Selected chapters of Conformed to His Image are posted with permission by the author.
Process Spirituality: Being Vs. Doing; Process Vs. Product
In our culture, we increasingly tend to be human doings rather than human beings. The world tells us that what we achieve and accomplish determines who we are, but the Scriptures teach that who we are in Christ should be the basis for what we do. The dynamics of growth are inside-out rather than outside-in. This section talks about becoming faithful to the process of life rather than living from one product to the next. It also focuses on what it means to abide in Christ and to practice His presence.
Continuing on the Journey
What does it take to stay in the race? This concluding chapter considers a variety of issues related to finishing well, including intimacy with Christ, fidelity in the spiritual disciplines, a biblical perspective on the circumstances of life, teachability, personal purpose, healthy relationships, and ongoing ministry.
Kenneth Boa
Website: http://www.kenboa.org
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In our society, we increasingly tend to be human doings rather than human beings. The world tells us that what we achieve and accomplish determines who we are, but the Scriptures teach that who we are in Christ should be the basis for what we do. The dynamics of growth are inside-out rather than outside-in. Process spirituality is concerned with faithfulness during the ongoing journey rather than living from one product to the next. It also focuses on what it means to abide in Christ and to practice His presence.
Recall from the introduction that I created the twelve categories in this book to reflect the various dimensions of biblical truth as they relate to practical experience on a personal and corporate level. Some of them, like disciplined and devotional spirituality, are rooted in historical traditions, but others simply portray hands-on applications of Christian principles. This is especially true of paradigm, holistic, and process spirituality. Process spirituality is concerned with being alive to the present moment and with the step-by-step process of responding to God’s loving initiatives in our lives.
For many people in our culture, life has become so filled with the if-only’s of the future that today becomes an inconvenient obstacle in the path of reaching tomorrow. As Walker Percy observed in his novel Lancelot, “To live in the past and future is easy. To live in the present is like threading a needle.” During most of our lives, we have a natural tendency to dwell in the future by investing our energies in goals and accomplishments we hope to achieve in the days ahead. The problem is that even when we are able to attain these ends, we are already thinking of the next one down the road. Thus, by moving from product to product, we are rarely alive to the realities of the present. We are fully capable of doing this for decades, but there eventually comes a point where the days ahead are few and the memories behind are abundant. At this point, many people make an unconscious switch to living in the past instead of the future.
I am not saying that being alive to the ongoing process implies the elimination of planning and goal setting. Without a clear vision of the results we desire, we will not move in the direction of creating them, whether in business or in acquiring a skill. In The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz distinguishes primary, secondary, and fundamental choices. Primary choices are choices about major results, and secondary choices help you take a step toward your primary result. A fundamental choice is a choice in which you commit yourself to a basic life orientation or a basic state of being. Fritz argues that it is easy for people to move through life by default without a clear idea of what they really want:
“What do you want?” I asked a man during a workshop.
“I want to get in touch with myself,” he said.
“What will you have once you are in touch with yourself?” I asked, trying to help him focus on the result he wanted.
“Then I can see what holds me back,” he replied.
“What will happen once you can see what holds you back?”
“Then I can overcome the way I sabotage myself.”
“Once you know that,” I asked again, “then what?”
“Then I can stop doing it.”
“What will happen when you stop doing it?”
“Well, I don’t know,” was the reply.
This exchange illustrates two things: first, many people don’t know where their process is taking them, and second, it is better to choose what we want to create than to focus on avoiding what we don’t want.
From a biblical perspective, our fundamental choice should be to know and become like the Lord Jesus, and this in turn should shape our primary and secondary choices in life. This fundamental choice is compatible with living in the present, the only point at which time intersects eternity. This aspiration animates our present, makes us alive to the process of daily experience, and informs our planning.
By contrast, an unbiblical fundamental choice (whether by default or by design) will never satisfy us because it will not address our deepest need as people created to know and enjoy their Creator. In this situation, our lack of contentment in the present will delude us into thinking that it will be found in the future—hence, product-to-product living.
The best metaphor for life as a whole and for the spiritual life in particular is that of a journey. Literature abounds with this imagery (e.g., John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress). As followers of the Way (Acts 9:2; 19:9; 19:23; 22:4; 24:14, 22), we are travelers on a quest, a voyage, an odyssey, a pilgrimage. If we are following Christ, we are headed for home, but there are stages along the way and lessons to be learned. This is why it is a mistake to view the spiritual life as a static condition or a state of being that can be attained by a combination of technique and information. To follow Christ is to move into territory that is unknown to us and to count on His purposeful guidance, His grace when we go off the path, and His presence when we feel alone. It is to learn to respond to God’s providential care in deepening ways and to accept the pilgrim character of earthly existence with its uncertainties, setbacks, disappointments, surprises, and joys. It is to remember that we are in a process of gradual conformity to the image of Christ so that we can love and serve others along the way.
Seen in this light, the primary point of this earthly existence is preparation for our eternal citizenship in heaven (cf. DeVern F. Fromke, The Ultimate Intention and Paul E. Billheimer, Destined for the Throne). In this life we stumble in many ways (James 3:2) because we are still in process—our sanctification is not yet complete. Sanctification is both an event (we were sanctified when we gave ourselves to Christ; 1 Corinthians 6:11) and a process (we are being sanctified; Romans 12:2; Philippians 2-3; 1 John 2:28). Spiritual formation is the lifelong process of becoming in our character and actions the new creations we already are in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17); it is the working out of what God has already worked in us (Philippians 2:12-13).
The Christian life is not conformity to prevailing standards of holiness, but a step-by-step process. This process of genuine response to what God is doing in our lives is more critical than the visible product. I remember a new believer who in his enthusiasm for having found Christ sometimes swore when he prayed. Laundry-list legalism with its inventory of don’ts (the filthy five, the nasty nine, the dirty dozen) and do’s would measure such a person as carnal and disobedient. But I submit that this new convert, who knew little but applied what little he knew, was more pleasing to the heart of God with his ungainly prayers than a person who is eloquent in public prayer but is harboring unconfessed sin. In this case, the former gives the appearance of disobedience when he is actually obedient to where he is in his journey; the latter gives the appearance of obedience when he is actually disobedient to what he knows. External appearances are often deceptive, and this is why God looks at the heart.
Rahab the harlot had little knowledge about the God of Israel, but applied the knowledge she had (Hebrews 11:31; James 2:25); the Pharisees knew the Scriptures but rejected God’s purposes. Since the spiritual life is not a matter of external conformity, it cannot be measured. Instead of comparing ourselves with others (2 Corinthians 10:12), it is better to seek fidelity in our own journey. Holiness relates to where we are now, not where we need to be later.
We are called to be apprentices of Jesus in kingdom living, and this requires time, development, and patience. As the gospels illustrate, knowing and believing in Christ is a dynamic process (consider the disciples in John 1, 2:11, and 16:30-31; the woman at the well in John 4; the man born blind in John 9; and Nicodemus in John 3, 7, and 19). Spiritual formation is gradual, and we become more substantial and real as we cooperate with the process by years of small choices in favor of God’s purposes. Each choice, whether to obey or resist, makes the next one possible.
Growth in Christlike virtues such as obedience, patience, courage, wisdom, service, humility, gentleness, and love is never automatic or easy. To use Teresa of Avila’s metaphor, the soul is an interior castle in which we must invite God to occupy room by room. This requires a lengthy series of deaths along the way: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34-35). Progress in following the Way necessitates an intentional and ongoing commitment to a protracted course of spiritual formation.
Our task is to place ourselves under the conditions favorable to growth and look to God for our spiritual formation. He uses different paces and methods with each person. Since the inner life matures and becomes fruitful by the principle of growth (1 Peter 2:2; 2 Peter 3:18), time is a significant part of the process. As nature teaches us, growth is not uniform—like a vine or a tree, there may be more growth in a single month than in all the rest of the year. If we fail to accept this uneven developmental process, we will be impatient with God and with ourselves as we wait for the next growth spurt or special infusion of grace.
In a culture that promotes instant gratification, it can be wearisome for us to wait patiently for God’s timing. Many of us are tempted to bypass grace and take matters into our own hands as we seek some method, technique, seminar, or experience that will give us the results we want when we want them. But the fact is that we are as incapable of changing ourselves through our own efforts as we are of manipulating God to transform us more quickly.
In His grace, the Lord invites us to cooperate with the formative work of His Holy Spirit in our lives by engaging in the disciplines of faith, repentance, and obedience and by trusting in His ways and in His timing. Inevitably, God’s timing will seem painfully slow to us, but as we grow in wisdom, we learn to be more patient with the divine process, knowing that He alone knows what we need and when we need it. Thus, spiritual formation is nourished by years of disciplined fidelity to the sovereign call of God. Indeed, we will fail and disobey and do many foolish and grievous things throughout the process, but fidelity means that we get up and return to Jesus each time we fall. “Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34). May we allow the ordinary demands of everyday living to drive us to the grace of Jesus, to the Love of the Father, and to the fellowship of the Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:14).
“But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13). The great theological virtues of faith, hope, and love encapsulate the dynamic of the spiritual life in Christ. Although all three relate to God’s creative purposes from eternity to eternity, faith particularly focuses on Christ’s redemptive work for us in the past, hope looks to the ultimate completion of this work in the future, and love manifests the life of Christ through us in the present.
Biblical faith is intrinsically bound up with hope because it is grounded in a Person we have not yet seen (see Romans 8:24-25 and 1 Peter 1:7-9). “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. . . . And without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him” (Hebrews 11:1, 6). Faith is pleasing to God because it is the measure of the risk we place in His character and promises. Those who trust in Christ are, in effect, “betting the farm” on His claims and credentials; they are hoping that what He has promised, He is able also to perform (Romans 4:21).
The essence of walking in faith is acting on the conviction that God alone knows what is best for us and that He alone is able to accomplish it. The problem with faith is that it goes against the grain of human inclination and culture because it is based on the invisible and uncontrollable. We may give lip service to the proposition that God alone knows what is best for us, but in practice we are inclined to follow our own viewpoints, especially when times are tough.
The risks of faith are pleasing to God since they honor His testimony in spite of appearances to the contrary. A. W. Tozer put it this way in The Root of the Righteous:
A real Christian is an odd number, anyway. He feels supreme love for One whom he has never seen; talks familiarly every day to Someone he cannot see; expects to go to heaven on the virtue of Another; empties himself in order to be full; admits he is wrong so he can be declared right; goes down in order to get up; is strongest when he is weakest; richest when he is poorest and happiest when he feels the worst. He dies so he can live; forsakes in order to have; gives away so he can keep; sees the invisible; hears the inaudible; and knows that which passeth knowledge.
