.
He is realistic about the response. Some “speak against you as evildoers.” Christians in the first century were accused of all kinds of things, from disloyalty to the emperor to bizarre rituals. Peter does not tell them to win the argument with clever words. He tells them to live in such a way that the slander eventually collapses against the evidence. “That they may by your good works, which they shall behold, glorify God in the day of visitation.” Some of those critics would one day turn to God, and when they did, the remembered goodness of their Christian neighbours would be part of what brought them.
Jesus said the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). Notice where the glory goes. Visible goodness exists for the Father’s honour. Mallam Idris had been watching Niyi for six years. What he saw was shaping what he thought about Niyi’s God.
There is a guard-rail we need here. Living well before others is not the same as managing an image. A believer who performs kindness for an audience and drops it in private has simply moved the costume from the church door to the market. Peter’s call is for goodness that is genuine, the kind that would be the same whether anyone was watching or not. The watching neighbour is a reason for care, not the source of our motivation. The source is the life of Christ within, and the honour of the Father we love.
The priest who passed by
When a lawyer asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29), Jesus answered with one of the most uncomfortable stories in the Gospels:
And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him , and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him , and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him , And went to him , and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
The detail that should arrest us is the direction of travel. The priest was going “down from Jerusalem.” The road from Jerusalem to Jericho dropped steeply through rocky wilderness, and many priests lived in Jericho and travelled up to the temple when their turn of service came. In all likelihood the priest was on his way home from worship. He had been in the house of God. He had performed the sacred duties of his office. And then, on the road, he met a wounded man and crossed to the other side.
We can speculate about his reasons. Perhaps he feared ritual defilement if the man was dead. Perhaps he feared robbers were still nearby. Perhaps he was simply in a hurry. Jesus does not explain, and that silence makes the story sharper. Whatever the reason, the priest’s religion had not reached the road.
Then a Samaritan came by, a man from a group the lawyer would have despised, and he “had compassion on him.” He stopped. He bound the wounds with his own supplies. He put the man on his own animal, took him to an inn, paid for his care and promised to return. Jesus then turned the lawyer’s question around. The lawyer had asked, “Who qualifies as my neighbour?” Jesus asked, “Which of these became a neighbour?” And He finished with a command: “Go, and do thou likewise.”
The prophets had said much the same centuries before. Through Amos, God told Israel that He hated their feasts and would not listen to their songs, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). What God rejected was worship that left justice and mercy at the temple gate. Micah put it in one sentence: “what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Micah 6:8).
The church building matters. Gathering matters. The writer to the Hebrews warns us against “forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is” (Hebrews 10:25). Worship together is where we are reminded of who we are, strengthened by one another and fed by the Word. But the road home is part of the service. The neighbour on the road is the next place where the worship continues.
When Monday has already gone wrong
Some readers will recognise themselves in Niyi’s story with real discomfort. You know you have been one person at church and another at work. Perhaps your colleagues would laugh if they heard you lead prayer. Perhaps your house help has seen a side of you that your pastor has never seen. What do you do with that?
Begin with the gospel. Trying harder at keeping up two performances will never heal a divided life. Come honestly to the Father through Christ and let the truth about you be spoken in His presence. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). That forgiveness is real and complete. You are not on probation.
Then let that forgiveness send you back into the places you have wronged. Grace never leaves us hiding behind a verse while people remain injured. If you cheated a customer, find a way to make it right. If you humiliated a junior colleague, apologise to them directly. If your words in a group chat wounded someone, say so in the same place where the wound was given. Zacchaeus, when salvation came to his house, did not merely feel sorry. He said, “if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold” (Luke 19:8). Restitution was the evidence that something new had happened, not the price of it.
Be patient with the process. Character is formed over time. The Spirit works in us through the Word, through prayer, through the correction of faithful friends and through a thousand ordinary choices. You will not become a different person at the market by Friday. But you can take the next honest step on Monday morning.
And be gentle with others who are struggling. The aim of this teaching is not to give anyone a new standard by which to judge their brother. It is to call each of us back into the wholeness that Christ purchased. Some believers are fighting hard battles in workplaces where honesty is costly and pressure is constant. They need encouragement and practical support far more than they need suspicion.
Niyi did not sleep much that Monday night. Before dawn he got up, opened his Bible and read the passage in Ephesians about putting away lying and speaking truth with one’s neighbour. He told me he felt the weight of it, and then, unexpectedly, the relief of it. “I realised I did not have to keep being two people,” he said. “That was exhausting. I could just be one.”
The student had left her number for collection. On Tuesday morning Niyi called her and asked her to come back. When she arrived, looking worried, he told her the truth about the screen, refunded the difference and offered to fit a genuine part at cost when she could afford it. She stared at him for a long moment. Then she said, “Nobody in this market has ever done that for me.”
Mallam Idris watched it all from behind his partition. He did not say anything that day either. But a week later, over a plate of rice from the woman who sells food at the end of the row, he asked Niyi a question he had never asked before. “Tell me about this Jesus of yours. What does He want from a man like you?”
PunchlineNiyi said it was the first time in six years that his neighbour had asked him about his faith. It was also the first time Niyi felt he could answer without hiding.
The life you have received in Christ is meant to walk out of the church door with you. It belongs at the stall and the desk and the dinner table, in the traffic and the group chat. The same Saviour who welcomed you on Sunday goes with you on Monday, and the people beside you, whether they ever enter a church or not, are watching to see what He is like.
Teaching Companion
For Reflection
- Where are you most tempted to become a different person from the one who worships on Sunday: the office, the market, the road, the home or online?
- Paul calls believers God’s “peculiar people, zealous of good works.” What would zeal for good works look like in your workplace this week?
- Which of the qualities in Ephesians 4:2 do you find hardest to show toward the people you live and work with?
- Who is watching your conduct in the way Mallam Idris watched Niyi’s? What are they learning about Christ from you?
- Is there someone you need to go back to, as Niyi went back to the student, to put something right?
This Week
Choose one ordinary place where you spend time this week outside the church building: your desk, your shop, your car or your family group chat. Each morning, before you enter it, pray a short prayer: “Lord Jesus, You go with me here. Let my words and dealings show what You are like.” At the end of each day, take two minutes to review one conversation and one transaction from that place. Thank God for what was faithful, and where something was wrong, make it right the next day.
A Prayer
Father, thank You that the grace which brings salvation appeared in the open, among ordinary people, on ordinary roads. Thank You that Christ gave Himself to redeem me and make me Your own treasured possession. Forgive me for the times I have kept my faith inside the church building and lived another way in the market, the office and the home. Make me one person before You and before others. Teach me to speak truth with my neighbour, to bridle my tongue, to work honestly and to stop for the wounded on the road. Let the people who watch my life see something of Your goodness and give You glory. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Truth received brings freedom. Truth believed establishes the heart.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version. · Illustrations using first names only are composites unless stated otherwise.