We are continuing on in the series that we are calling Discipleship. We define discipleship as ordinary people learning to live everyday life like Jesus. We decided here at Bellevue Christian Church that there are three primary ways that help facilitate your discipleship here: to gather, to train, and to go. To gather together, train together, and then go together into the world to begin to make a real impact. Today, we are continuing on with this theme of training. Specifically, we are going to talk about some of the primary tools that we use to train, and those tools are collectively called the spiritual disciplines. Last week, if you were here, you know that I put a big emphasis on the idea of training to be like Jesus rather than just simply trying to be like Jesus. In order to get my point across, I talked about the idea that someone like our very own violinist Mark Andre or Cleveland’s LeBron James didn’t simply one day decide to step on the stage or step on the basketball court and begin to play an instrument or play basketball. Instead, they developed some good training habits that over time made them able to step on the court or step on the stage and perform with a sense of ease and excellence. Likewise, what I suggested is that even though our ultimate aim is to be like Jesus, really if we decided to go out into the world and go out into the midst of the trials and tribulations of life and try to act like Jesus, we would probably fail. We would fail miserably. In fact, many of us do. Instead, similar to the basketball player and the musician, we have to learn to develop spiritual training habits off the spot so that when we come on the spot, we will begin to perform like Jesus with ease and excellence. I suggested at the end of the sermon that the primary training tools that we use to become like Jesus are collectively known as the spiritual disciplines, the spiritual practices, or the spiritual exercises. And I explained that just like a musician has musical scales that they practice or an athlete has drills that they go through and diets that they adhere to, Christians have these practices that are modeled by Jesus that enable them to not only connect with Jesus but to look like Jesus.
I struggled when I was putting together this sermon because there is a lot of information when it comes to the spiritual disciplines. Really too much to put into one sermon, so I am struggling with whether I should go on with this series a little longer or have a whole separate series. But, today, what I am going to do is just briefly talk about the spiritual disciplines. I am going to give a high flyover of the purpose behind the disciplines and really show how they connect you with God. But, more importantly, what they do is help you begin to realize your deepest needs of your heart, which is really about the need to become like Jesus, the way you were designed by our creator.
Before I get into the disciplines a little bit more in depth, I want to first address what I would call the four major myths about the spiritual disciplines. Myths or ideas that, when you mention the phrase spiritual disciplines, they automatically give pushback to some people. They are something that they struggle with. I think the first myth that people get in their mind is that the spiritual disciplines are an attempt to win favor with God. If you have been a Christian for some time, you may have heard the phrase works based righteousness. It is the idea that somehow we can do things to win special brownie points with God or increase the chance that we are going to be saved and go to heaven. Although there are Christian who probably do practice the disciplines for those purposes, the people who practice the disciplines on a regular basis understand that you don’t practice the disciplines to gain some sort of favor status with God or to gain some sort of spiritual brownie points, so to speak. The reality is they know that Ephesians 2:8-9 suggests that there is nothing we can do to earn our salvation. All the work has been done by Christ. Ephesians 2:8-9 says “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.” There is no boasting when it comes to our salvation. If there is any boasting, the boasting is in the work of Christ that has been formed on the cross. We cannot do anything to earn our salvation. All we can do is accept it by faith. This passage should be a very freeing passage. Unfortunately, for many, it also becomes a very paralyzing passage. Paralyzing in the sense that there are some people that are so into this passage that they are so scared about doing anything that might give the appearance of working to earn their salvation that they don’t do anything at all. They really do as minimal as possible to practice to become like Jesus. Maybe they go to church and maybe they crack their Bible and maybe say a few prayers, but they really don’t want to do anything that would somehow be perceived that they are trying to earn their salvation. So they don’t put any effort forward. There is a man by the name of Dallas Willard who summarizes this. When it comes to our growth in Christ likeness, God is not opposed to effort, but what he is opposed to is earning. In other words, if we try to claim special status with God because we have done certain things, God doesn’t like that because of that passage, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t make the effort to begin to work out that salvation that has already begun in us. Our spiritual growth in Christ likeness is not a God thing and it is not a me thing, it is a combination thing. It is a cooperative effort between God and us to help to facilitate Christ likeness. We do have to do something. I don’t have the passage up there, but I think I have used it before. Philippians 2:12 speaks of “Continue to work out your salvation for it is God who works in you.” Again, the emphasis on God does the initial work and we cooperate with God to continue on our Christ likeness. That is the first myth.
