Good morning. We are continuing to look at this theme of discipleship. Discipleship at Bellevue Christian Church has been defined as ordinary people learning to live everyday life like Jesus. We decided that there are three ways that we become a disciple at Bellevue Christian Church. We gather, we train, and we go. As you might have guessed from the skit, we are continuing to look at this idea of training. Specifically, the importance of training to be like Jesus rather than simply trying to be like Jesus. Last week, I introduced the concept of training by looking at this passage out of Paul’s first letter to his mentoree Timothy where he wrote “Train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” If you were here last week, you know that the major emphasis was the need to train in godliness. This training would not simply be something you would do once in your spiritual life. It would be something you would do throughout your spiritual life, throughout your life as a Christian to keep you from becoming too spiritually sluggish, so to speak. I suggested that even though many of us in this room have accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and taken self off the throne of our life, we still carry residual parts of our old self within us. Things possibly like greed or lust or impatience or possibly negativity. These are things that are often left over from what I would call the me-centered life. We talked about that the only way to get rid of some of this stuff and begin to look more like Jesus is to take this idea of training, specifically training in godliness, seriously. Because it is training in godliness that is able to pop the lid off of our interior self and begin to work on those places that we need to remove from ourselves so we begin to look more like Jesus. I suggested that one of the biggest obstacles of doing so was really the lack of self-awareness. I mentioned how some people just don’t feel the need. They don’t see their own flaws. They might see the flaws of others, but they forget that we all have some sort of flaw going on inside of us. Some sort of character trait that we need to work on. I suggested that if somehow we could all become totally transparent for the day and somehow peer into not only the other person’s soul but into our own soul, we might see that when it comes to godliness, we all fall woefully short.
Today, I want to suggest that even though we might become self-aware of our character issues, for many people just trying to be like Jesus is just too impossible. It is just too difficult. It is too hard. They have tried it, and it just does not work out. In that regard, the words of this English theologian from the 18th century, a guy named G.K. Chesterton, rings true when he writes “Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting as it has been found difficult and left untried.” I think a lot of people just say Christianity is just too difficult. It is too hard. I was hoping when I became a Christian that there would be a burden removed from me. But I feel as I have become a Christian it just seems like there are all these expectations that have been placed on me. Christianity becomes this heavy burden that it was never meant to be. In fact, we know from Matthew 11:28 that Jesus himself said “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” These words of Jesus, if we were to meditate on these words for the day and reflect on these words, we would see that they don’t sound burdensome. In fact, they sound quite refreshing. It gives the impression that following Jesus should be a relief from the burdens of life, from the weariness of life. Following Jesus would end up in a place where we would find total rest for our souls. The rest sometimes we don’t find because we are caught up in legalistic traditions.
I like the way Eugene Peterson translates this passage in the book The Message when he writes “Are you tired? Word 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.” When you read these words, you say those words are nice, but they just don’t seem to match my experience. Because many of you grew up in maybe legalistic homes or legalistic churches where you viewed your Christian faith as not grace-filled but law-filled. Your Christian life became simply a long list of dos and don’ts. Do this and don’t do that. You have these expectations placed on you that are pretty much impossible to meet, at least in this particular culture. But just because Jesus’ words don’t match your expectations doesn’t cancel out Jesus’ offer to you. Come to him if you are weary and he will give you rest for the soul. He will give you that easy yoke. As Eugene Peterson said “those unforced rhythms of grace.” We find that there is really no secret to this. What we are talking about here as far as locating this rest is really based on a simple principle that applies to all of life. A principle that you hopefully picked up on in the opening illustration. The importance of training to be a Christian rather than simply trying to be a Christian. Mark Andre is a very good violin player. He performs with ease and excellence. So much so that it just looks like he has this natural talent. And he does have a certain amount of natural talent, but if he was just to get up the first day he decided to play the violin and just get up in front of you guys and start playing, things wouldn’t go too well. He would make a fool of himself. Kind of like the fool that I made of myself being up there. We get that. We know that he didn’t do that. Rather than simply just showing up on stage and trying to play the violin, he developed a pattern of life. A pattern of life that allowed him to adjust his life so that he could train his mind and his body to be able to play the violin with excellence. So when he does step up on the stage, it looks so natural. It looks like he is just performing something he has done all his life. We forget about the training that has gone into that. What is true of a musician is true of really any sort of a performer or really anybody who in front of the public or really any sort of profession. Even a teacher or a doctor. I imagine that some of you know the name LeBron James. Whether or not you like Cleveland sports, if you have ever seen this guy play basketball, you know that he is pretty good. In fact, when he plays, he seems to demonstrate this rhythm. He seems to do this thing with a sense of ease and excellence. So much so that it just looks like he is filled with natural talent. When you think about his on-court movements and timing and strength, you should know that he didn’t just step onto a court all of a sudden and magically become a pro-basketball player. You know that behind the scenes there is a lot of work going on. There are a lot of drills and exercises. He was probably watching NBA film clips. He was probably working on certain exercises to try and make sure that he would become a good basketball player. In other words, he was doing things off the court so when he finally stepped on the court, he would do them with excellence.
