Reflections on Spiritual Disciplines
People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy. (2 Timothy 3:2)
Hi! My name is Josh, and I am one of the interns here at Oasis Church this year. In my time as an intern, my mentor, John Hoogenhout, and I have been reading an amazing book by Richard Foster called The Celebration of Discipline, and I wanted to talk about a particular part in the early chapters that speaks to our daily attitude toward resisting sin and living out our Christian walk.
I think we can all agree that it's a common cycle for some of us, if not all of us, to go through a great season with God, where we are praying as much as we can, attending church every Sunday, and reading our Bibles every day. We feel the love of God in full force through blessings and life generally going well for us. While all this is well and good, and I think we should be practising these things regularly, we begin to develop a kind of pride in ourselves and start to think quite highly of ourselves. We start to think our spiritual discipline is why God is blessing us so frequently, and over time, this pride turns into complacency, which then breeds a kind of dull or numb attitude towards the message of the Gospel. Over time, this false reliance on our willpower turns into how we seek validation from God, and eventually we sin in some way that may be a little more atrocious than normal, and we feel that we have been knocked out of God's grace. We feel like God has abandoned us, or we are undeserving of his love.
The first chapter of Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline describes this mindset as a form of self-worship. He uses the phrase "will worship." We tend to see idolisation as outwardly worshipping a golden calf like some of the Israelites were guilty of, but we forget the enemy is the father of lies or as 1 Peter 5:8 puts it, hungry lions prowling for unwary prey. It's far easier to be convinced to worship oneself (Romans 1:25) "…they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator…" The point I'm trying to make here is that rarely does the temptation of sin come to us as a little horned man with a goatee and a red jumpsuit with a little pitchfork on our shoulders. It often comes to us as understandable, common human emotions, and when we do try to resist sin by our own strength, our own willpower, I don't think we realise the subconscious pat on the back we give ourselves. The focus goes on us and our personal ability to resist sin. Even if we find short-term success, it only makes us double down on our "will worship" and our entitlement to God's love and grace.
Friends, not only is this exhausting and ultimately futile, but we're warned against having this mindset in Ephesians 2:8-9. "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast".
Richard goes on, in chapters 2 and 3, to say that the cure for this mindset is prayer and daily Scripture reading, not to check a box for the day, but to soak in and meditate on Scripture and prayer. Our common understanding of meditation is an Eastern and more pagan understanding of it, which is to empty our minds of thought and emotion to achieve nirvana or as the Kung Fu Panda movies would put it "inner peace", but this is a far cry from the Christian understanding of meditation which is to read and contemplate on Scripture as if chewing on a rich, tender piece of steak and to marinate in the presence of God during prayer. All this to say that, while it may feel easier to take our spiritual life into our own hands with this mindset and we may find brief success, it is ultimately a shaky foundation for our spiritual life and will eventually leave us burnt out, as it's a foundation not built on genuine communion with the sovereign God. (Matthew 7:24-27).
Thank you all for reading through my reflections on my internship. Have a great day!
Josh