This faith that pleases God involves three components: knowledge, trust, and action.
Unless we know the truth, the truth cannot set us free. Faith in the biblical sense is not based on our feelings and opinions or on those of others, but on the authority of divine revelation. Since the heart cannot rejoice in what the mind rejects, it is important to understand that biblical faith is not a leap into the dark but a step into the light. It is a faith founded on fact, and there are credible answers to the intellectual barriers that are often erected against Christianity. For example, I’m Glad You Asked, a book I coauthored with Larry Moody, outlines the answers to twelve basic objections to Christianity. The component of knowledge in our faith will be enriched when we renew our minds with God’s truth, and this requires the discipline of regular personal time in the Scriptures.
Faith is only as good as the object in which it is placed. If the object is worthy of our faith, it will sustain us even when our faith is weak. When I was in seminary, one of my professors told the story of his grandfather who wanted to cross the icy Susquehanna River at the turn of the century. Since he was unsure of the thickness of the ice, he began to cross gingerly on his hands and knees. When he was about halfway across, he heard a great rumbling sound. Looking over his shoulder, he was embarrassed to see a large wagon drawn by four horses storming past him on the ice! His faith had been weak, but its object was worthy. There is no more trustworthy foundation for our faith than Christ, the Rock and Anchor of our soul. When we place our trust in Him, we can be sure that He will carry us safely to the other side.
Knowledge and trust are best displayed in action. Regardless of what we say, it is what we do that will reveal what our hearts truly believe and trust. Faith in Christ has the property of growing through acts of obedience, and an obedient faith results in a greater knowledge of God. So there is a reciprocal relationship between the faith components of knowledge and action; the better we know Him, the more we want to obey Him, and the more we obey Him, the better we will know Him. Everything hinges on what we trust. If we trust our own wisdom, our hands are too full of ourselves to receive the gifts of God. It is only when we empty our hands of self-reliance, self-righteousness, self-pity, and other self-sins that they will be empty enough to receive the life of Christ in us and display His life to others.
A few years ago, I attended the funeral of one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known. Several months after giving her life to Christ, Emily Meredith was diagnosed with a brain tumor. During the next five years, the courage, love, hope, and peace she displayed could only be explained by the power of the Holy Spirit in her life. In spite of her ordeal, she was never known to complain even once. The Christlike quality of her life made an indelible impact on hundreds of people, and by the age of 21 she had accomplished the purpose for which she was sent and was ready for her heavenly homecoming. While her family grieves her passing, their sorrow is tempered by an unflinching hope in the promises and character of God (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).
Hope is a powerful biblical motivator because it is related to the promise of long-term gain. We just observed that faith and hope are linked together; faith takes the risk of commitment before knowledge, and hope gives us the reason for the risks of faith. Each of the men and women of faith listed in Hebrews 11 understood that God is a rewarder of those who seek Him and risked the temporal in order to gain the eternal. Moses, for example, chose to endure ill-treatment with the people of God instead of enjoying the passing pleasures of sin, because he considered the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he was looking to the reward (Hebrews 11:25-26).
Worldly hope tells us to pursue passing pleasures, but biblical hope warns us not to sell ourselves so cheaply. God calls us to give ourselves to the things that will last and will not disappoint us in the end. If we focus our hearts on the eternal, we will enjoy the temporal as well; but if our primary pursuit is the temporal, we will not only lose the eternal, but also the temporal.
In their helpful book, A Layman’s Guide to Applying the Bible, Walt Henrichsen and Gayle Jackson describe four kinds of people: those with no hope, those who have a misplaced hope, those who have an ill-defined hope, and those who have a proper hope.
Few people can live for long without some sense of hope. The venerable Bede portrayed human existence without the resurrection as a bird that flies out of complete darkness into a window of a brilliantly lighted banqueting hall, only to dart briefly across the light and music of the hall and fly out another window into the blackness of night. If this earth is all there is, life is a brief episode between two oblivions; it mocks our deepest aspirations and longings for more than this planet seems to offer. Some existentialists counsel us to accept the idea that life is meaningless and to live with courage in spite of the absurdity of existence. But no one can live consistently with such a hopeless philosophy.
Almost everyone we meet lives with some kind of hope, some reason for getting up each morning and going on with life. But it would not take much probing to reveal the shallowness and inadequacy of the things in which most people put their faith and hope. When men put their hope in money, power, and position for their sense of self-worth and fulfillment, they will discover, as countless others have before, that these things will let them down. When women hope first in their family, their possessions, or their social status to satisfy their longing for security and significance, they too will be disillusioned.
Those who know Jesus are by no means immune to the problem of misplaced hope. Many have slipped into the trap of hoping in Christ for their eternal salvation and hoping in the world for everything else. I believe the reason so many can swallow the camel of eternity and strain at the gnats of the temporal is that this earth seems so real to them while heaven seems so vague and distant. With this mindset, it takes less faith to trust Christ for the afterlife than it does for this life.
Bob Hope once told a story about being in a plane that was struck by lightning. “Do something religious!” shrieked a little old lady across the aisle. “So I did,” he wisecracked. “I took up a collection.” People have a tendency to “do something religious” in life-threatening situations. I heard the testimony of an Atlanta businessman who described an experience he had before putting his faith in Christ. He was staying at the Hilton in Las Vegas when a fire broke out in the hotel. Thinking he was going to die, he cried out to God to deliver him. As he later reflected on this terrifying experience, he observed, “I didn’t pray to the gods of work, money, golf, or family.” It is during times of tribulation and adversity that we clarify the nature of our hope (see Romans 5:3-5). Hope developed in good circumstances tends to be unreliable because it is untested. But God uses times of adversity and few alternatives to bring us into contact with a hope that will not let us down.
The only firm foundation for our hope is the unchanging character of the living God. It is when we find our refuge in Christ that we lay hold of a hope that is an anchor of the soul, a hope that will not disappoint because it is both sure and steadfast (Hebrews 6:18-19; 1 Peter 2:6). This biblical hope provides us with stability and direction because it draws us toward the promises of God. Since these promises are an extension of the Lord’s character, a proper hope is founded on a willingness to trust in Him. The key to trusting Him is knowing Him, and the key to knowing Him is the time we spend walking with Him day by day.
The apostle Paul lived out the truth that “the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). In the same way, the heroes of faith listed in Hebrews 11 welcomed the promises of God from a distance and longed for a reward that was unseen by earthly eyes. Their faith was the assurance of the things for which they hoped, and the conviction of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).
Paul revealed his heart when he wrote to the saints in Philippi of his longing for completeness in his relationship to Christ: “Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14).
The apostle avoided the morass of complacency and self-satisfaction through his understanding of the spiritual life as a process that leads ever higher and deeper in the personal knowledge of Jesus Christ, the Creator and Sustainer of all things in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible (Colossians 1:16-17). In his singlemindedness (“one thing I do”), he concentrated on the goal of growing conformity to Christ.
The world’s agenda burdens us with a multiplicity of worries and “desires for other things” (Mark 4:19) that can never satisfy the spiritual hunger of the human heart. But our calling is higher than this. Our Lord wants us to lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, so that we can run with endurance the race that is set before us as we fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith (Hebrews 12:1-2).
Paul lets us in on a discipline that can revolutionize our lives: “one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead . . . .” A. W. Tozer wrote that “we must face today as children of tomorrow. We must meet the uncertainties of this world with the certainty of the world to come.”
Too many of us allow the present to be dominated by the regrets and the successes of the past. Paul learned the practice of deliberately forgetting the past, not in the sense of blotting out his memory, but by refusing to allow the past to control the present. If he had dwelled on his successes in Judaism, he would have been inclined to put his confidence in the efforts of the flesh rather than the grace of Christ. If he kept reviewing his failures and shortcomings, he would have been paralyzed by a sense of inadequacy and discouragement.
All of us have said and done things we wish we could undo or redo. In varying degrees, we have also experienced the pains of mistreatment and rejection. Though we cannot change the past, we can change our understanding of the past as we embrace the unconditional love of Christ who blesses us with forgiveness, healing, and restoration. The Scriptures exhort us to overcome the bondage of the past by living in the light of the future to which we have been called. The past is inalterable, but our lives in the present have a direct bearing on the quality of eternity. When we learn to see our past in light of our future, we see that our past has relevance, but our future reforms our past and determines who we are. In this way, we avoid the common pitfalls of camping permanently in denial or of camping permanently in sorrow.
This is why Paul added the positive statement, “reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” This is a metaphor of a runner who strains his body in his determination to win the race. The apostle’s life was compelled by a singleness of purpose that shaped all of his activities. Like an athlete in a race, he had a clearly defined goal, and he disciplined himself to attain it. But the prize he had in mind was not a fading laurel wreath; it was the reward of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Elsewhere he wrote that “everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. Therefore I run in such a way, as not without aim” (1 Corinthians 9:25-26; see Acts 20:24; 2 Timothy 4:7-8).
If we applied the same zeal in our walk with the Lord that we use in our sports and hobbies, many of us would be farther along the course. It takes time and discipline to “run with endurance the race that is set before us,” but this discipline must be set in a context of a transcendent hope and dependence upon the Spirit of Christ who indwells us and enables us to run in His victory.
Thus, the meaning of the present is largely shaped by our understanding of our destiny. There are two telling lines in The Iliad of Homer that seem to encapsulate the worldview of Greek mythology: “Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals, that we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows.” We live in unhappiness and death ends all—with such a perspective, it is not surprising that many Greek thinkers sought refuge from absurdity in variations of Stoicism and Epicureanism. But for the believer in Christ, the ultimate context of meaning and purpose is our participation in the everlasting kingdom of God. Each “today” in Christ can be animated by an eschatological spirituality of hope.
The gospel decisively deals with the twin problems of guilt over the past and anxiety about the future. In Christ, we enjoy forgiveness of sins (past) and anticipation of heaven (future). Unfortunately, this is where we often stop. But the gospel is more than forgiveness and eternal life: it is also the power to manifest kingdom living in the present. As I heard Darrell Bock put it, the gospel is the offer of God’s ability to make us into the people we were meant to be all along. In Christ, we have been freed from the bondage of the past and apprehension about the future so that we can enjoy the liberty of being alive to the opportunities of the present. The gospel is not a negative matter of keeping sin at bay, but a positive manner of walking with Christ and of loving and serving people through Him.