The second myth is the idea that spiritual disciplines are only for super Christians. Somehow I think we have classified these things out there that only a few super saints are able to do. If you have been here for some time, you know that we keep emphasizing the idea of discipleship is ordinary people learning to live like Jesus. Likewise, the spiritual disciplines of the Christian faith are also designed not for a special class of people but ordinary people. Everyday people like you and me. It is not restricted to a cave or a monastery filled with monks or nuns or hermits or super saints. No. The spiritual disciplines are meant to be worked out in the everyday life. You can be standing in line at Giant Eagle. You can do a discipline there. If you are washing dishing at home. If you are sitting on the parkway in your car and you are stuck there. Or you are even sitting in a board meeting. You can begin to practice some of the spiritual disciplines. In fact, last week, I gave a definition of spiritual disciplines, but I actually came up with a new one this week. I suggested that spiritual disciplines are simply everyday practices for everyday people that are part of everyday life. We have to take the mystery out of them. They are for all of us at any time at any place. They help us make that connection to God and facilitate the transformation into Christ likeness.
The next myth is myth number three, which suggests that spiritual disciplines are drudgery. Probably the mere mention of spiritual disciplines and people cringe. I doubt if there is anybody in here who says oh boy, we get to do disciplines today and is really excited. If we are honest, there are sometimes that we just approach these things, even the basic things like prayer and Bible study, with just a sense of drudgery. We just really don’t want to do it. I think part of the problem is that we are looking at the disciplines as some sort of a religious obligation of some sort rather than an opportunity for us to be created further into the image of Christ. I know that there are probably some people who work out or are practicing to be a musician. If you are someone who is working out your body, you might have an image for what your body might be if you continue to work out. You don’t see the work out as a sense of drudgery. If you are trying to be a musician and you have a vision of yourself someday playing at Carnegie Hall, you don’t see the practices and trainings as drudgery. You see them as opportunities to draw you closer to being the person that God has made you to be. To capitalize on your giftedness. Likewise, so many people see it as drudgery because they say my life is busy. I don’t have the time for this. I see the disciplines as just one more thing to add to my busy schedule. One more thing to add to my to-do list. I have to pray in the morning. I have to read my Bible. All of a sudden they just say I have no room for that. It is just too hard. It is adding this burden on me. The reality is that the disciplines were never designed to add extra burden to your life. They are actually designed to begin to lighten your load. To begin to experience a real sense of joy and inner peace that sometimes you are lacking in your particular life. If you were here last week, I gave an example of a discipline that I like to use. I think it is spiritual and I think it is a discipline. It might be a little weird, but I do it and it works. I mentioned how I love going to the beach. I take my smartphone out and play ocean sounds and then I see myself just simply hanging out with Jesus at the beach. Walking down the beach, listening to sounds, talking to Jesus, talking about scripture, talking about concerns, which sounds a little bit like prayer. I am enjoying his creation. I am thinking about the ocean. I am actually beginning to be affected by that. I am having peace. Would that be classified as a spiritual discipline? I think it is spiritual and I think it is a discipline, and the idea is that it incorporates prayer. Some people have a hard time seeing that. I don’t see it as an extra burden in my life. I have not quite disciplined myself to do it on a regular basis, like every day. I do it a few times a week, but when I do it, I don’t see it as a burden. I see it as a relief. I see it as 15 minutes or so of being able to pull my mind out of the busyness of the day and hang out with Jesus, and then when I am done, I just keep moving on. That is not a burden. That is a relief. A relief that many people haven’t had in years. Being able to have 15 minutes alone with your mind and with God. It’s not meant to be a drudgery.
