Living in Christ's Presence

Living in Christ’s Presence

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Author: Dallas Willard, John Ortberg
Full Title: Living in Christ’s Presence
Category: #books

Highlights

But that developed in such a way that the predominant thought is that a person can have the worst character possible and still get into the good place if he believed the right thing. This disconnection became increasingly burdensome to the church itself until we came to the point that, as is widely discussed, there is not a clear difference between Christians and those who aren’t Christians.
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Spokespersons for Christ have the dignity of bringing that knowledge to everyone around them. One of the sad things is what has happened to witnessing in our culture. Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.
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Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things.
When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people,
If it is at all possible, read the Philokalia, one of the earliest collections of Christian writings, or John Cassian’s Institutes, which are in that same genre. Come to know them to see what spiritual formation is about.
Spiritual transformation is not about behavior modification. It is about changing the sources of behavior, so the behavior will take care of itself. When the mind is right and the heart is right and the body and the soul and the relationships that we have in our social world are right, the whole person simply steps into the way of Christ and lives there with joy and strength. It is not a struggle.
The person who has the easiest, the happiest, the strongest life is the person who walks in the yoke with Christ. Only as we do that do we begin to draw the strength and direction that straightens out everything that is wrong in human existence.
Repent just means to turn back on how you are thinking about things and to reconsider.
We are not sent out without equipment. We are sent out with all the equipment we can possibly use, and as we go, we make disciples. I think the best way of translating this is “As you go, make disciples.” This presents making disciples as a kind of side effect, and that is really important to understand in relation to making disciples. In life, some things that can be pulled cannot be pushed, and some things that can be pushed cannot be pulled. Making disciples is a matter of pulling people, of drawing them
The best place to make disciples in the United States is in church, because there are always people there who are hungering for discipleship. They are really looking for it.
The other way leads to legalism, which has repeatedly defeated the best intentions of the best of Christ’s followers through the ages, because it [legalism] simply does not deal with the life of the individual; it deals with the behavior.
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Over and over you have situations that can be cured by the changing of the person, but the person is not changed because he is pushed rather than pulled by the winsomeness of Christ. You might say, “Oh, you mustn’t have anger with your brother.” Then what are you going to do? Hit him on the head if he is angry with his brother? No, you have to show him why anger is not a good thing. You have to show him there is a better way of dealing with situations that provoke anger and hatred and create a spiral of injury and hurt.
you have to show him why anger is not a good thing. You have to show him there is a better way of dealing with situations that provoke anger and hatred and create a spiral of injury and hurt.
It is the inadequacy of what is presented by knowledge in the secular world to deal with the life of the people who occupy the secular world that is the revelation of the limitations that this viewpoint, which sets the knowledge of Christ aside and says it is not knowledge, is revealed.
What takes over when knowledge disappears is tradition.
The main thing is, when you hear Jesus, do what he says. Don’t build a theory. Just do what he says, and reality will teach you, and that is where authority ultimately lies. So, the test for the secularist and the Christian spokesperson is the reality that they bring people in touch with. In our recent past the single greatest illustration of this is C. S. Lewis. He never pulls authority on you. He just talks about things, and he helps you see things. Multitudes of people have simply put in practice what he says, and they have found it to be true. That is the ultimate appeal of the spokesperson for Christ.
when you hear Jesus, do what he says. Don’t build a theory. Just do what he says, and reality will teach you, and that is where authority ultimately lies.
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In our recent past the single greatest illustration of this is C. S. Lewis. He never pulls authority on you. He just talks about things, and he helps you see things. Multitudes of people have simply put in practice what he says, and they have found it to be true. That is the ultimate appeal of the spokesperson for Christ.
the proper role of doctrine is teaching openly with a view to people coming to understand things, not with a view to them winding up with the right views. That’s not for us to control. That’s for them and the Holy Spirit and reality to work out—having the right views.
Jesus was a man of truth. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, not of correct doctrine. I am just saying that we need to tell our young people, “Follow Jesus, and if you can find a better way than him, he would be the first to tell you to take it.”