The blood of Christ paid the penalty of sin, the cross of Christ overcomes the power of sin, and our resurrection in Christ will remove the presence of sin. We live today between the cross and the resurrection, but even now Christ’s resurrection life empowers us to live and love in the present. We have been engrafted into the life of the ascended Lord, and as “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4), our life is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). This makes it possible for us to have an intimate connection between faith and practice, between being and doing, so that what God has already done in our inner life will become increasingly visible through His transforming work in our outer life. In this way, the hope of our glorious future can be incorporated by faith into our present relationships and circumstances.
Life in Christ is the life of Christ in us—appropriated in the past, active in the present, and anticipating the future. “But now faith, hope, love, abide these three: but the greatest of these is love“ (1 Corinthians 13:13). Love is the greatest virtue because it is the application of faith and hope to our relationships in the present:
|
FAITH |
LOVE |
HOPE |
|
Appropriated in the PAST |
Active in the PRESENT |
Anticipating the FUTURE |
|
Forgiveness and Grace |
Love and Community |
Purpose and Hope |
|
Salvation |
Sanctification |
Glorification |
|
Positional |
Progressive |
Ultimate |
|
Significance |
Satisfaction |
Security |
|
Hindsight |
Insight |
Foresight |
|
History |
Our Story |
His Story |
|
Humility |
Obedience |
Trust |
|
Knowing |
Doing |
Being |
|
Mind |
Will |
Emotions |
|
Seeing |
Acting |
Expecting |
|
Life |
Love |
Light |
Since eternal life is a new and ongoing quality of life in us that will last forever, the journey of spiritual transformation with its pains and joys and its failures and advances is a process of rendering this new creation increasingly visible.
Perhaps the greatest threat to applying these truths about process spirituality is the busyness that stems from the way we define ourselves in terms of achievements and accomplishments. We live in a future-oriented culture that relates time largely to efficiency and productivity. We are more inclined than ever to use time to accomplish results than to enhance relationships.
The civil religion of America worships the god of progress and inspires us to compete, achieve, and win for the sake of competing, achieving, and winning. Life for many people in the business world has been colorfully described as a matter of “blowing & going, plotting & planning, ducking & diving, running & gunning, slamming & jamming, moving & shaking, shucking & jiving.”
Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote, “We are warned not to waste time, but we are brought up to waste our lives.” This is evident in the tragedy of many people who in the first half of their lives spend their health looking for wealth, and in the last half spend their wealth looking for health.
My associate Len Sykes relates the problem of busyness to five areas:
In our home. We miss out on relational opportunities when we are dominated by excessive activities. Consider taking an inventory of activities like television, children’s lessons and sports, meetings, time on the computer, etc., and see how some of these can and should be pared down. Deuteronomy 6:5-9 exhorts parents to know and love God and to teach their children about Him “when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.” God intended the home to be a sanctuary for spiritual and personal development in a relational setting of love and acceptance. This requires an ongoing process involving both formal and spontaneous times together.
In our work. The mistake of looking to work rather than God for security and significance coupled with the pressured quest for more of this world’s goods—these are forces that drive us to the idolatry of materialism and busyness. If we don’t have enough time to cultivate a quality relationship with God, our spouse, and our children, we are working too long and too hard. As Gordon Dahl put it, “Most middle-class Americans tend to worship their work, to work at their play, and to play at their worship.”
In our recreation. Hard-charging approaches to recreation and vacations can devitalize us and keep us from enjoying personal and relational renewal. The Sabbath principle of restoration through “being-time” provides a balanced rhythm of work and rest.
In our church work/ministry. This can become another arena of busyness and frustration, especially when we take on activities and responsibilities in order to please people and meet their expectations. Not every need and request is a calling from God.
In our walk with God. Excessive activity draws us away from the time it takes to cultivate intimacy with God. We are often inclined to define our relationship with God in terms of doing things for Him rather than spending time with Him.
Here are just a few suggestions that will enhance the daily process of living before the Lord:
All of us have a built-in hunger for security, significance, and satisfaction, but our world teaches us to pursue these things in the wrong places. It should come as no surprise, then, that the dreams and goals promoted by the culture have also infected our whole approach to the spiritual life. There are Christian books, seminars, and churches that have baptized the media agenda of self-orientation, success, and ambition with a spiritual veneer. Many believers are encouraged to set their heart on goals that actually distance them from Christ. By contrast, Scripture teaches that our meaning is not found in a quest for self, but in a calling to know God.
Any dead fish can float downstream—to swim against the current of our times, we must be spiritually alive. As the New Testament portrays it, real life in Christ is countercultural. The world defines who we are by what we do, but the Word centers on who we are in Christ and tells us to express that new identity in what we do. Being and doing are clearly interrelated, but the biblical order is critical: what we do should flow out of who we are, not the other way around. Otherwise, our worth and identity are determined by achievements and accomplishments, and when we stop performing, we cease to be valuable. When people answer the question “Who are you?” by what they do, the world has a way of responding, “So what have you done lately?”
In Christ we have a secure and stable basis for worth and dignity, because these are founded on what God Himself has done for us and in us. Having been re-created and incorporated into the glorified life of the ascended Christ, God has penetrated to the very roots of our being and given us a new nature. Thus, being should have priority over doing, but it should also be expressed in doing. This balanced interplay would be lost if we disconnected the two. My friend Skip Kazmarek warns against this disjunction and illustrates this concern with a cartoon that shows a man laying on a couch, with a “Gangster Psychologist” (according to the diploma on the wall) sitting next to him. The psychologist says, “Well, just because you rob, murder, and rape doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.” We are not disjointed, disconnected, severed entities. Mind, body, and spirit exist in an integrated whole. How we act affects how we think, and how we think affects our relationship with God. There is a very dangerous construct that we sometimes serve up in which we can think of ourselves as “being” one way, while we continue to “do” exactly the opposite.
Thus, external action should be derived from internal reality, and this requires a rhythm of solitude and engagement, restoration and application, intimacy with Christ and activity in the world. The life of Jesus illustrates this pattern of seeking significant amount of time to be alone with the Father (Luke 5:16; Mark 1:35; 6:31) so that He would have the inner power and poise to deal with the outward pressures imposed upon Him by His friends and enemies. People who work and minister without adequate restoration through prayer and meditation do not have the interior resources to manifest the fruit of the Spirit in a stress-filled world. It is during the quiet times of the devotional life that we gain the perspective and power we need to live with character and composure in the context of daily demands. “In repentance and rest you will be saved, in quietness and trust is your strength” (Isaiah 30:15).
|
Being |
Doing |
|
Intimacy with Christ |
Activity in the World |
|
Solitude |
Engagement |
|
Abiding |
Serving |
|
Interior |
Exterior |
|
Relational calling |
Dominion calling |
|
Calling |
Character |
|
Invisible |
Visible |
|
Real Life |
Reflected Life |
|
Restoration of Spiritual Energy |
Application of Spiritual Energy |
|
Perspective |
Practice |
|
Rest |
Work |
In this chart, the real life of the left column should energize the reflected life of the right. The problem is that people typically approach the spiritual life in terms of the right column, supposing that their actions and service will lead to intimacy in their relationship with God. While the greatest commandment exhorts us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30), we tend to reverse the order, thinking we can go from the outside-in rather than the inside-out. Instead of ministry flowing out of our relationship with God, many people suppose, in effect, that ministry will determine their relationship with God.
The perennial problems of perfectionism and legalism stem from this vision of the spiritual life as a series of duties and tasks to be accomplished. Legalism is a spiritual disease that has afflicted the church since its inception. I cannot recall having met a legalistic Christian who is characterized by deep joy. This is because legalists attempt to achieve, through their own efforts, an externally imposed standard of performance in the hope that this will somehow earn them merit in the sight of God and others. This produces insecurity, frustration, denial, and failure for several reasons:
The Scriptures tell us that there is nothing we can do to earn favor before God, since all of our own efforts fall short of His character and righteousness (Romans 3:23; Titus 3:5-7).
Just as none of our actions will make God love us more, it is equally true that there is nothing we can think, say, or do that will make God love us less than He does (Romans 5:6-10).
Spiritual growth is accomplished by Christ’s life in us, not by our own attempts to create life. Our responsibility is to walk in the power of the Spirit and not in dependence on the flesh (Galatians 2:20; 5:16-25).
The focus of the Christian life should not be deeds and actions, but a relationship; it is not centered on a product, but on a Person. It is a matter of abiding in Christ Jesus (John 15:1-10) rather than fulfilling a set of religious formulae.
The New Testament teaches that allegiance to Christ has displaced devotion to a code (Romans 7:3-4), but there is a human tendency to avoid God through religious substitutes. Many miss the point that while intimacy with Christ leads to holiness, attempts to be holy do not necessarily lead to intimacy. Sanctification is not generated by moral behavior but by the grace of a relationship with Christ. If we miss this, we will be driven to causes rather than called to Christ, and activity will take precedence over intimacy. People who are driven eventually burn out. “If I am devoted to the cause of humanity only, I will soon be exhausted and come to the place where my love will falter; but if I love Jesus Christ personally and passionately, I can serve humanity though men treat me as a door-mat.” (Oswald Chambers).
The lives of Joshua and Joash poignantly illustrate the contrast between being called and being driven. Four scenes from the life of Joshua capture the heart of this faithful man. In the first scene, Joshua is present with Moses at the tent of meeting. When Moses entered this tent, the pillar of cloud would descend and stand at the entrance to the tent, and the Lord would speak with Moses (Exodus 33:7-10). The key to the life of Joshua is revealed in Exodus 33:11: “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses returned to the camp, his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent.” Joshua remained in the tent of meeting because he had a passion to know and be with God. This personal knowledge of God served him well in the second scene when he and Caleb were two of the twelve spies who were sent from Kadesh to view the land of Canaan (Numbers 13-14). Although all twelve spies saw the same things, ten of them interpreted what they saw from a human perspective and were overwhelmed by the size and number of the people. Only Joshua and Caleb saw the opposition through a divine perspective, and they encouraged the people to trust in the Lord: “Only do not rebel against the Lord; and do not fear the people of the land, for they will be our prey. Their protection has been removed from them, and the Lord is with us; do not fear them” (Numbers 14:9). Tragically, the people believed the fearful conclusions of the majority of the spies, and the Israelites were consigned to wander in the wilderness, literally killing time for 38 years until the generation of the exodus perished in the wilderness.