The next myth about the spiritual disciplines is that the spiritual disciplines are somehow New Age. Some of you might not be familiar with New Age, but it is just a collective term that refers to a movement that incorporates things like Eastern mysticism, meditation, channeling, the occult, maybe some tree hugging activities. That is the New Age type movement. When you hear spiritual disciplines, some of you kind of envision a Hindu or a Buddhist guru sitting in an incense-filled room that is meditating and emptying his or her mind to be able to receive something from the pagan god or a demon out there. I suspect some of you think in those terms. But the reality is that there are many religions, including Eastern religions, including Muslims, and Jews, that incorporate the spiritual disciplines into their religion, but it doesn’t mean that any of them have cornered the market on utilizing those disciplines. That is the key. We forget that nobody has the corner of the market on these disciplines, but somehow we associate them with a pagan entity. With something like meditation, I think it was the Hebrew people that began to practice meditation before the New Age people. There is a passage that some of you are familiar with. It is the first Psalm. It says “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers, but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” I don’t know who wrote this Psalm, but I don’t think he was into New Age stuff. Meditation is not this mystical term. It is pondering stuff. Taking stuff from your head and allowing it to percolate into your heart and to sink a little bit lower than it normally does in our life. We forget that these spiritual disciplines are not owned by any particular tradition. They are gifts from God that he has given to all creation to, when used rightly, begin to bring you closer to God. To create space for God to begin to do the work in you to turn you into the image of Christ. That means pretty much any discipline. It could be silence, solitude, or meditation. It could even be yoga to a certain degree. It really depends on how you are approaching it. It really means that you have to make sure that you incorporate the Holy Spirit and that you allow the Holy Spirit to be your guide, to be your discerner as you practice these things. You have to. It is a cooperation with the Holy Spirit. If you don’t incorporate the spirit of the living God in it, then really what happens is these disciplines become very empty. They become very ritualistic. And yes, to a certain degree, dangerous. They become useless. Paul himself wrote in Colossians 2:23 “Such regulations (he is talking about disciplines) indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” He is writing to people that were practicing a lot of spiritual practices. Some that incorporated God and some that didn’t. Some that were basically brought in from the pagan religions. They were using these things as a way to get closer to God but using them really as a way of earning brownie points with God. Having an appearance of wisdom but really lacking in any sense of substance. The bottom line is that any spiritual discipline, including prayer and Bible study, the two basics of the evangelical faith, can be abused. In fact, I would suggest that the most abused book in the world is the Bible. How many people have been beaten over the head with the Bible? And yet we don’t throw the Bible out do we? What I am suggesting is don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because the spiritual practices have been used by cults or whatever it is, it doesn’t mean you should give up on them. They are gifts that God has given us to be able to make space for him so that he might begin to work in our lives.
Those are basically the four myths. Some say, well that is nice; now give me the list of the disciplines. I started to think about doing that. I was going to work on a list and separate them by category. I finally decided that is silly because there is no comprehensive list when it comes to the spiritual disciplines. I have had access to at least five or six books on the spiritual disciplines. I have yet to find two that are in agreement. They all have their own variations on the list. Most of them contain the basics of Bible study and prayer and worship and maybe silence and solitude and those types of things. But when you get into some of the more modern books from the 80s when they came out they would include things like accountability, small groups, mentoring. Then when you start getting into the technological age, you start seeing things come up like exercise or discernment or things even like sex. Some suggest that sex is a very spiritual exercise, a spiritual discipline. I was going to elaborate but one of my children is still in the audience, and she would probably start throwing up violently if I started talking about it. Unplugged is another one that is part of the technological age. Again, I can’t give you a complete list of all the disciplines. And to do so would, I think, do it an injustice. If I gave you a list of every spiritual discipline I had ever heard about there would probably be about 30-35, and you would be overwhelmed. I am lucky if I do five of those or two of those. Also, the problem is if I gave you a list, many would shift into do mode. This is a to-do list and I can just check them off. Somehow if I check them off, I will be meeting the requirements of Godliness, Godly behavior, and righteous behavior.
This is where it gets important. The reality is that your spiritual transformation into Christ likeness does not begin with the disciplines. It begins with you. It begins with your response to the question that Jesus often asked his disciples and any sort of followers who were trying to get serious about following him. What is it you want from me? Jesus was the most intelligent man that ever lived. It cannot be denied. If you come up with a more intelligent man, let me know and we will start following that person. He was the most wise, intelligent person that ever walked this earth. But as wise and intelligent and all the wisdom that he had, very little did he just share or give information or give the answers to life’s questions. He was all about asking questions of people. If you look through the gospels and look at the words of Jesus that are highlighted in red, you will see that Jesus was asking more questions than he was giving answers. Because what he was trying to do was prompt something deep within the soul. He was trying to get you to respond. What is it that you really need? What are you asking for? Because some people can’t identify that. They think they want one thing and they really want another. I don’t have time to look through all the passages, but there is a passage I think in John that talks about the first two disciples came out and saw Jesus walking down the road. They said “Look, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Jesus didn’t say great. That is cool. I am glad you recognize that. What he did was turn around and say “What do you want?” What do you want from me? Then there is a story about I think James and John. Their mother had heard Jesus was establishing his own kingdom, so she wanted to make sure that her sons would get good status in that kingdom. She was probably going to think of some way to manipulate Jesus. Before she could even ask for that, he just said “What do you want?” He knew what she wanted.