Again, what is true for the musician and true for the athlete is true for each one of us. Especially as it relates to our spirituality. It doesn’t make too much sense that we would just expect to go out there on the stage of life or the basketball court of life or whatever you want to call it and face all these trials and all these things coming at us from different angles, trials and tribulations, and expect to just try to act like Jesus. It doesn’t make sense. Rather, the smart Christian realizes behind the scenes you have to train to be like Jesus. In other words, train off the court so when you get on the court, your normal response is going to be more like Jesus.
What I am saying is that the WWJD approach to Christianity doesn’t work well. WWJD stands for what would Jesus do. I think it came out in the 90s. This trend was started by a youth minister and started selling these bracelets and they sold really well. It was based on the book from the 1800s called In His Steps that was written by a man named Charles Sheldon. The plot of the book is really quite simple. It is the idea that there was a series of negative events that happened in this town that centered on the local church. A church that was very prosperous and doing very well. Somewhere in the middle of the book, the pastor got this idea that I don’t think I am living like Christ and I really don’t think my congregation is. So what he did was issue a challenge. He had everybody take a vow that they would not do anything during their day without first asking the question what would Jesus do. Don’t get me wrong, I think I had one of these bracelets at one time too. It is not totally a wrong concept. It is just that if you are going to rely on something like a bracelet or an acronym, you are going to quickly find that it doesn’t work in all situations. In fact, it probably doesn’t work in 90% of the situations. If I am going to walk into a situation that comes at me really quickly, it could be a comment, a disaster, an accident, I am not going to have time to process what would Jesus do. Instead, what I am going to do is respond to what is already going on in here. What I talked about last week was the idea that we all have automatic responses to life events. Things that just trigger something. Things trigger something and we respond in a certain way. We forget that those responses are based on something un-Jesus-like inside of us. We went to that list last week and I referred to some of those things today. That stuff is going on inside. Let’s say I have a problem with anger. I get easily upset. Really, if I was to examine that I would see that maybe it has something to do with feeling insecure about something. Maybe I never got the affirmation I needed from my mother or my father. Maybe I am fearful. So when somebody comes along, and given enough time they will, they will hit that fear button, they will hit that insecure button and the natural response will not be what would Jesus do in this situation. It is lash out. Go on the attack. We just don’t have the time to think about what Jesus would do in most circumstances. We just respond. That is why the WWJD bracelet doesn’t work. With the WWJD bracelet what you are trying to do is change an external behavior, in this case anger or an outburst, without dealing with the underlying stuff that is causing that anger and outburst.
Does this make sense at all? This is a hard concept to explain, but I hope you are getting it. The point being is that trying to be like Jesus, trying to be a good person, a good Christian doesn’t work, especially when you are on the spot in the midst of a crisis. So we train to be like Jesus off the spot so when we do come on the spot, whether it is in a meeting, a conversation, in the middle of a tragedy, or whatever, we begin to respond as Jesus would respond if he were us. What is true of a musician and of an athlete is true for us. The good news is that it was true for Jesus. Jesus did these things I am talking about. Jesus was someone who understood the importance of training and preparation to begin to meet the many situations in life that are uncomfortable, unpleasant, and difficult. In fact, right after he became baptized in the early part of Matthew, he didn’t say okay I am baptized. Let’s go eat some cake and celebrate. He ended up in the desert fasting in prayer for 40 days. Because of that fasting and prayer, he was able to meet and effectively deal with Satan who was coming his way.