In the third scene, the Lord prepares Joshua to lead the generation of the conquest into the land of Canaan. In Joshua 1:1-9, the Lord encourages him to be a courageous and obedient man of the Word who meditates on it day and night. Because he knew and loved God and renewed his mind with the book of God’s law, Joshua finished well. In the fourth scene, Joshua is nearing the end of his earthly sojourn when he gathers and exhorts the people of Israel to serve the Lord only and to put away all forms of idolatry. He concludes his exhortation with this famous stance: “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” (Joshua 24:15). As Bob Warren puts it, “Because [Joshua] spent more time being a friend to God than a friend to others he avoided the pitfall of becoming enslaved to unproductive activity. But because he understood the necessity of intimacy over activity, his activity was energized beyond anything he could have imagined.”
By contrast, King Joash (2 Chronicles 22:10-24:27) was a man who appeared to start well but finished poorly. He was the only one of the royal offspring of the house of Judah who escaped Athaliah’s murderous plot to take the throne for herself. After Joash was protected and raised in the temple by Jehoiada the priest, Athaliah was put to death and the seven-year-old Joash became Judah’s king. “Joash did what was right in the sight of the Lord all the days of Jehoiada the priest” (24:2), and he championed the project of restoring the temple in Jerusalem. But when Jehoiada died, Joash listened to foolish counsel, abandoned the house of the Lord, and gave himself over to idolatry. He even murdered Jehoiada’s son when he rebuked him for forsaking the Lord.
Joash was involved with “religious” activities (the temple restoration project), but he never developed a relationship with the God of Jehoiada. He was driven by causes, but avoided the more fundamental calling to know the Lord. Because the “godly activity” of his younger years was never energized by intimacy with the Lord, he failed miserably in the end.
It is easy to become more concerned with good causes than with knowing Christ. As Oswald Chambers notes, “Beware of anything that competes with loyalty to Jesus Christ. . . . The greatest competitor of devotion to Jesus is service for Him. . . . We count as service what we do in the way of Christian work; Jesus Christ calls service what we are to Him, not what we do for Him. . . . The one aim of the call of God is the satisfaction of God, not a call to do something for Him.” Our primary purpose is not to do something for Christ, but to know Him; our activities and abilities are useless for the kingdom unless He energizes them, and this will not happen if they take precedence over intimacy with Him. We become weary and exhausted when we attempt more public ministry than we can cover in private growth.
Even worthy causes—raising godly children, building a company for Christ, knowing the Scriptures, leading people to the Lord, discipleship ministry—will not sustain us if we are not cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus. Many believers fall into the trap of striving for goals that are inferior to their purpose of knowing and enjoying God. When this happens, we attempt to do God’s work in our own power and get on the treadmill of outward activities without an interior life.
It is crucial for us to form the habit of holy leisure, of quiet places and times alone with the Lord, so that we will restore our passion and intimacy with Christ. In this way, service will flow out of our life with Him and our activities and abilities will be animated by dependence upon His indwelling power. This restoration and renewal is especially important after periods of intense activity. When we seek and treasure God’s intentions and calling, our personal knowledge of Him (knowing) shapes our character (being) and conduct (doing). Although we are more inclined to follow Jesus into service than into solitude, it is really the time we spend in “secluded places” with Him (Mark 1:35; 6:31) that will energize our outward service.
Our times of solitude with Jesus should not be limited to secluded places—we can choose to enjoy solitude with Him even in the midst of the outward activities of everyday living. Private prayer consists of mental prayer (meditation and contemplation; discussed in devotional spirituality), colloquy (conversational prayer with God; discussed in disciplined spirituality), and the prayer of recollection (practicing the presence of God). This recollection of God can be habitual or actual. Habitual recollection is analogous to a man’s or a woman’s love for a spouse or children, and does not require an ongoing consciousness. Just as we can form a habitual identity as being a husband, a wife, or a parent, so we can ask for the grace to form a habitual state of mind as a follower of Jesus Christ. Actual recollection involves the developing habit of turning to God at regular times throughout the course of the day. This is more along the lines of what Brother Lawrence, Frank Laubach, and Thomas Kelly pursued in their quest for a more conscious awareness of God in the routines of everyday life.
Note the process imagery in Scripture that stresses an ongoing awareness of the presence of Christ: abide in Jesus and let His words abide in you (John 15:4-7); set your mind on the things of the Spirit (Romans 8:5-6); walk by the Spirit (Galatians 5:16, 25); keep seeking the things above where Christ is (Colossians 3:1-2); rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18); run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus (Hebrews 12:1-2). The spiritual life is not a measurable product, but a dynamic process.
Here are some suggestions for practicing the presence of Jesus:
Intimacy and activity, solitude and engagement, interior and exterior, calling and character, rest and work—both sides of each of these spectra are important. A balanced life of being and doing will nourish both restoration and application.
Our culture teaches us that people are basically good and that their internal problems are the result of external circumstances. But Jesus taught that no outside-in program will rectify the human condition, since our fundamental problems stem from within (Mark 7:20-23). Holiness is never achieved by acting ourselves into a new way of being. Instead, it is a gift that God graciously implants within the core of those who have trusted in Christ. All holiness is the holiness of God within us—the indwelling life of Christ. Thus, the process of sanctification is the gradual diffusion of this life from the inside (being) to the outside (doing), so that we become in action what we already are in essence. Our efforts faithfully reveal what is within us, so that when we are dominated by the flesh we will do the deeds of the flesh, and when we walk by the Spirit we will bear the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:16-26).
Holiness is a new quality of life that progressively flows from the inside to the outside. As J. I. Packer outlines it in Keep in Step with the Spirit, the nature of holiness is transformation through consecration; the context of holiness is justification through Jesus Christ; the root of holiness is co-crucifixion and co-resurrection with Jesus Christ; the agent of holiness is the Holy Spirit; the experience of holiness is one of conflict; the rule of holiness is God’s revealed law; and the heart of holiness is the spirit of love. When we come to know Jesus we are destined for heaven because He has already implanted His heavenly life within us. The inside-out process of the spiritual life is the gradual outworking of this kingdom righteousness. This involves a divine-human synergism of dependence and discipline so that the power of the Spirit is manifested through the formation of holy habits. As Augustine put it, “Without God we cannot; without us, He will not.” Disciplined grace and graceful discipline go together in such a way that God-given holiness is expressed through the actions of obedience. Spiritual formation is not a matter of total passivity or of unaided moral endeavor, but of increasing responsiveness to God’s gracious initiatives. The holy habits of immersion in Scripture, acknowledging God in all things, and learned obedience make us more receptive to the influx of grace and purify our aspirations and actions.
“Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God” (1 John 3:21). It is wise to form the habit of inviting God to search your heart and reveal “any hurtful way” (Psalm 139:23) within you. Sustained attention to the heart, the wellspring of action, is essential to the formative process. By inviting Jesus to examine our intentions and priorities, we open ourselves to His good but often painful work of exposing our manipulative and self-seeking strategies, our hardness of heart (often concealed in religious activities), our competitively-driven resentments, and our pride. “A humble understanding of yourself is a surer way to God than a profound searching after knowledge” (Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ). Self-examining prayer or journaling in the presence of God will enable us to descend below the surface of our emotions and actions and to discern sinful patterns that require repentance and renewal. Since spiritual formation is a process, it is a good practice to compare yourself now with where you have been. Are you progressing in Christlike qualities like love, patience, kindness, forgiveness, compassion, understanding, servanthood, and hope? To assist you, here is a prayer sequence for examination and encouragement that incorporates the ten commandments, the Lord’s prayer, the beatitudes, the seven deadly sins, the four cardinal and three theological virtues, and the fruit of the Spirit. This can serve as a kind of spiritual diagnostic tool:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
Try me and know my anxious thoughts;
And see if there be any hurtful way in me,
And lead me in the everlasting way. (Psalm 139:23-24)
Watch over your heart with all diligence,
For from it flow the springs of life. (Proverbs 4:23)
You shall have no other gods before Me.
You shall not make for yourself an idol.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Honor your father and your mother.
You shall not murder.
You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal.
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
You shall not covet.
Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come,
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not lead us into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
Poverty of spirit (nothing apart from God’s grace)
Mourning (contrition)
Gentleness (meekness, humility)
Hunger and thirst for righteousness
Merciful to others
Purity of heart (desiring Christ above all else)
Peacemaking
Bearing persecution for the sake of righteousness
Pride
Avarice
Envy
Wrath
Sloth
Lust
Gluttony
Prudence (wisdom, discernment, clear thinking, common sense)
Temperance (moderation, self-control)
Justice (fairness, honesty, truthfulness, integrity)
Fortitude (courage, conviction)
Faith (belief and trust in God’s character and work)
Hope (anticipating God’s promises)
Love (willing the highest good for others, compassion)
Love
Joy
Peace
Patience
Kindness
Goodness
Faithfulness
Gentleness
Self-control
One of the great enemies of process spirituality is the craving to control our environment and the desire to determine the results of our endeavors. Many of us have a natural inclination to be manipulators, grabbers, owners, and controllers. The more we seek to rule our world, the more we will resist the rule of Christ; those who grasp are afraid of being grasped by God. But until we relinquish ownership of our lives, we will not experience the holy relief of surrender to God’s good and loving purposes. Thomas Merton put it this way in New Seeds of Contemplation:
This is one of the chief contradictions that sin has brought into our souls: we have to do violence to ourselves to keep from laboring uselessly for what is bitter and without joy, and we have to compel ourselves to take what is easy and full of happiness as though it were against our interests, because for us the line of least resistance leads in the way of greatest hardship and sometimes for us to do what is, in itself, most easy, can be the hardest thing in the world.
Our resistance to God’s rule even extends to our prayerful attempts to persuade the Lord to bless our plans and to meet our needs in the ways we deem best. Instead of seeking God’s will in prayer, we hope to induce Him to accomplish our will. Thus, even in our prayers, we can adopt the mentality of a consumer rather than a servant.
Perhaps the most painful lesson for believers to learn is the wisdom of being faithful to the process and letting loose of the results.
|
Opportunity |
Obedience |
Outcome |
|
Divine Sovereignty |
Human Responsibility |
Divine Sovereignty |
We have little control over opportunities we encounter and the outcomes of our efforts, but we can be obedient to the process.
Distorted dreams and selfish ambitions must die before we can know the way of resurrection. We cannot be responsive to God’s purposes until we abandon our strategies to control and acknowledge His exclusive ownership of our lives. At the front end, this surrender to the life of Christ in us appears to be the way of renunciation, but on the other side of renunciation we discover that it is actually the way of affirmation. “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it” (Luke 9:24). The better we apprehend our spiritual poverty and weakness, the more we will be willing to invite Jesus to increase so that we may decrease (John 3:30).