The tongue follows correctness, but the heart follows truth.
“These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me”
As you practice discipleship in the community of believers under the direction of—please God—pastors and spokespersons who are really living and teaching the truth that God has made available in history and Scripture and through experience, then life begins to make sense.
That should be what comes out of our work as spokespersons for Christ. Again I reference C. S. Lewis, because most Christians are familiar with him. He makes sense of things that people never made sense of before. After reading a few of his words, they say, “Oh, I see it.” Now, that light-turning-on effect should be the constant process of those of us who are followers of Christ as we go through the world and make disciples by drawing them to the truth of Christ.
He makes sense of things that people never made sense of before. After reading a few of his words, they say, “Oh, I see it.” Now, that light-turning-on effect should be the constant process of those of us who are followers of Christ as we go through the world and make disciples by drawing them to the truth of Christ.
What needs to be true in their life, in their mind and their life, for them to be able to say they know Christ? Dallas: Put his words into practice and find them to be true.
The last thing we want to do is to be arrogant and presumptuous about what we know. We want to be humble, learning. We want to ask questions and not just make assertions. As we do that, we help ourselves and other people. The most important thing we can do for young people is to help them to learn how to ask questions.
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to forgive your sins is a load off God’s mind. He is happy to do it.
The miracle is not that God loves me; it would be a miracle if he didn’t love me, because he is love. That is God’s basic nature—a will to good.
begin to put in practice the things that Jesus said. Just begin to put them in practice—something simple like let your yes be a yes and your no be a no.
In all of Jesus’ teachings, you go through a process. That’s why discipleship is so important. It is a process of learning and letting your yes be a yes and your no be a no.
If we are willing to just let people be, to tell them how it is and how it isn’t, and let that be, then we can just say, “Yes, it is this way,” or “No, that’s not the way it is.”
I remember asking James Bryan Smith once on the platform, “Do you think God ever lets you get away with anything?” And the answer is yes, all kinds of things. That’s what a life of grace is.
this is a life in which God is bringing us to the fullness of the likeness of his Son, and in order to do that, he gives us a life, and giving us a life means that we make choices and they matter; they don’t have to be always correct, God isn’t keeping score.
The easy yoke is to lay aside your projects and mine and to take up God’s projects.
John: Now, when you say “lay aside my project,” I assume if there’s a young person with a dream of being a writer, you don’t mean they shouldn’t dream of being a writer—or do you? Dallas: I mean they should not burden themselves by trying to be a writer. If they want to be a writer, they should write. John: But not carry the outcome? Not carry the pressure? Dallas: Absolutely right. Absolutely right.
the great temptation is to try to make it happen, whatever it is. That’s where we need to step out of our yoke and into Jesus’ yoke and let him carry the burden.
We feel like we have to make it happen, and that’s what we have to lay down. We don’t make it happen. We turn it loose. Whatever we are doing for the Lord, we let him carry through with it. We do our best, but we don’t trust our best.
Another student asked him, “Why did you do that, because you could have just let the guy have it? Why didn’t you let him have it?” Dallas’s response was, “I’m practicing the discipline of not having the last word.”
“Authentic transformation is possible if we are willing to do one thing and that is to arrange our lives around the kind of practices and life Jesus led to be constantly receiving power and love from the Father.”
What is needed is for people to actually come to see—for us to come to see—reality differently, to believe at the level of the basic ideas out of which we live, because then we don’t have to hype people up into doing stuff; it flows naturally out of how things look to us.
- Note: Move center from left brain to right brain
The difficulty is that—especially in our day, when we have decided that authority is suspect—we don’t think of ourselves as having to learn how to live. And so we never ask ourselves the question “Who has mastered life? Who is worthy of being the teacher that I sit under?”
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we don’t think of ourselves as having to learn how to live. And so we never ask ourselves the question “Who has mastered life? Who is worthy of being the teacher that I sit under?”