In fact, we have a few minutes with this sermon, in case you are not familiar with this story, I would like to have somebody read through Matthew 4:1-11, ideally the NIV version. (Scripture read here.) To me, this is a perfect picture of what I am talking about. Jesus knew the importance of training and preparation. That preparation for him came through, in that case, 40 days of fasting and prayer and probably coupled with some scripture memorization. So much so that when the devil approached him, he just acted like a LeBron James with a sense of ease and excellence. That is why we love that passage. Jesus had all the stuff right on your lips when you did that. We think he just got that way because he was the son of God. I suspect it came from doing the training behind the scenes. Training off the spot so he would perform well while he was on the spot. This, as you know, is not simply a one-time situation for Jesus. As you read through the gospel, you see that he was regularly engaging in this pattern of training. Over and over we see him going off and praying in silence and solitude. A good passage comes out of Mark that speaks of this. It says “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went off to a solitary place where he prayed.” I love this passage because the first thing it makes me think is why did Jesus have to get up early. If anybody should have been able to sleep in on Sunday mornings it should have been Jesus. What was causing this? What was going on here? He did this as a regular habit. He would go off to these solitary places and pray. He would probably meditate on scripture. He would think about it. It would just prepare him for dealing with all sorts of stuff in life that he was about to deal with. I imagine that because of his training habits, he was able to continue to love his disciples even though they disappointed him in so many ways. He was able to bless the Pharisees even as they cursed him. He was able to go and feel comfortable hanging out in the houses of sinners, the prostitutes and the tax collectors, where other people would have nothing to do with those people. Finally, he was able to be crucified on a Roman cross and do it with restraint and dignity. He didn’t get like that by just stepping on that cross on the first day. Could he have done it? Maybe. But I think he wanted to demonstrate that he was not only the son of God, he was the son of man, and he was showing us the pattern of life that we are to live. He was giving us an example of the life of preparation that is so necessary. He was showing the importance of training to be like him, not simply trying to be like him.
Some of you may be thinking, ok Chuck, I think you made the point of the importance of training over trying, but the question that may be lingering in some of your minds is how do we do this. After all, Jesus is not around anymore. How do we be like Jesus? How do we be with Jesus? I am going to have to keep my sermon short today, so I can’t really answer that question as good as it is. Next week, I promise that I am going to get into real practical ways that we can be with Jesus and be like Jesus. Today, I will leave you with talking about briefly the idea that just as musicians and athletes and many professionals have training drills, scales, and all this stuff that they need to work with in order to become very good at their profession, Christians have a whole tool box full of things that are sometimes to referred to as spiritual practices or spiritual exercises or collectively referred to as spiritual disciplines. I wish we could change that name because it tends to weird people out because they don’t like the idea of discipline or they think we are talking about something new age or weird. Really, there are a lot of definitions about spiritual disciplines, but one definition that I like comes from a man named Dallas Willard. He says a spiritual discipline is simply spiritual activities or trainings that we can do to accomplish what we cannot do simply by trying. Maybe we have a very hard time trying not to be a workaholic. What we can do is, over time, learn to practice the discipline of Sabbath. So when the temptation comes along to over work, we naturally respond like Jesus. We can’t necessarily not stop doing things, but there are things we can do. The spiritual disciplines we are all familiar with. Most of the people in the room have engaged in some form of spiritual discipline. Hopefully, you pray occasionally. That is a spiritual discipline. Hopefully, you read the Bible occasionally. That is a spiritual discipline. Being here on Sunday mornings is a spiritual discipline. Worshipping God is a spiritual discipline. When we limit the disciplines to those three or four things, we really limit God’s work in our lives. When we open ourselves up to things like art, exercise, Sabbath, silence, fasting, writing, we begin to see that God is a creative God. God can use anything to help us to connect with him in very real, very practical, and very Christian ways. If we limit our spiritual life to our daily bread and reading through three chapters of John every day and maybe saying a one-minute prayer as you go out the door, what is going to happen over time is you are going to get frustrated because you haven’t really trained. You have just gone through the motions and think that if you go through the motions, eventually you are going to start looking like Jesus. What is going to happen is you are going to become very frustrated because you are going to see no growth in yourself. But if you begin to tap into the creativity of God, the creativity of others, and begin to take some of these non-traditional disciplines and merge them in with your unique personality, with your season of life, with your schedule, you begin to see that you are making progress in your faith. And you are actually beginning to experience these unforced rhythms of grace that all of a sudden lightens your load as a Christian.