Another key to staying in the process is learning to receive each day and whatever it brings as from the hand of God. Instead of viewing God’s character in light of our circumstances, we should view our circumstances in light of God’s character. Because God’s character is unchanging and good, whatever circumstances He allows in the life of His children are for their good, even though they may not seem so at the time. Since His will for us is “good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2), the trials, disappointments, setbacks, tasks, and adversities we encounter are, from an eternal vantage point, the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. This Romans 8:28-39 perspective can change the way we pray. Instead of asking the Lord to change our circumstances to suit us, we can ask Him to use our circumstances to change us. Realizing that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18), we can experience “the fellowship of [Christ’s] sufferings” through “the power of His resurrection” (Philippians 3:10). Thus, Blaise Pascal prayed in his Pensees:
With perfect consistency of mind, help me to receive all manner of events. For we know not what to ask, and we cannot ask for one event rather than another without presumption. We cannot desire a specific action without presuming to be a judge, and assuming responsibility for what in Your wisdom You may hide from me. O Lord, I know only one thing, and that is that it is good to follow You and wicked to offend You. Beyond this, I do not know what is good for me, whether health or sickness, riches or poverty, or anything else in this world. This knowledge surpasses both the wisdom of men and of angels. It lies hidden in the secrets of Your providence, which I adore, and will not dare to pry open.
We are essentially spiritual beings, and each “today” that is received with gratitude from God’s hand contributes to our preparation for our glorious and eternal destiny in His presence. In “the sacrament of the present moment” as Jean-Pierre de Caussade described it, “It is only right that if we are discontented with what God offers us every moment, we should be punished by finding nothing else that will content us” (Abandonment to Divine Providence). It is when we learn to love God’s will that we can embrace the present moment as a source of spiritual formation.
As we grow in dependence on Christ’s life and diminish in dependence on our own, the fulfillment of receiving His life gradually replaces the frustration of trying to create our own. It is in this place of conscious dependence that God shapes us into the image of His Son. Here we must trust Him for the outcome, because we cannot measure or quantify the spiritual life. We know that we are in a formative process and that God is not finished with us yet, but we must also remember that we cannot control or create the product. Furthermore, we cannot measure our ministry or impact on others in this life. If we forget this, we will be in a hurry to accomplish significant things by the world’s standard of reckoning. Francois Fenelon noted that “the soul, by the neglect of little things, becomes accustomed to unfaithfulness” (Christian Perfection). It is faithfulness in the little daily things that leads to faithfulness in much (Luke 16:10). Henri Nouwen used to ask God to get rid of his interruptions so he could get on with his ministry. “Then I realized that interruptions are my ministry.” As servants and ambassadors of the King, we must be obedient in the daily process even when we cannot see what difference our obedience makes.
A young man with a bandaged hand approached the clerk at the post office. “Sir, could you please address this post card for me?” The clerk did so gladly, and then agreed to write a message on the card.
He then asked, “Is there anything else I can do for you?” The young man looked at the card for a moment and then said, “Yes, add a PS: ‘Please excuse the handwriting.’”
We are an ungrateful people. Writing of man in Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky says, “If he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped.” Luke’s account of the cleansing of the ten lepers underscores the human tendency to expect grace as our due and to forget to thank God for His benefits. “Were there not ten cleansed? But the nine—where are they? Was no one found who turned back to give glory to God, except this foreigner?” (Luke 17:17-18).
Our calendar allocates one day to give thanks to God for His many benefits, and even that day is more consumed with gorging than with gratitude. Ancient Israel’s calendar included several annual festivals to remind the people of God’s acts of deliverance and provision so that they would renew their sense of gratitude and reliance upon the Lord.
In spite of this, they forgot: “they became disobedient and rebelled against You . . . . they did not remember Your abundant kindnesses . . . . they quickly forgot His works” (Nehemiah 9:26; Psalm 106:7, 13). The prophet Hosea captured the essence of this decline into ingratitude: “As they had their pasture, they became satisfied, and being satisfied, their heart became proud; therefore, they forgot Me” (13:6). When we are doing well, we tend to think that our prosperity was self-made; this delusion leads us into the folly of pride; pride makes us forget God and prompts us to rely on ourselves in place of our Creator; this forgetfulness always leads to ingratitude.
Centuries earlier, Moses warned the children of Israel that they would be tempted to forget the Lord once they began to enjoy the blessings of the promised land. “Then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. . . . Otherwise, you may say in your heart, ‘My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth’” (Deuteronomy 8:14, 17). The antidote to this spiritual poison is found in the next verse: “But you shall remember the Lord your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth” (8:18).
Our propensity to forget is a mark of our fallenness. Because of this, we should view remembering and gratitude as a discipline, a daily and intentional act, a conscious choice. If it is limited to spontaneous moments of emotional gratitude, it will gradually erode and we will forget all that God has done for us and take His grace for granted.
“Rebellion against God does not begin with the clenched fist of atheism but with the self-satisfied heart of the one for whom ‘thank you’ is redundant” (Os Guinness, In Two Minds). The apostle Paul exposes the error of this thinking when he asks, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). Even as believers in Christ, it is quite natural to overlook the fact that all that we have and are—our health, our intelligence, our abilities, our very lives—are gifts from the hand of God, and not our own creation. We understand this, but few of us actively acknowledge our utter reliance upon the Lord throughout the course of the week. We rarely review the many benefits we enjoy in the present. And so we forget.
We tend toward two extremes when we forget to remember God’s benefits in our lives. The first extreme is presumption, and this is the error we have been discussing. When things are going “our way,” we may forget God or acknowledge Him in a shallow or mechanical manner. The other extreme is resentment and bitterness due to difficult circumstances. When we suffer setbacks or losses, we wonder why we are not doing as well as others and develop a mindset of murmuring and complaining. We may attribute it to “bad luck” or “misfortune” or not “getting the breaks,” but it really boils down to dissatisfaction with God’s provision and care. This lack of contentment and gratitude stems in part from our efforts to control the content of our lives in spite of what Christ may or may not desire for us to have. It also stems from our tendency to focus on what we do not possess rather than all the wonderful things we have already received.
“Rejoice always; pray without ceasing; in everything give thanks; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). We cannot give thanks and complain at the same time. To give thanks is to remember the spiritual and material blessings we have received and to be content with what our loving Lord provides, even when it does not correspond to what we had in mind. Gratitude is a choice, not merely a feeling, and it requires effort especially in difficult times. But the more we choose to live in the discipline of conscious thanksgiving, the more natural it becomes, and the more our eyes are opened to the little things throughout the course of the day that we previously overlooked. G. K. Chesterton had a way of acknowledging these many little benefits: “You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” Henri Nouwen observed that “every gift I acknowledge reveals another and another until, finally, even the most normal, obvious, and seemingly mundane event or encounter proves to be filled with grace.”
If we are not grateful for God’s deliverance in the past and His benefits in the present, we will not be grateful for His promises for the future. Scripture exhorts us to lay hold of our hope in Christ and to renew it frequently so that we will maintain God’s perspective on our present journey. His plans for His children exceed our imagination, and it is His intention to make all things new, to wipe away every tear, and to “show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” in the ages to come (Ephesians 2:7).
Make it a daily exercise, either at the beginning or the end of the day, to review God’s benefits in your past, present, and future. This discipline will be pleasing to God, because it will cultivate a heart of gratitude and ongoing thanksgiving.
“We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.” Uncle Screwtape’s diabolical counsel to his nephew Wormwood in C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is a reminder that most of us live more in the future than in the present. Somehow we think that the days ahead will make up for what we perceive to be our present lack. We think, “When I get this or when that happens, then I’ll be happy,” but this is an exercise in self-deception that overlooks the fact that even when we get what we want, it never delivers what it promised.
Most of us don’t know precisely what we want, but we are certain we don’t have it. Driven by dissatisfaction, we pursue the treasure at the end of the rainbow and rarely drink deeply at the well of the present moment, which is all we ever have. The truth is that if we are not satisfied with what we have, we will never be satisfied with what we want.
The real issue of contentment is whether it is Christ or ourselves who determine the content (e.g., money, position, family, circumstances) of our lives. When we seek to control the content, we inevitably turn to the criterion of comparison to measure what it should look like. The problem is that comparison is the enemy of contentment—there will always be people who possess a greater quality or quantity of what we think we should have. Because of this, comparison leads to covetousness. Instead of loving our neighbors, we find ourselves loving what they possess.
Covetousness in turn leads to a competitive spirit. We find ourselves competing with others for the limited resources to which we think we are entitled. Competition often becomes a vehicle through which we seek to authenticate our identity or prove our capability. This kind of competition tempts us to compromise our character. When we want something enough, we may be willing to steamroll our convictions in order to attain it. We find ourselves cutting corners, misrepresenting the truth, cheating, or using people as objects to accomplish our self-driven purposes.
It is only when we allow Christ to determine the content of our lives that we can discover the secret of contentment. Instead of comparing ourselves with others, we must realize that the Lord alone knows what is best for us and loves us enough to use our present circumstances to accomplish eternal good. We can be content when we put our hope in His character rather than our own concept of how our lives should appear.
Writing from prison to the believers in Philippi, Paul affirmed that “I have learned to be content in whatever circumstances I am. I know how to get along with humble means, and I also know how to live in prosperity; in any and every circumstance I have learned the secret of being filled and going hungry, both of having abundance and suffering need” (Philippians 4:11-12). Contentment is not found in having everything, but in being satisfied with everything we have. As the Apostle told Timothy, “we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either. If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content” (1 Timothy 6:7-8). Paul acknowledged God’s right to determine his circumstances, even if it meant taking him down to nothing. His contentment was grounded not in how much he had but in the One who had him. Job understood this when he said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). The more we release temporal possessions, the more we can grasp eternal treasures. There are times when God may take away our toys to force us to transfer our affections to Christ and His character.
A biblical understanding of contentment leads to a sense of our competency in Christ. “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13). As Peter put it, “His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3). “Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God” (2 Corinthians 3:5). Contentment is not the fulfillment of what we want, but the realization of how much we already possess in Christ.
A vision of our competency in Christ enables us to respond to others with compassion rather than competition, because we understand that our fundamental needs are fulfilled in the security and significance we have found in Him. Since we are complete in Christ, we are free to serve others instead of using them in the quest to meet our needs. Thus we are liberated to pursue character rather than comfort and convictions rather than compromise.