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Dallas says that the counsel of the ungodly is just the way most people talk. It is the counsel to live as though it were not true that you are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s glorious universe. The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if it matters what people think of you.” The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if the outcomes of your life are on your shoulders and you control them.” The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if aging is something to worry about.” The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if satisfying your desires and appetites is central to your well-being and a wise strategy for living.” That’s the counsel of the ungodly. It goes on all the time, and we rarely even see it.
The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if the outcomes of your life are on your shoulders and you control them.” The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if aging is something to worry about.” The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if satisfying your desires and appetites is central to your well-being and a wise strategy for living.”
At a conference years ago, Dallas put a sign up on the wall that said, “The will is transformed by experience, not information.” Both inside the church and out, we tremendously overestimate the power of information to bring about transformation.
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“The will is transformed by experience, not information.”
we want to teach Jesus and his teachings so that people come to believe it with their whole selves, so that they are able to navigate the reality of God and life and other people and temptation well.
the Pharisees’ aim in the New Testament, as most of those conflicts are described, was to get people to do right things. But Jesus’ aim was for people to become the sort of persons who would automatically do right things.
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It’s actually, in many ways, the opposite of license. It’s just aiming at the root instead of at the symptoms.
when I sat down and started to talk with him, the phone would ring—this was back before there were answering machines—and he wouldn’t answer the phone. He would just talk with me like he had nothing more important to do.
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Mostly I would watch how he lived, and I would think, I want to live that way.
when there is an important spiritually formative relationship, in moments of crisis, they have contact and are able to talk together—that’s a really important thing.
being a disciple is a full-time job, and it will require me thinking about my life 24/7. But there will be certain people in my life that really help me understand Jesus or help me move toward that, and so I want to lean into those folks a lot.
we think of a transformed person in terms of devotional practices, but those are a means to an end.
a transformed person is somebody who genuinely loves God and genuinely loves other people.
We measure people’s spiritual maturity in terms of their devotional practices. The problem with that is, back in Jesus’ day, if you measured people’s spiritual maturity in terms of their devotional practices, who would come out on top? The Pharisees. We have to measure spiritual maturity in such a way that the Pharisees don’t win.
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You couldn’t walk without gravity, but if you wait on gravity to make you walk, you will never walk.
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Let’s talk about how to do this. Many times people sing songs and talk all their life about seeking the kingdom of God, but there is no method to it. There is no how-to. You default to things like religious activities and perhaps a few other fragments of righteousness that you may have picked up, but not the whole story of God’s presence and God’s action.
Living in the kingdom of God is a matter of living with God’s action in our lives. When we seek the kingdom of God, we are seeking more and more to allow God to be present in everything that we are and everything that we do, and we allow him to act and overrule and guide and help us become what he intended us to be. Seeking is fundamental.
A major part of repentance is looking at things and seeing them for what they are. For the most part, that alone will begin to loosen the grip.
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Spirit. Jesus said, “But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” (John 14:26). In other words, the Spirit will remind people about Jesus. Jesus also said, “But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you” (John 16:13-14). In other words, the Holy Spirit does not clamor to have attention focused on himself. His constant ministry is to get people to focus on Jesus. Bruner said the ministry of the Holy Spirit can be kind of pictured like the illustration below. The
The whole blessed Trinity is shy. Each member of the Trinity points faithfully and selflessly to the other in a gracious, eternal circle of love.
me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. (John 17:22-24) And Dallas said, The
That’s why Jesus says that when there is oneness in the body, the world will know: “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me” (John 17:23). It’s not by accident that he says this, because that oneness, that community, is God’s signature. He doesn’t say, “May they be given the ability to out-argue all their foes.” He doesn’t say, “May they be given the power to change the culture.” He doesn’t say, “May they be given really cool worship services.” Trinitarian fellowship is the foundation of the existence of that which is real. That’s what we have been invited into at great cost. That’s where we rest.
