The Joy Of Prayer: Spiritual Disciplines = Spiritual Privileges

Sermon for January 16, 2022 - The Joy of Prayer - Prayer as a Spiritual Discipline

Last week Pastor Arleen introduced our current series on spiritual disciplines. If you missed that message, it was an excellent overview of what spiritual disciplines are and why they matter. You can watch that on our Youtube channel on demand.

At the Thursday morning Bible study, we discussed the Scriptures that Pastor Arleen used in her message, and I asked people, to begin with, how they feel about the word “spiritual“.

The general response was that the word “Spiritual” generates positive feelings and, for those in the Bible study anyway, the word brought up thoughts and feelings about the inner life, about our relationship with God, and about all those things about us that are true and the most important.

Who we really are on the inside. That much is, I think, a good overview of how people generally feel about the word spiritual.

Then I asked how people feel about the word “discipline”. And there were a variety of responses. One said that discipline was generally a positive word when they thought of their own life and how they were able to make positive forward progress by applying discipline to their lives.

But when it came to thoughts of being disciplined as a child, perhaps on the job, the feelings expressed by the group about that word were more negative.

Another person present at the Bible Study suggested that the word discipline was so strongly connected to parental discipline, and being forced to do things that they didn’t want, the word just had a very negative meaning overall.

Another added that when you attach the word “spiritual“ to the word “discipline“, it created a completely different feeling and meaning. That person‘s experience was that spiritual growth generally would happen when they were engaged in spiritual disciplines.

And I think the sense there was that when we’re not actively doing things that we might call spiritual disciplines, we can find ourselves in some way drifting in our walk with God. So adding the word “spiritual“ before the word on “discipline“, kind of reduces the negative associations, and in fact turns it around completely to being a positive thing.

And in fact spiritual disciplines are an extremely positive thing. Pastor Arleen ended her message with a caveat or a warning, as I heard it, that I think is wise. For me it is summed up in these meme:

So the caution here, and there are always cautions which hopefully keep us from extremes, the caution here is that spiritual disciplines, spiritual growth in general weirdly - can produce pride in us if we’re not careful.

When we make positive movement forward, and experience the blessing and the life-change that really applying ourselves to the spiritual disciplines brings, it’s in the human heart to look down on those that, from our limited perspective, are not growing as much.

That tendency to pride is something we have to be very honest about and careful about. What’s the big general statement that Scripture makes about this type of pride?

Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18. So yes, spiritual pride is something to be avoided at all costs. May we grow the self-awareness to maintain humility in the midst of growth. Amen?

The reason that spiritual disciplines are so positive, and the reason that we encourage all of us to grow in the spiritual disciplines can perhaps be understood with a few simple metaphors. Think about when you have been super thirsty, even if you may not have been fully aware of it. Maybe you’ve been focussing on a task, distracted. What happens if you have a small cup of water?

Speaking first person, what happens is that my body just instantly absorbs it. And then the question is, is that enough? Well, when you’re really super thirsty, you can drink much more than a small cup of water.

I’m a large fellow, and it has happened numerous times when I’ve been super thirsty, perhaps the result of doing a whole lot of distracting work where I was focussed on what I was doing and not on how I was feeling, that when I have started to drink water, I’ve been able to drink 16, 20, 24 ounces in a single gulp.

It is utterly refreshing, even when you didn’t know how thirsty, how deprived your body was. More than likely you have your own experience of thirst.

Not enough prayer, and communion with God can be like that. Maybe it’s the reason sometimes that many of us inconsistently and just periodically cry out to God in prayer. It might be that the reason for that is that we have not been taking “small sips“ as it were on the regular. And our spirits then may have developed a thirst, a tremendous longing for God, a tremendous sense of being far away from God and needing to draw near.