A Life of Discipline: Lent 2010
Feb 21, 2010
Intro:
Here are some faces that might be familiar to you – who can tell me who they are? (Alexandre BILODEAU (Freestyle Skiing - Men's Moguls, GOLD), Jennifer HEIL (Freestyle Skiing - Ladies' Moguls, SILVER), Maelle RICKER (snowboard cross, GOLD)).
Ok, so hands up for all the people that think these people were casual, weekend visitors to the local ski bump? How many people think that these people were couch potatoes who like to lay around eating chips and dip, drinking cola all day long? How many people here think that they decided on a whim to enter this little sporting event in Vancouver in 2010 called “the Olympics” and just for fun see what happened? Ridiculous questions, yes? Of course!
Ok, so here is a serious question: who won the Gold medal in Freestyle Skiing – Moguls, in 1988 in Calgary? Aha, trick question, moguls were just a demonstration sport in Calgary… the first year medals were given out for freestyle skiing – moguls was in 1992, in Albertville. So who won then? Well the men’s winner was Edgar Grospiron (FRA), the women’s winner was Donna Weinbrecht (USA). I can’t believe most of you didn’t know that!
Paul on Sport:
The Apostle Paul would probably like my two sets of questions, because he answers the spirit of them both in 1 Cor. 9:25-27: “25Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. 27No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”
Welcome to Lent:
Today marks the first Sunday in the season of Lent, which is our journey of preparation to celebrate the victory over sin and death that comes with the empty tomb of Jesus on resurrection Sunday. Lent is the 40 days which Christians for many hundreds of years have set aside to pay particular attention to our way of living as God’s adopted children, to focus our energies on our spiritual life in Christ, so that when we arrive at resurrection Sunday we can do so in freedom, anticipation, and full preparation to worship and adore the Risen Lord. Lent officially began this past Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, which is historically a day set aside for reflection and repentance, and I trust that many of you took some extra time on Wednesday to do that. That same theme has guided our worship service today, as you no doubt noticed.
God’s Part and Ours in Powerful Christian Living:
Lent is, without apology, a season where I invite and challenge us to greater effort in pursuit of Christlikeness. But immediately, that very phrase “greater effort” sparks some alarm bells in some of us, some resistance. We hear about “effort” in our spiritual lives, and it takes us in three directions:
1. a “theological” direction, where we remember Ephesians 2: “8 God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. 9 Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it.” So we resist this idea of effort on our part, because hasn’t God done it all for us in Jesus? And then freely offered it to us as a gift, so that it would be an insult to God if we were to try to work to earn that gift? And so theologically we resist the notion of effort.
2. a “guilt” direction, where we hear about effort in our spiritual lives and feel guilty because we know we don’t do enough, certainly not as much as we should or as God deserves, and so we self-condemn, and that guilt then leads us to emotional places where we believe the guilt is deserved and that proves how awful we are and (here comes the big lie that has a powerful hold on some of you) “how could God continue to love you when you continue to act like that”…
3. a “laziness” direction, where we hear about some vague notion of “effort” in our spiritual lives but, honestly, don’t really care enough to motivate us out of our current patterns of life which often don’t include the basic practices of the Christian life. We are spiritually “comfortable”, like lying on the couch eating chips and drinking pop. And we sometimes even justify and spiritualize our laziness by believing that God has to give us the motivation and desire to get off the couch, and so it’s God’s fault that we are there because He has to do it all.
Much of the problems with those 3 reactions are dealt with by simply returning to the foundations of the nature of our very relationship with God, which is so basic but so deeply missed by so many. Yes, absolutely, I affirm Ephesians 2, salvation as gift, grace freely given, nothing we could ever do to deserve it or earn it. But that is completely beside the point of what we do, what effort we expend, AFTER we receive this incredible gift. We must not stop reading at verse 9 of Eph. 2, we must also read vs. 10: “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.”. The “effort” comes not to earn our salvation – Jesus did all of that – the effort comes because we are “created anew”, we are “masterpieces”, and so that “we can DO”. Never confuse these two, the “before” and “after”! All of the considerable effort we are to expend in following Jesus is NEVER to earn grace, to be worthy of salvation, or to demean the gift. All the considerable effort we are to expend in following Jesus is because of WHO WE NOW ARE; because of our free loving relationship to God as our adopted Father, part of His household and His family.