Then there is the classic story of blind Bartimaeus. Does anybody know that story? It is Mark 10:46-52. (Scripture read here.) There is a lot of detail missing from the story, but we can glean some things. We know there was a big crowd in town for a Jewish festival. We know that Bartimaeus was blind and sitting on the side of the road. He was a beggar. It suggests that maybe he had heard that Jesus was in town and that he was a healer and could possibly fix his condition. When Jesus walked by in this crowd, he didn’t just say hey Jesus. He shouted out “Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me!” Somehow Jesus stopped in his tracks because he heard this desperate cry above the roar of the crowd. He said to Bartimaeus in verse 51 “What do you want me to do for you?” To me, that is kind of a silly question, even for Jesus. Bartimaeus was blind. He probably knew that. But for some reason he wanted Bartimaeus to identify the need, the desire. I think the interaction with Bartimaeus is how he interacts with us. We go to Jesus all the time. We talk with Jesus. He wants us to be able to identify our real need. Not the superficial needs that many of us bring to God. What is the real ache of your heart? What, at the deepest level of your soul, do you really want? Those are questions that are hard to answer on a Sunday morning. They are only answered by sometimes some deep reflection. Until you are able to answer that desire, until you are able to understand what it is you really want from God, maybe a sense of significance, a sense of worth, know that you are loved, know that he is real, and those types of questions, you will never ever be able to get on the pathway towards wholeness and healing. You have to be able to identify that need. You have to be able to articulate in the presence of Christ what it is you want from him. There is a writer named Ruth Haley Barton who wrote a book called Sacred Rhythms. In that book, she really nails this. She writes “Jesus’ interactions with the people he came in contact with during his life on earth made it clear that desire and the willingness to name that desire in Christ’s presence is a catalytic element of the spiritual life. It enables us to rise up from our place by the side of the road so that we can actually get on the path to spiritual transformation and follow Christ.” That summarizes really what I am talking about here. You have to be able to identify what you need. Most of us don’t know what we need. If you don’t know what you need, how is he going to help you? How is he going to fix you? He wants to know that you want it bad enough and to be able to identify that need. Because only after you identify that need are you able to then find the spiritual disciplines that help connect that desire to the need. What I am suggesting here is there is a connection between desire and discipline. As you identify that deepest desire, there is a spiritual discipline that will help create space for God to begin to work in your life and begin to accomplish that desire.
First sometimes what he has to do is sort through the good desires and the bad desires. If you have desires that are going to lead you to a closer relationship with Christ, he is going to help you figure out how to get there. He is going to begin to work in your life. If you have desires that lead you away from God, he is also going to work with you to help them get out of your life. That is all through spiritual disciplines. They are called disciplines of abstinence, disciplines of engagement. Some things that you abstain from in life in order to spend time with God. Some things you engage in life to be able to get closer to Christ. There is no set list of all these disciplines. There is a deep connection between desire and discipline. That is what you really have to learn. Until you get that, you will continue to look at the disciplines as something you have to do rather than something that God wants to give you to accomplish your deepest desires. A simple example is a lot of people, including myself, sometimes struggle with self-control when it comes to food or other things. So have the desire to get back control over your body or your diet or whatever it is. There is a discipline for that. It is called fasting. Fasting is something that is a spiritual discipline that Jesus himself practiced and people continue to practice. If you train yourself by disciplining yourself to fast on a regular basis, over time God will take away that desire for food that goes beyond the normal desire.
In the technological age, there are people who are a little too connected and attached to the computer, the smartphone, the internet, online gaming, or whatever it is. You desire to be able to free yourself from that because you see it is affecting your life. It is affecting your relationships. It is affecting your spouse, your kids. The desire is to be free of that. There is a discipline for that. It is the discipline of unplugging. It is training yourself daily, weekly, monthly to unplug the computer or smartphone and spend time with family. That is a spiritual discipline. There is nothing mysterious about it. But what it does is simply create space for God to be able to come in and work something in you that takes away that desire and replaces it with a deeper desire for him.
Some people say I don’t have a good prayer life. I wish that I could pray more but in the morning I fall asleep or I am rushing out of the house. I wish I could practice the passage that speaks of praying over and over. They want to be able to experience regular prayer throughout the day. There is a discipline for that. It is called fixed hour of prayer. Nothing fancy. It is what the monks used to do. The monks would be in their monastery and somebody would hit a gong three or four times a day. When they heard the gong, no matter what they were doing, working outside in the garden, studying, in the kitchen, they would stop and pray. There are people who just set their smartphone for three or four times a day and when that sound goes off, they stop, and they say a quick prayer. It could be an extended prayer. It could be something as simple as the prayer of Bartimaeus. Jesus, son of David, I am a sinner. Have mercy on me. Or just Praise God. It gets you thinking about praying with God throughout the entire day.