Notice the contrast between the four horizontal pairs in this chart:
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WHO DETERMINES THE CONTENT OF YOUR LIFE? |
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SELF |
CHRIST |
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Comparison Covetousness Competition Compromise |
Contentment Competency Compassion Character |
As we learn the secret of contentment, we will be less impressed by numbers, less driven to achieve, less hurried, and more alive to the grace of the present moment.
The actor Lee Marvin, who died of a heart attack in 1987 at the age of 63, once made this despondent statement: “They put your name on a star on Hollywood Boulevard and you find a pile of dog manure on it. That’s the whole story, baby.” If we are only citizens of this world, Marvin was right; the achievements of fame, position, possessions, and power will not endure and will not satisfy. Our monuments and accomplishments will crumble around us and offer little comfort at the end of our brief sojourn on this earth.
By contrast, consider Peter Kreeft’s words in his book, Three Philosophies of Life:
The world’s purest gold is only dung without Christ. But with Christ, the basest metal is transformed into the purest gold. The hopes of alchemy can come true, but on a spiritual level, not a chemical one. There is a “philosophers stone” that transmutes all things into gold. Its name is Christ. With him, poverty is riches, weakness is power, suffering is joy, to be despised is glory. Without him, riches are poverty, power is impotence, happiness is misery, glory is despised.
Once we have committed our lives to Christ, there should be no turning back—indeed, if we think about it, there is nothing of real and lasting substance to which we can turn apart from Him. In spite of this truth, there is an epidemic of believers who drop out of the race during their middle years. Many begin well but finish poorly. It can be gradual erosion through a series of small compromises or a more sudden point of departure, but any number of things can divert us from the course on which we are called to run.
What does it take to finish well? How can we run in such a way that we can say with Paul, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:7; Acts 20:24; 1 Corinthians 9:24-27)? A number of observers have considered the characteristics of people who “run with endurance the race that is set before [them]” (Hebrews 12:1). I have arrived at a set of seven such characteristics:
1. Intimacy with Christ
2. Fidelity in the spiritual disciplines
3. A biblical perspective on the circumstances of life
4. A teachable, responsive, humble, and obedient spirit
5. A clear sense of personal purpose and calling
6. Healthy relationships with resourceful people
7. Ongoing ministry investment in the lives of others
I have highlighted the seven key words (intimacy, disciplines, perspective, teachable, purpose, relationships, and ministry), and it is important to note that these characteristics move from the inside to the outside. The first two concern our vertical relationship with God (being), the next three concern our personal thinking and orientation (knowing), and the last two concern our horizontal relationships with others (doing). Here is a brief word about each of these seven crucial characteristics.
The exhortation, “let us run with endurance the race that is set before us” in Hebrews 12:1 is immediately followed by these words in 12:2: “fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith.” If we wish to run with endurance and finish our race well, we must continue to look at Jesus rather than the circumstances or the other runners. Remember Jesus’ strong words in Luke 14:26: “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.” The Scriptures call us to love and serve these people, but our Lord tells us that He must be preeminent in our affections. Our love and pursuit of Him must make all other relationships seem like hatred in comparison.
Telescopic photographs of the sun often reveal massive areas on the solar photosphere called sunspots. These are temporary cool regions that appear dark by contrast against the hotter photosphere that surrounds them. But if we could see a sunspot by itself, it would actually be brilliant. In the same way, our love for others should shine except when compared with our love for the Lord Christ. Although we have not yet seen Jesus, we can love Him and hope in Him who first loved us and delivered Himself up for us (1 Peter 1:8; Ephesians 5:2).
Our highest calling is to grow in our knowledge of Christ and to make Him known to others. If any person, possession, or position is elevated above the Lord Jesus in our minds and affections, we will be unable to fulfill this great calling. Instead, we will sell ourselves cheaply for the empty promises of a fleeting world.
We would be wise to ask this question from time to time to examine our hearts and our direction in life: “Does my desire to know Christ exceed all other aspirations?” If not, whatever is taking His place in the center of our affections must yield to Him if we are to know the joy of bearing spiritual fruit as His disciples.
A key secret of those who finish well is to focus more on loving Jesus than on avoiding sin. The more we love Jesus, the more we will learn to put our confidence in Him alone. To quote Peter Kreeft again,
The great divide, the eternal divide, is not between theists and atheists, or between happiness and unhappiness, but between seekers (lovers) and nonseekers (nonlovers) of the Truth (for God is Truth). . . . We can seek health, happiness or holiness; physical health, mental health or spiritual health as our summum bonum, our greatest good. . . . Christ’s first question in John’s Gospel is the crucial one: “What do you seek?” (1:38). This question determines what we will find, determines our eternal destiny, determines everything. (Christianity for Modern Pagans)
In the section on disciplined spirituality, we saw that the disciplines are not ends in themselves, but means to the end of intimacy with Christ and spiritual formation. The problem is that anything, when left to itself, tends to decline and decay. The second law of thermodynamics, which says that the quantity of useful energy in any closed system gradually diminishes, can be broadly applied to other systems, from information theory to relationships. Without an infusion of ordered energy, entropy (a measure of randomness and disorder) increases. In the case of objects and relationships, an infusion of directed intentionality and effort is necessary to sustain order and growth.
The twenty disciplines we touched upon earlier (solitude, silence, prayer, journaling, study, meditation, fasting, chastity, secrecy, confession, fellowship, submission, guidance, simplicity, stewardship, sacrifice, worship, celebration, service, and witness) can enhance our character, our thinking, and our practice. No one consistently practices all of these disciplines, and some are less meaningful for some people than for others, but fidelity to the disciplines we most need in our spiritual journeys will keep us on the path and bring repeated times of personal renewal.
Without a growing sense of desperation, we will not maintain our focus on God. The Lord lovingly uses trials and adversities in a variety of creative ways in our lives, and part of the purpose of our suffering is to drive us to dependence on Him alone. (This is part of the point of the mid-life process, as we face the combination of diminishing capacity and increasing responsibility. We usually come to grips with our mortality in an experiential way in our late thirties to mid-forties, though some see it sooner and others manage to defer it for a few more years.)
As God’s children, our pain causes us to ask, to seek, and to knock (Matthew 7:7-8), and in His time, God responds by revealing more of Himself to us. This personal knowledge increases our faith and our capacity to trust His character and His promises. Only as we experientially realize that we cannot survive without God will we willingly submit to His purposes in the midst of affliction. A growing faith involves trusting God through the times we do not understand His purposes and His ways.
Tribulation plays a significant role in clarifying hope (see Romans 5:3-5), because it can force us to see the bigger picture. As we saw in the section on paradigm spirituality, we must cultivate an eternal perspective in this temporal arena in order to understand that “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18). When we view our circumstances in light of God’s character instead of God’s character in light of our circumstances, we come to see that God is never indifferent to us, and that He uses suffering for our good so that we will be more fully united to Christ (Hebrews 12:10-11; 1 Peter 4:12-17). In addition, He comforts us in our afflictions (2 Corinthians 1:3-5) and reminds us that they will not endure forever (2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
In The Problem of Pain, C. S. Lewis argues that God allows pain in our lives not because He loves us less, but because He loves us more than we would wish:
Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man love a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute.
As we renew our minds with a growing biblical perspective on the experiences and circumstances of life, we come to see that this life is a time of sowing the seeds of eternity rather than multiplying ephemeral treasures on earth. Such a perspective reduces our anxieties (Matthew 6:25-34), increases our contentment (Philippians 4:11-13; 1 Timothy 6:6-8), and strengthens our trust and hope (Hebrews 6:13-20). With the shrinking of space and the acceleration of time in a postmodern age, we need rhythm and pacing or we will be in danger of spiraling downward and fading out in the end. It is always wise to review and adapt our pace to the larger Story.
Those who finish well maintain an ongoing learning posture through the seasons of their lives. A smug, self-satisfied attitude causes people to plateau or decline on the learning curve, and this is inimical to spiritual vitality. In our youth, we have a problem with foolishness and lack of focus; in our middle years, we struggle with double-mindedness and entanglement; when we reach our later years, our great challenge is teachability. Those who maintain a childlike sense of wonder, surprise, and awe do not succumb to rigidity and “hardening of the categories.” Such people who continue to grow in grace “will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still yield fruit in old age; they shall be full of sap and very green” (Psalm 92:13-14).
Humility and responsive obedience is the key to maintaining a teachable spirit. Humility is the disposition in which the soul realizes that all of life is about trust in God, and that “from Him and through Him and to Him are all things” (Romans 11:36). The mystery of the grace of God humbles us more than our sinfulness, because grace teaches us to be preoccupied with God, and not with ourselves. When we surrender to this grace and invite God to be our all in all, we displace the self through the enthronement of Christ. We would do well to make the following prayer, adapted from the end of Andrew Murray’s book on Humility, a part of our devotional lives:
Lord God, I ask that out of Your great goodness You would make known to me, and take from my heart, every kind and form and degree of pride, whether it be from evil spirits, or my own corrupt nature; and that You would awaken in me the deepest depth and truth of that humility which can make me capable of Your light and Holy Spirit.
Like our Lord in the days of His flesh, we must learn obedience through the things which we suffer (Hebrews 5:7-8). As Thomas Merton put it in Spiritual Direction & Meditation, “We must be ready to cooperate not only with graces that console, but with graces that humiliate us. Not only with lights that exalt us, but with lights that blast our self-complacency.”
Obedience requires risk taking, because it is the application of biblical faith in that which is not seen, and that which is not yet (Hebrews 11:1). As we mature in Christ, we learn to live with ambiguity in this world by trusting God’s character and promises in spite of appearances to the contrary.
Life without a transcendent source of purpose would be an exercise in futility. As Malcolm Muggeridge puts it,
It has never been possible for me to persuade myself that the universe could have been created, and we, homo sapiens, so-called, have, generation after generation, somehow made our appearance to sojourn briefly on our tiny earth, solely in order to mount the interminable soap opera, with the same characters and situations endlessly recurring, that we call history. It would be like building a great stadium for a display of tiddly-winks, or a vast opera house for a mouth-organ recital. There must, in other words, be another reason for our existence and that of the universe than just getting through the days of our life as best we may; some other destiny than merely using up such physical, intellectual and spiritual creativity as has been vouchsafed us.
