A Life Of Discipleship - Lent 2010

My title for this Lenten series is, “A disciplined life”. I want to explore, present, and challenge us all to greater effort in training ourselves in the practices of the Christian life, as imitators of Paul and Jesus, and so that, in the moments of life when we face either temptation to sin (which destroys our soul), or opportunities to serve (which build the Kingdom of God here on earth), we will be prepared, strong, trained, in shape, ready, and thus victorious.

See, the simple truth is that it is often hard to resist temptation, it is often hard to serve in God’s Kingdom, because we haven’t done the work of training ourselves for godliness. We haven’t created the spaces for God to transform us through the inner workings of His Spirit in cooperation with our spirit, mind, and body. We get to those moments of temptation or opportunity and we are like Alexandre or Jennifer or Maelle at the top of the ski hill, but instead of training daily for months and years we’ve been spiritually laying on the couch. Those athletes can not be successful until they have so trained their bodies for their sport that it is the most natural thing in the world for them to take their run in complete control of their bodies and minds, exercising their various movements naturally and gracefully and smoothly, so that it looks like the easiest thing in the world. In fact it has been tons of work, loads of effort, lots of sacrifice, to get to the point where it is all completely natural. And I believe the same is true of our spiritual lives.

Disciplines for Today:

But we’ve sort of lost this whole dimension of what it means to be Christians in the last couple hundred years in the Western church. My observation is that the regular “disciplines” of the spiritual life have been downgraded to a practice of daily “devotions” (consisting of reading a sentence of Scripture, maybe a paragraph-long story and insight, and a short prayer at the end), and those have become “optional” in the minds of many Christians today. But rather than focusing on this current state of things, and fixing our minds on why that happened and how it happened and what all that says about the state of the Kingdom of God in our world today, I want to spend our last few moments building something positive, for one very simple reason. About a year ago I began a series of changes in how I take care of myself, many physical but some other areas as well. For many years prior to that, I had been dissatisfied, knowing something was wrong, knowing something needed to change, knowing I wanted more out of life, but I didn’t know how to start. I didn’t know what to do first. Once I found something that got me started, I began the right track, exercised discipline, and my life is remarkably better. So I want to do that today in the spiritual area of life – just get us started in the right direction for this Lenten period of time especially.