There are some people that struggle with what Austin called thought monkeys. They just kind of jump around. Sometimes they start very early in the morning. Sometimes they are invoked by a situation that happens in the day. Something happens to our kids or they do something stupid, and your whole day is consumed by the thought monkeys. It drives you crazy. There is really a discipline to fix that. It is called centering prayer. Nothing magical or mystical about it. You take a biblical word or passage. A word such as faith, Jesus, God, or a passage that you like, and you close your eyes and center on that passage. You don’t have to do it the whole time. You just do it. When the monkeys jump in and start getting at you, you center back on the prayer, and the monkeys go away. It works. I use it. It is a discipline. When I was taking a class in seminary, I had to do it for 30 days straight, 20 minutes a day. By the end of that month, I was crazy. It seemed so hard, but now I have incorporated it into my spiritual life, and I just crave it. I love it. It is an invaluable tool for being able to for 15-20 minutes of the day pull yourself away from those thought monkeys that are messing with your head. It is not about emptying your mind. It is not about spiritual mysticism. It is just about getting back control of the Godly thoughts and getting out the junk and garbage in your brain. I guarantee a lot of you have a lot of stuff going on in your brain that you want to get rid of. I am just telling you it is a great tool to put in your arsenal.
There are some people that are just frustrated because maybe at one time in your faith you were able to notice God. When you are a new Christian you see God everywhere and in everything. As you mature in your faith, you don’t see God anymore. You don’t notice him in the day. So you are feeling distance from God. There is a discipline for that. It is called the prayer of examine. Or the discipline of noticing God, which is very simple. At the end of the day, you lay in your bed and reflect on the day. You begin to think from the very beginning, where did I see God at work during the day? Where did I see him at work in relationships? Where did I see him at work in creation? Where did I see him at work even in the workplace or at school? When you train in that, you are going to find that it is very difficult. You are going to get frustrated because you didn’t see God anywhere. Rather than beat yourself up, you do it again. It is called training. You do it again and you do it again. What you notice is after a while, you begin to notice God in new ways. Ways you never suspected. Little conversations, passing conversations. You begin to see him at work through the events of your lives.
I am going to wind this up here. I want to tell you right now that I am no expert at this. I would give myself about a C- at this point or a D+. I am finding that it is very difficult. I am a beginning. A guy named Thomas Burton said “When it comes to spiritual transformation in Christ likeness, we are all forever beginners.” No one has it finished. We are all learners. We are all beginning. We are all ordinary people learning to be like Jesus. We are beginners. In closing, when you think about the spiritual disciplines, if you take anything away, it is just to remember that the spiritual disciplines are not a form of works based righteousness or a way that you earn brownie points with God. If I do these things, God is going to give me a pat on the back and I am done for the day and feel pretty good. This is not for God’s benefit. The spiritual disciplines are not for superstar Christians. Ordinary people in everyday life. It is not something that should invoke a sense of drudgery, but if you begin to perceive these things as something that is going to move you forward in your relationship with God and really to your truest self that God is trying to bring you to, not the self that the world has made in you; it is going to bring you to the truest self, which is probably also the most joyful self, then you are going to change your perspective. You are not going to see them as drudgery as much. And again, don’t see them as a New Age thing because what you are doing is giving the devil all the tools that God wants you to use. That is silly. You are throwing out the baby with the bathwater again. There are dozens and dozens of ways that you can connect with God in very real ways. You need to see these spiritual disciplines not as obligations but gifts that have been given to us to begin to transform us into the very image of Christ. When you begin to embrace these disciplines over time, you begin to replace your language from I ought to read my Bible or I should go to church today or I should give my money to the church to I get to do this. I am excited to do this stuff. I am excited to give. I am excited to study my Bible. I am excited to meditate. All this kind of stuff because I know that it is bringing me closer to how I am in Christ. Eventually, if you keep this up in a very real and active and even somewhat of an organized way that we talked about at some point called the basic rhythm of life, you not only begin to look like Jesus, but you begin to experience what Eugene Peterson referred to as the unforced rhythms of grace. Again, the passage that I put up last week that speaks of this says “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.” Let us pray.