But the kingdom is available now; I just have to want it more than I want anything else. The Trinity is right here. I don’t have to wait. I don’t have to be preoccupied. I don’t have to have anything solved. In fact, I could say to the world, “Go ahead, bring it on, because nothing can separate me.” I just have to want it more than I want anything else. I just have to say, “With God’s help in this moment, I will refuse to allow anything to sever that from me.”
At one point, I asked, “Dallas, how can I help people in my church grow spiritually, because I would really like for it to be happening more than it is? What do I need to do?” Dallas’s immediate response was, “You must arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.”
He said, “The main thing that you bring the church is the person that you become, and that’s what everybody will see; that’s what will get reproduced; that’s what people will believe. Arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.” That’s not the elders’ job, and that’s not my wife’s job, and that’s not my friend’s job, and that’s not my congregation’s job, and that’s not my staff’s job. It is not okay for me to wait until everything in my church or my world or my life achieves a certain level of resolution. That’s life within the Trinity. If I want to move toward that, the outcome is a growing community of supernatural love in constant interaction with the members of the Trinity.
Dallas said that anytime somebody does something great for God, it always begins with a vision. But the vision isn’t of what I’m going to do. It’s not of what we’re going to do. The vision is a vision of God and how good God is and how fortunate I am to be alive in God’s universe.
Then we begin to be a part of it, and the perspective shifts from the vision to the mission. We stop focusing on the vision of life in God’s kingdom, and we start focusing on what we are doing.
It’s not just that there was never a community like this before Jesus. There wasn’t even the idea of a community like this before Jesus. In the ancient world, there were guilds and there were philosophical schools and there were tribal religions and there were households and there were families. Community was his idea.
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There’s no subordination in the Trinity, not because of something metaphysical but because the members of the Trinity will not put up with it. They simply won’t have it.
I love the old translation of Philippians 2 that says, “He made himself of no reputation.” That cuts to the heart of everything so deeply. You think about Jesus hanging around there in Nazareth, working with wood and unhappy customers, and helping to raise the family and all of that. He had no reputation. Someone comes and asks, “Where’s Jesus?” And the reply is “Jesus? Jesus who?”
When I first went to South Africa twenty-five years ago, the Methodist Church there still refused to call itself a church. They had Methodist societies, which is good Wesleyan usage. When I went last time, they had become churches. It seems like it is almost hard to beat.
Wanting other churches to succeed is one of the most important things we can do.
As disciples, we love one another, and we care for one another, and we recognize the situation that we are in in a local community. We claim one another. It may scare the others to death until they get used to it, and they will want to know what you are up to. But with great relief, they will begin to understand that we are up to supporting them and pulling for them to succeed in God’s terms. We can, I believe, make a start.
I think one of the reasons I am hopeful about what is now happening is that denominationalism generally has receded into the background of the spiritual life. When I was young, you could still sort of make a life out of being a Baptist or a Lutheran or a Presbyterian or something. It’s very hard to do that now. Your identity in those terms doesn’t mean much of anything, especially to the people on the outside.
denominationalism generally has receded into the background of the spiritual life. When I was young, you could still sort of make a life out of being a Baptist or a Lutheran or a Presbyterian or something. It’s very hard to do that now. Your identity in those terms doesn’t mean much of anything, especially to the people on the outside.
I think what is appearing in our day is a growing realization that what really matters is not the divisions but what we have in common.
True ecumenicism is obedience to Christ. Discipleship leads to that. Christ’s body comes together not by administrative actions, but by the actions of individuals who begin to step across the line and invest in the unity of the body.
Jesus said that if we continue in his word—if we buy it, if we really live in it—we are his students indeed, and we will know the truth, and that truth will liberate us into the greatness and goodness of God.
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Discipleship is the true ecumenicism. It’s the way the people of Christ really come together, not by administrative action but by the spontaneous behavior of Christians toward one another. And this issues in a kind of obedience that is easy and routine because of the understanding of the reality of what we are dealing with.