Although we realize that we never arrive in this life, God has called each of us to a purposeful journey that involves risks along the way and is sustained by faithfulness and growing hope. This calling or vocation transcends our occupations and endures beyond the end of our careers. As we seek the Lord’s guidance in developing a personal vision and clarity of mission, we move beyond the level of tasks and accomplishments to the level of the purpose for which we “live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28). We are first called to a Person, and then we are called to express this defining relationship in the things we undertake, realizing that the final outcome of our lives is in the hands of God. We have a sense of destiny, but our ignorance of the invisible geography of the new creation means that we must trust God for what He is calling us to become. Reinhold Niebuhr put it well:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.
There is always a chasm between our aspirations and our accomplishments, between our capacities and our contributions. This discrepancy turns from an occasion for despair to an opportunity for hope when we see it as our nostalgia for our true home. This hope is the realization that our purpose is not measurable and that our earthly calling is but the preface to the endless creative activity and community of heaven.
In the section on corporate spirituality, we looked at the spectrum of supportive soul-care relationships that moves from spiritual friendship to spiritual guidance to spiritual mentoring to spiritual direction. We also considered the important dimensions of servant leadership as well as personal and group accountability. Each of these relationships is a valuable resource that can encourage, equip, and exhort us to stay on the course we have been called to run. People who finish well do not do so without the caring support of other growing members of the body of Christ. These relationships help us to increase in intimacy with Christ, to maintain the needed disciplines, to clarify our long-term perspective, to sustain a teachable attitude, and to develop our purpose and calling.
We saw in the exchanged life spirituality section that Jesus Christ gave His life for us (salvation), so that He could give His life to us (sanctification), so that He could live His life through us (service). Spirit-filled spirituality stressed the importance of discovering and developing the spiritual gifts we have received and of exercising them in the power of the Spirit for the edification of others. Nurturing spirituality centered on cultivating a lifestyle of evangelism and discipleship so that we are part of the process of introducing people to Jesus and assisting them in their spiritual growth after they have come to know Him. The life God implants within us is meant not only to permeate our beings, but also to penetrate and multiply in the lives of others. Believers who finish well are marked by ongoing outreach and sacrificial ministry for the good of other people. Those who squander the resources, gifts, experiences, and hard-learned insights God has given them by no longer investing them in the lives of others soon wither and withdraw.
It is obvious that when we reverse these seven characteristics of people who finish well, we arrive at a corresponding list of barriers to running the course. Instead of doing this, let me observe that a failure to sustain the first characteristic (intimacy with Christ) is the key obstruction to progress in the other six. Indeed, the others contribute to our intimacy with Christ, but regression in our relationship with Jesus will soon erode fidelity in the others. The real question then is, “What causes us drift away from abiding in Jesus?” In some way or another, the spiritual sin of pride and autonomy usually heads the list. This can take many forms, such as ego-driven ambition (often inspired by insecurity), unwillingness to learn from others, comparison and envy, refusal to submit to authority, strategies designed to avoid pain and vulnerability, and bitterness with God for allowing personal affliction and loss.
The more visible sins of moral or ethical compromise and failure are generally the byproducts of inner spiritual disintegration—the loss of the clear eye (Matthew 6:22-23) and the pure heart (Matthew 5:8; 1 Timothy 1:5; 2 Timothy 2:22). Declining passion for Christ eventually subverts calling and character.
Have you ever seen another person grow in character and depth in times of apparent success? It would be so much simpler if having things go “our way” was also beneficial to us in the long run, but because of self-centeredness and shortsightedness, this is rarely the case. Until the Lord returns, we will continue to learn and grow more through setbacks and failures than through success as the world defines it. Listen to the observations of a man who had enjoyed an eminently successful career in the eyes of his peers:
Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained.—Malcolm Muggeridge
If any of us could be transported to heaven for even a five-minute visit, we would never be the same after our return to earth. For the first time, we would have a true perspective on the frailty and brevity of life on earth and the absurdity of giving our hearts to things that will not last.
John White observed that “It is want of faith that makes us opt for earthly rather than heavenly treasure. If we really believed in celestial treasures, who among us would be so stupid as to buy gold? We just do not believe. Heaven is a dream, a religious fantasy which we affirm because we are orthodox. If people believed in heaven, they would spend their time preparing for permanent residence there. But nobody does.”
Our perspective on life, whether temporal or eternal, will determine the set of rules by which we play, the standards and character we pursue, the source of our hope, and the difference between and obedience and disobedience to God’s precepts and principles.
In his essay, “Meditation in a Toolshed,” C. S. Lewis depicted the difference between looking at a beam of light and looking along the beam. As he entered a dark toolshed, he could see nothing but a sunbeam that came from a crack at the top of the door. At first, he looked at the shaft of light with thousands of specks of dust floating in it, but then he did something most of us have done at one time or another. He moved until the beam fell on his eyes, and at that moment, the toolshed and the sunbeam vanished. Looking along the beam, he saw green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside, and beyond that, the sun itself. Perspective makes all the difference.
Imagine a world where people’s problems cease at the moment they put their faith in Christ. They suddenly become immune to bodily ailments, they enjoy complete harmony in their personal and professional relationships, and success and affluence are theirs for the asking. Actually, this trouble-free state of affairs is not far from the scenario touted by the peddlers of the “prosperity gospel.”
It may sound good at first, but consider a few of the implications. They may trust Christ for their salvation, but it would be extremely difficult for them not to look to the world for everything else. Because there are no obstacles, they would soon take God for granted and presume upon His grace; their prayers would become more like conjuring tricks than acknowledgments of love and dependence on the Lord. And since everything goes “their way,” it would be almost impossible for them to cultivate true Christian character. They would never develop qualities like endurance (James 1:3), steadfastness (1 Corinthians 15:58), thanksgiving (1 Thessalonians 5:18), diligence, moral excellence, self-control, perseverance, godliness (2 Peter 1:5-6), compassion, humility, gentleness, patience (Colossians 3:12), and faithfulness (Galatians 5:22), since these are related to hoping in God in a context of adversity.
Far from promising a life of ease and prosperity, the New Testament actually affirms that those who follow Christ will face a new dimension of obstacles and struggles that they did not know before they committed their lives to Him. In fact, the intensity of the spiritual warfare is proportional to the seriousness of a believer’s response to the terms of discipleship. “And indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Timothy 3:12). This is why Paul encouraged the disciples in Asia Minor to continue in the faith, saying, “Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). At the end of His last discourse to His disciples, Jesus assured them, “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Our responses to the trials we encounter expose our level of trust in the sovereignty and goodness of the Lord. At a special exhibition of Rembrandt paintings, a custodian overheard some of the museum patrons making critical remarks about the work of the great artist. He quietly remarked, “It is not the artist, but the viewers who are on trial.”
I confess that when I move through times of conflict and adversity, it is all too easy for me to develop a wrong attitude toward God, and it is not so easy to thank Him for what He can accomplish through the problem. But I can also acknowledge with thanksgiving that whenever I stopped rebelling against Him and started trusting in His sovereignty, love, goodness, and wisdom, He never let me down. If you think back, I think you will be able to say the same.
“You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain” (John 15:16).
God’s grace is always previous to our response; whenever we pursue Him it is because He has already pursued us. Whenever we love Him, it is because He has first loved us (1 John 4:8-21). Whenever we offer up prayers, it is because He has already invited us to do so.
Nevertheless, God holds us accountable for our responses to His initiatives. Indeed, the quality of our relationship with Him and the entire direction of our lives are determined by the nature of our responses to His loving impulses in our lives. We have been given a response-ability, an ability to respond to or neglect these divine initiatives, and from a human standpoint, our relationship with God is determined by our willingness to reciprocate. Without an ongoing response of our personality to God’s personality, our relationship with Him will be shallow or nonexistent.
Clearly, the most significant response we will ever make is related to the gospel, the good news about Christ’s gift of forgiveness and newness of life. This gift is not ours unless we respond to it by coming to Christ on His terms, which include not merely intellectual assent, but personal reception. Coming to Christ is a volitional commitment in which we turn away from our former trust in our own efforts to achieve or merit God’s favor and turn instead to an exclusive trust in Christ and His righteousness on our behalf. This faith response is an affront to our natural pride, because it involves the admission of our desperate need and hopeless condition without Jesus.
In 1938, a German merchant vessel was in the midst of a storm in the North Atlantic. The pressure of the sea was so great that the plates in the hull began to buckle, and within moments, the ship sank. Almost miraculously, one sailor stayed afloat by holding onto a cot mattress which had somehow not soaked through and was somewhat buoyant. Then from the south came a British cutter. The German sailor was spotted along with the wreckage of the sunken ship. The British ship “hove to,” even though this was a very dangerous thing to do in a storm. The German sailor rose and fell on the billowing waves. A seaman on deck threw out a lifesaver. The big doughnut landed next to the German sailor, but the sailor looked up and saw the British flag and the British faces. He knew that these people represented the traditional enemy of Germany. He turned his back on the lifesaver and slowly the mattress that buoyed him up sank under the waves. The sailor was lost.
When I read this account, I saw it as a parable of God’s offer of salvation. Jesus’ gift of deliverance from spiritual death is the lifesaver, and part of us instinctively resists taking hold of it because, without Christ, we are enemies of God (Romans 5:10). Like the German sailor, we can stubbornly refuse God’s offer, but if we do, we can never blame Him for our demise. The judgment is not a matter of degree. As Peter Kreeft observes, “There are only two kinds of people in the world; and they are not the good and the bad, but the living and the dead, the twice-born and the once-born, the children of God and the children of Adam, the pregnant and the barren. That is the difference between heaven and hell” (Love Is Stronger Than Death).
The most important response of our lives is to say Yes to the gospel. As Brennan Manning observes in The Lion and the Lamb, “There are two elements which are central in the Christian experience. First, a man hears God say, ‘Thou art the man.’ Secondly, he replies, ‘Thou art my God.’” The former is the point of conviction (see 2 Samuel 12:7), and the latter is the point of turning from self to Christ.
Once having come to Christ in this way, the spiritual life becomes a continuous series of daily responses to the Lord’s promptings in our lives. In each case we will choose to walk by sight or by faith, by law or by grace, by the flesh or by the Spirit, by our will or God’s will, by submission or resistance, by dependence or by autonomy, by worldly wisdom or by divine wisdom, by betting everything on God’s promises and character or by trying to control our world on our own terms, by the temporal or by the eternal, by trying to find our lives or by losing them for Christ’s sake. Until we see Christ, we will always be engaged in this warfare in which we are tempted on a daily basis to drop out of the process of the obedience of faith.