Next week, I will go into more of these types of examples, but here is an example. Just see what you think about this. Anybody here like to go to the beach? I think most people love going to the beach. Debbie and I were blessed to be able to spend some time in Florida last month when I did my sabbatical. We just loved walking along the beach. Feeling the warmth of the sun. Experiencing the waves as they come up on your ankles and hearing the sounds of the ocean and really just walking along together. Sometimes saying something. Sometimes not. Just walking. Just being together. Another question is does anybody struggle with their morning devotions? If you are honest, we all struggle with it. I struggle with the morning devotionals. Finding time to be with God. With a little bit of creativity and a little bit of technology and a little bit of discipline, you can find a way to accomplish both. To be at the beach and be with Jesus at the same time. I imagine some of you have smart phones. Do you know they can download music? Not only music. Sounds of the ocean. When I was getting depressed leaving Florida and about to head back here, I thought how can I take the ocean with me. I went on and asked Siri to give me some ocean sounds. She downloaded ocean sounds from across the world. I started listening to them. I really like just sitting and listening to the ocean. I thought what if I was to take those sounds and take my quiet time and begin to imagine that it is not just me walking along the beach. It is me and Jesus. So I begin to see Jesus walking on the beach together slowly. Just as Debbie and I did. We would walk. Sometimes we would talk. Sometimes we wouldn’t talk. Sometimes we would share about a concern. Sometimes we would share a prayer. Sometimes we would talk about a scripture. That is what I began doing. I would see myself walking with Jesus, talking to Jesus, I am expressing prayers to Jesus, and I am expressing my concerns to Jesus. I am talking about a scripture that I have read that day. After about 15 minutes or so, the alarm on my phone goes off and suddenly I am awake and back to reality. There are times that I have just set my alarm for ten more minutes because I really enjoy that time with Jesus. Now some of you are looking at me like Chuck you are just weird. I look at all you and say you are all weird too. Because in Bellevue weird is just a matter of degree and you can decide where I fall on that scale. We are all weird. It is just a matter of degree. It sounds weird because it wouldn’t fit into a typical spiritual disciplines book like Celebration of Discipline or different books like that that have been written for years. It just doesn’t fit in there. But I would say, to me, based on my personality and my needs at the time, which is me connecting with God in creative ways, doing that is spiritual and it is a discipline. Tell me it’s not spiritual. I am walking with Jesus. I am thinking about Jesus. I am talking to Jesus. I am praying to Jesus. I am thinking about the scripture. I am thinking about what he wrote. It is a discipline because the first few times you try it, it doesn’t work. So you have to try it over and over again. I don’t want to belabor this because I will talk about it more next week, but my point is, again, that just as it is difficult to try to be like Jesus without training to be like Jesus, sometimes we don’t train the right way. We become very frustrated. I know some of you are into working out and probably would suggest that if you have done the same routine over and over again, it makes sense to shake it up a little bit. If you are in your quiet time and something is not there and you are just feeling farther away from God, begin to ask God to help you with this. Ask other people how they connect with Jesus. As you do that, you will find that your routine, call it what you want, call it spiritual practices, call it spiritual trainings, but the bottom line is you are just being with Jesus. You will stick to that more, and you will begin to see the results that you want to see.
In closing, we are talking about the need for training versus trying. Many Christians are frustrated because they have tried too hard to be like Jesus. A better approach is that they would learn to develop the pattern of Jesus who was always in a constant lifestyle of training. So much so that he would do off the spot what he needed to do on the spot and begin to really impact his world. And he is expecting the same in us. The idea of training, don’t make it too difficult. If your training time is becoming frustrating or boring, what I suspect is if you keep your minds and your hearts open a little bit and realize really that the scripture we just spoke of is true. Jesus doesn’t want our Christian life to be an added burden. He is all about embrace. As we learn creative ways to connect with God and connect with others, we too will be able to experience the unforced rhythms of grace. Jesus said “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.