He is saying, “Come to me and accept your life with me in the kingdom of God as a little child would accept it, and just begin to live it.”
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the main field for discipleship evangelism is in the church itself.
If we will gently present the gospel and the reality of the kingdom of God in the context of the churches where we serve and the communities where we serve—and I realize church can take many different forms—we will see disciples emerging, and we will see people coming together in a trinitarian unity. Then we are in a position to teach ourselves and to teach others how to do everything he said. We occasionally need to remind ourselves that there isn’t a single thing that Jesus said that we cannot do. There isn’t a single thing that he said that we can do on our own, but we are not on our own. Everything that he said is accessible to us. Let’s explore the last phase of the Great Commission:
Then we are in a position to teach ourselves and to teach others how to do everything he said. We occasionally need to remind ourselves that there isn’t a single thing that Jesus said that we cannot do. There isn’t a single thing that he said that we can do on our own, but we are not on our own. Everything that he said is accessible to us.
Let’s explore the last phase of the Great Commission: teaching people to do everything that he said. The main thing to understand is that we can do that.
We have to talk in very particular terms about how change actually happens. There is one big thought that I want to make sure I get on your plate: if you are going to be transformed, you have to transform your parts. One of the things that defeats Christian growth is failure to attend to the parts of the person.
There is one big thought that I want to make sure I get on your plate: if you are going to be transformed, you have to transform your parts. One of the things that defeats Christian growth is failure to attend to the parts of the person.
So, if you wish to not be conformed to the world, one of the main things you have to do is transform your mind. And your mind, if it is transformed, will transform the rest of you.
when we come to the area of practical transformation, we’re in the area of spiritual disciplines.
Spiritual disciplines don’t work the same way for everyone. Some people need more work on their body than they do on their mind, and others need more work on their mind than they do on their body. Some need deep soul work. Some are caught in a web of social relations that is simply destroying them.
the idea here is very simple: take care of the parts, and the whole will take care of itself. Missing this will lead to a life of frustration. It will lead to a life of failure, because you’ll keep trying to change you without changing your parts, and you can’t do it. On the other hand, because that’s the way things are set up, you can change you.
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Missing this will lead to a life of frustration. It will lead to a life of failure, because you’ll keep trying to change you without changing your parts, and you can’t do it. On the other hand, because that’s the way things are set up, you can change you.
where he’s asked, “What’s the greatest commandment?” He doesn’t say, “It’s straighten up and fly right.” He talks about the parts of the person. He says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”
Think of this as a list of the elements of a person. Jesus understood that each one of these elements has to be dealt with in order to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and your neighbor as yourself.
The people who love God with all their heart are those whose will is totally devoted to what is good for God.
One of the things that reveals character is what you have to think about. If you have to think about whether or not you are going to do things that are wrong, well, there’s something wrong with your mind.
we have to be careful that our relationships to others are places where the love of God dwells. To love God, we must love our neighbor as ourselves. To do that is to inject what is good for God into all our relationships.
We don’t attack people in the love of God. We don’t withdraw from them. We accept them. We love them.
God actually does love your neighbor. It seems very unlikely to many as they look at their neighbor, but God does love them.
He loves the neighbor who is your enemy, so he very naturally says, “Love your enemies.”
spiritual disciplines are designed to disrupt bad habits and replace them with good habits.
Our body is designed to enable us to live without thinking. If you think that’s bad, you ought to try to live thinking about everything.
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we have to grow into good habits and out of bad habits to have proper relationships of love with our neighbors.
One of the main functions of Christian disciplines is to allow your soul to come out of its cover and to be recognized and restored.
The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul, Psalm 19:7 says. The law restores the soul by bringing it into harmony with what God is doing. As that happens, the whole person that has been divided by all the conflicts in his life and even in his own will is restored. The conflicted will is one of the most common features of the lost and fallen human being, but as the soul is restored, you’re no longer defeated by the habits of your will. They are focused on God.