One of the things that helps me gain a sense of perspective during times of temptation or discouragement is to review the fact that since I came to Christ in June of 1967, I have never once regretted an act of obedience, but I have always come to regret acts of disobedience. Yet obedience is still difficult, because it is sometimes counterintuitive and usually countercultural. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The problem with Christianity is not that it has been tried and found wanting, but that it has been found difficult, and left untried.”
A clenched fist cannot receive the gift of the one thing most needful. Sin quenches the Holy Spirit and removes our joy, certainty, and peace. This is why it is wise to stop and ask God to reveal to you whatever is in your life that is blocking the Spirit of God. Name it for what it is and give it to God so that the blockage will be removed.
As Romans 12:1-2 makes clear, God does not ask us to do anything for Him until He has informed us about what He has done for us. But overexposure and underresponse leads to a bad heart. God is more pleased with our response than with how much we know. The reason that Rahab the harlot is found in Hebrews 11 as an illustration of faith is that although she knew little, she applied what little she knew. The Pharisees, by contrast, knew a great deal but did not respond in their hearts to what they knew. The magi had very little knowledge about the Messiah but engaged in a long and tedious journey to find Him, while the scribes in Jerusalem, knowing Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, didn’t even bother to accompany the magi on the six-mile journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.
May God grant us the grace to respond in faith and obedience to the things He calls us to trust and apply.
We mentioned the importance of purpose in the discussions of motivated and holistic spirituality, and the following thoughts are supplementary.
How did it happen that now for the first time in his life he could see everything so clearly? Something had given him leave to live in the present. Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream.
Is it possible for people to miss their lives in the same way one misses a plane?
The answer to this question raised in Walker Percy’s novel, The Second Coming, is an unqualified affirmative. Someone once said, “Fear not that your life will come to an end, but rather that it will never have had a beginning.”
In the recent film, Awakenings, a number of patients who had been in a catatonic state for some thirty years were temporarily brought to full consciousness through a new medication. While some were elated, others were embittered that so much of their lives was spent in oblivion. But they all seized the preciousness of each day, especially when they learned that their “awakenings” would only be temporary.
There is a sense in which many people live without being truly awake, without thinking and questioning, without a sense of wonder and awe. It is easy, even for believers in Christ, to lurch through life, never developing a clear picture of the unique purpose for which God placed them on this planet.
In the words of Vclav Havel, “The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.” I find it astounding that the bulk of people on our planet seem to journey through years and even decades without seriously wrestling with the fundamental question of they are here and what they want their lives to add up to in the end. Many business and professional people get on a fast track in pursuit of an elusive vision of success without questioning whether they are selling themselves too cheaply by investing their precious years of life in something that, even if attained, will never satisfy. It is like the two-edged story of the airline pilot who announced the good news that due to a strong tail wind, the plane was making great time, but the bad news that due to an equipment failure, they were hopelessly lost. Many people appear to be making great time on a journey to futility. They may experience the thrill of the bungee jump without realizing the cord is not attached to their ankles or waists, but to their necks.
In a conversation from Alice in Wonderland, Alice asks the Cheshire Cat, “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat. “I don’t much care where,” said Alice. “Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat. If we have not decided where we are going, one road will do as well or as poorly as another. The problem is that the outcome of the unexamined life is rarely satisfactory. If we fail to pursue God’s purpose for our lives, we are likely to suffer from destination sickness, the discovery that when we reach our destination, it’s not all it was cracked up to be (cf. Ecclesiastes 2:17). This sickness is captured in John Steinbeck’s summation of a character in East of Eden who gave his life for that which let him down in the end: “He took no rest, no recreation, and he became rich without pleasure and respected without friends.”
It is much wiser to follow Kierkegaard’s advice to define life backwards and live it forwards—start from the destiny and define the journey in light of it. Few of us would think of taking a two-week vacation without any plans as to where we will go or what we will do. But what many wouldn’t dream of doing on this scale, they do on the greatest scale of all: their entire earthly existence. To avoid this fatal error we should ask ourselves, “What do I want my life to add up to, and why?” “At the end of my sojourn, what will I want to see when I look back?” From a biblical perspective, the real question is not what we will leave behind (the answer to this is always the same—we will leave everything behind), but what will we send on ahead (cf. Matthew 6:20).
Many people define themselves in terms of their activities and accomplishments. But those who have experienced the grace, forgiveness, and newness of life in Christ are recipients of a new source of identity that redefines their mission and purpose on earth. Instead of seeking purpose by comparing themselves with others, they can discover God’s purpose for their lives in the pages of His revealed Word.
It has been observed that there are three dimensions of purpose in Scripture (see the helpful Vision Foundation booklet, Establishing Your Purpose). The first is God’s ultimate purpose in creating all things. Prior to creating time, space, energy, and matter, God alone existed, complete and perfect in Himself. As a triune, loving community of being, He had no needs, and it was not out of loneliness or boredom that He created the realms of angels and men. We know from Scripture that part of God’s ultimate purpose in creation is the manifestation of His glory to intelligent moral agents who bear His image and who can respond in praise and wonder to His awesome Person, powers, and perfections. But in our present state, we can hardly scratch the surface of the unfathomable wisdom of God’s ultimate purpose for the created order.
The second dimension of biblical purpose is God’s universal purpose, the intention He has for all people who acknowledge the lordship of Jesus. This level of purpose is shared by all believers and is communicated to us in a number of passages. There are various ways of expressing it, but they can be reduced to two essential areas: knowing God experientially (spiritual growth), and making God known to others (spiritual reproduction).
In His high priestly prayer after the Upper Room Discourse, Jesus said, “this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3). This knowledge is not merely propositional and theological, but also personal and devotional. Eternal life is the experiential knowledge of God, and it involves a growth process that is inaugurated when a person trusts Christ and receives His gift of forgiveness and new life. The greatest treasure a person can own is increasing intimacy with the living Lord of all creation. Although this should be our highest ambition, many believers give their hearts to the quest for lesser goods and boast and delight in things that are destined to perish. This is why we should frequently heed the powerful words of Jeremiah 9:23-24: “Thus says the Lord, ‘Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,’ declares the Lord.”
The Scriptures expressly communicate the purpose for which we have been created: “For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8:29). God’s purpose for us is nothing less than Christlikeness! Here are four observations on this high and holy purpose: (1) It is impossible for us to attain. Only when we recognize our weakness and inability to be conformed to the image of Christ will we be ready to allow Him to live His life through us, for this is the genius of the spiritual life. (2) On the human side of the coin, we will only be as spiritually mature as we chose to be. If we do not engage in the disciplines of discipleship, such as habitual time in the Word of God and prayer, we will not become more intimate with God. (3) Growing intimacy with God is crucial to Christlike character. The personal, experiential knowledge of God transforms the heart and expresses itself in sacrificial acts of love and service toward others. (4) If God’s purpose for us is not the focus of our lives, something else will be, and whatever it is will not be worthy of our ultimate allegiance. Therefore ask God for the grace to make it your highest ambition to be pleasing to Him (2 Corinthians 5:9).
We summarized God’s universal purpose for all who know Christ as knowing God experientially (spiritual growth), and making Him known to others (spiritual reproduction). The first part relates to the question, “Who do You want me to be, Lord?” The second relates to the question, “What do You want me to do?” It is prudent to consider the first question before launching into the second, because biblically speaking, being precedes doing; who we are in Christ is foundational to what we do. Typically, however, we put activities and objectives before purpose and define ourselves more by measurable accomplishments than by godly character. The result is that our activities determine our purposes. But purposes developed in this way are shaped by comparison with peers and role models and never lead to the universal and unique purposes for which God created us. Instead, we should embrace a biblical perspective on purpose and let this determine our objectives and activities.
If God’s universal purpose for us is to grow in the knowledge of Christ (edification) and to make Him known (evangelism), how do we develop a vision of the unique ways He would have us apply this purpose in our lives? The answer is that we must launch a prayerful process of discovery that involves a thoughtful assessment of what God has gifted, called, and equipped us to do. Every believer has a unique combination of experiences, gifts, and relational networks that form a sphere of ministry opportunities. We can be assured that the Lord will not call us to a task for which He has not equipped us (1 Thessalonians 5:24), but we can also be certain that the development of our life message and purpose does not happen suddenly.
The most critical component in the process of discerning our unique purpose is prayer. We would do well to persist in asking God to clarify the vision of our calling, since we will never be able to discover it on our own. This is a divine-human process of preparation and illumination in which each of our positive and negative experiences can be sovereignly used by God in such a way that we can, through His power, make a lasting impact in the lives of others. But commitment must precede knowledge (John 7:17); we must trust God enough to commit ourselves in advance to whatever He calls us to be and to do.
Another essential component in this process is our time in the Scriptures. God uses His Word to train and equip us for ministry, and our effectiveness is related to the depth of our Bible reading, study, and memorization. The price tag is time and discipline, but the benefits are always disproportionate to the expenditures. If we are shallow in the Word, we will be superficial in our knowledge of God and less effective in our relationships with others.
Other components that relate to your unique purpose are your personal experiences, skills, education, temperament, and roles as well as your spiritual gifts. Each of these elements is relevant to your vision of the specific outworking of God’s universal purpose in your life.
Begin to ask God to clarify your personal vision of purpose. This will not happen by doubling up on activities, but through prayer, exposure to Scripture, and times of reflection. This process may take months or years, but it should lead to a brief written statement of purpose that can be used to determine and evaluate your objectives and activities. In this way, your activities will be determined more by the Word than by the external pressures of the world.
A biblical purpose is always an unchanging reason for being. It holds true for you regardless of your circumstances or season of life. When a Christ-centered purpose becomes the focus of your life, it harmonizes all the other areas, such as family, work, finances, and ministry.
Recall the point we made in the introduction that the twelve facets of spiritual formation are all part of the same gem, and thus are inextricably bound together. For example, Spirit-filled spirituality informs all the others, because it is only in the power of the Holy Spirit that we can be formed into the image of Christ. Relational spirituality affects all the others, because loving God and others is the central expression of our faith. And so it is with the remaining ten.
But we also observed that because of our widely differing temperaments, each of us has a unique personal pattern that involves differing degrees of attraction and resistance to the various facets. It is good to understand that we are naturally drawn to some more than others, but it is also beneficial to stretch ourselves through deliberate exposure to the ones we tend to resist.
It is my prayer that you benefit from this diversity of approaches that have been used to cultivate spiritual growth and that you explore some of the facets that may have been less familiar to you.
The Lord bless you and keep you;
The Lord make His face shine on you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance on you,
And give you peace.
(Numbers 6:24-26)