I really don’t want to spend much time on this fundamental and foundational truth, but two weeks ago around our staff table we had an excellent discussion about how this basic truth hasn’t really sunk in for many Christians. Many live in fear of rejection, motivated to effort out of a twisted perspective that if we don’t “do”, God will reject and punish, and that grieved me deeply. It feels similar to what I would feel if every day my son put away the dishes after supper and said “I hope I did it well enough that you will still love me dad;” or “I was ready after school when you picked me up because I want you to still love me;” or “I’m really sorry that I didn’t say thank you for making me dinner last Tuesday, I am a terrible person and I’ll try to make it up to you so that you will love me again.” I would be deeply grieved that my child felt my love to be that fickle; yet many Christians around treat God that exact same way because they have missed the incredible truth of Eph. 2:8-10 – in Christ we are “masterpieces”, “made new”, for a new way of life. And before you think “oh yah, some masterpiece I am, look at me, I’m a mess, a total mess”, look at the verse carefully – you are not the artist, God is – it is HIS work, HIS creation, HIS masterpiece, and so if you insult or believe you are not a masterpiece you are insulting God’s work.
Back to the “effort”:
With Paul’s teaching in Eph. as a foundation, and proceeding forward with a CLEAR understanding of all of our effort flowing out of our new identity as a deeply loved child of God, let’s get back to 1 Cor. 9:25-27: “25Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. 27No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.” Now, to counter the idea that “well that is all well and good for Paul, he was one of those “super-Christians”, and I am just an average every-day garden variety Christian…”, we need only skip ahead a few chapters to where Paul clearly and confidently commands, “And you should imitate me, just as I imitate Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1).
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.
Dallas Willard, in “The Spirit of the Disciplines”, divides the list into two main categories, “disciplines of abstinence” and “disciplines of engagement”. These counter the sins of commission (so we abstain from certain things to train us to be able to respond to those types of temptations), and the sins of omission (so we engage certain things to train us to be able to respond to situations where we have opportunity to act in positive ways). He leads into the list with the caution and advice that we need to make careful choices that are appropriate to our lives and needs, not picking the “easy” things that we do already but rather picking those disciplines that we need to train our areas of weakness, and then encourages us to approach them “in a prayerful, experimental way”. Here is the list: Disciplines of Abstinence include: solitude, silence, fasting, frugality, chastity, secrecy, and sacrifice; Disciplines of Engagement include study, worship, celebration, service, prayer, fellowship, confession, and submission.
We are going to explore those more in the weeks ahead, but today I want to choose one of each to mention and encourage you to try this coming week, and to share your experiences. From the Disciplines of Abstinence I want to recommend solitude. What is it, why recommend it, what is the outcome: solitude is choosing to remove oneself from the presence of others – all others – to be completely alone with God. Why? – because whenever we are around others we pay attention to them, and we pay closer attention to how we present ourselves to them and thus can easily become slaves to an image of ourselves rather than who we really are, which then naturally carries over into how we try to relate to God. What is the outcome? – creating space to be completely alone with God, choosing solitude, is really the first and primary discipline, for without it we won’t have strength for others. Maybe it is the “cardio” equivalent; while others build specific muscles solitude builds overall endurance. When we practice solitude, expect to feel alone, expect to feel inadequate, expect to struggle to keep your mind from simply daydreaming, expect to have your soul lain bare before God from whom nothing is hidden; and (now to the positives) expect to meet God in His deep love for you as his child (that place where we started in this sermon), expect to grow in strength as you see God’s face, expect to emerge from the period of solitude with something more to offer the world than just the frantic left-overs of your life, and expect to fall in love with this practice as it establishes a firm foundation.
From the Disciplines of Engagement I want to recommend study. Now note – no multi-tasking! Creating space to be alone in solitude so that you can study Scripture is not the point – that is the spiritual equivalent of trying to run and lift weights at the same time. And here is what I recommend specifically: study the life of Jesus in the Gospels, not to see the miracles and the teachings, but to see how Jesus lived on a daily basis. Approach the life of Jesus with this reality: the healings generally took about 5 minutes; the teachings maybe an hour?; how did Jesus live the rest of the time? What other practices did Jesus engage in, on a regular basis, and what impact do you think those had on Jesus’ ability to heal and teach as He did?
Conclusion:
OK, now I want to help you even more. When, in the next 7 days, are you going to get started? The solitude one will take at least an hour, although the longer you do it for the greater benefit. So which hour will you choose? Pick it now, because you’ll have to make arrangements for it – it won’t just “spontaneously” happen. Same with study – plan it into your week right now, put it on your calendar. We’ll create opportunities to share and dialogue about your experiences, because that is an important part of making this a corporate journey. One last caution: just like with physical things, don’t expect immediate miraculous effects. 30 sit-ups one day won’t give you washboard abs. But 30 every day, with other disciplines too, might. Same with these spiritual disciplines –they take time, and the result is not a crown that perishes, but the joy of doing “the good things he planned for us long ago”.