The message and reality of redemptive life comes in community. It comes partly because individuals are gifted by God with special abilities to discern and to speak to and to change things in a person that simply cannot be changed by his or her own efforts.
When we are thinking about church or fellowship, we want to think in terms of ministering in the power of the gifts that God gives his people and receiving that benefit to ourselves.
The definition of success for the spokesperson for Christ is one of the most important parts of learning how to live in the easy yoke with Christ. Each one of us needs to think about what we take as a mark of success for our ministry. We need to understand how that always involves the transformation of character.
Jesus talks about how some people will say, “Well, you’ve taught in our streets, and we listened to you. We can cast out demons, and we did works in your name.” But he will reply, “No, I don’t know you. I don’t know where you’re from.” He has shifted the picture from the level of action to the level of character. Who are you?
disciples. If we gather as disciples, that’s what we will see—disciples who go through the process of transformation so they come out actually loving God with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their mind, with all their strength, and their neighbor as themselves. And you know what? Easy, routine obedience is what follows. That is the good fruit that comes out of the good tree. That’s where we want to put our emphasis. The last clause in the Great Commission deals with teaching others to do all the things that Jesus has commanded. Unfortunately, many people read that as teaching them what they ought to do, but it’s talking about teaching them in such a way that they wouldn’t think of doing anything else. As we do that, we begin to see the glory of the easy yoke and the light burden that Christ invites us to.
For every person who is concerned about changing a particular kind of thing, there is a reason they are troubled with it. This is absolutely vital in the habits that get so much attention, like pornography. Where does that desire come from?
If you are willing to not want what you now want, then you begin to find out why you want what you want. That requires fellowship. This is the kind of work we could be doing in our fellowships and in our small groups. I encourage groups to run a six-week seminar on anger and invite eight people who are ready to get out of anger. You could do it with lust or anything else, but get serious about education.
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Now, you don’t need to be very explicit about all this. You just need to do it. In general, in our churches and fellowship groups, we need to be very careful about announcing revolutions. We need just to begin preaching the gospel and encouraging people to come together and work on the things that they want to change.
In general, in our churches and fellowship groups, we need to be very careful about announcing revolutions. We need just to begin preaching the gospel and encouraging people to come together and work on the things that they want to change.
The mark of disciplined people is that they do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. I could probably take a score to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and pick out every note on that score, but I couldn’t pick them out when they need to be picked out.
You have to listen to people. We don’t do enough listening. We think too highly of talking at people; we need to listen more. As we listen, we begin to perceive the roots of their behavior and find out why they are so discouraged.
We don’t do enough listening. We think too highly of talking at people; we need to listen more.
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My vision of spiritual direction—which is not an educated one, just one that comes out of my experience—is that the spiritual director primarily helps people find ways of responding that will bring them in touch with the saving grace of God where they are. You suggest things for them to do, and then you come back and talk with them about that.
the spiritual director primarily helps people find ways of responding that will bring them in touch with the saving grace of God where they are. You suggest things for them to do, and then you come back and talk with them about that. That’s how learning actually goes.
As a young Baptist minister, I became conscious that the best people in my congregation were the ones who felt the most guilty and would come and rededicate themselves if I put a little pressure on them. You know, as a Baptist, you can’t get saved again, but you can rededicate yourself an endless number of times.
this is one of the things that really turned around my idea of how you minster to people. I realized I was not saying anything that was helping these people. That meant I wasn’t actually helping them get into the things that were defeating them. That’s the key in all of these matters: You listen to people. You try to discern. Of course, this is a spiritual work, not just being clever; it involves intelligence and application. You listen to them, and you help them see why they’re failing.
the practice of silence can help you realize that you don’t stop breathing when you stop talking.
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the disciplines standardly give us indirection. That is, we don’t try to find the soul, but we practice something that allows the soul to make itself known.
- Note: As in so many other things, the desirable state is not directly achievable, but arises (or doesn’t) in response to other, controllable states.
The soul is experienced as a kind of inner force. I like to compare it to an inner river that pulls everything in our world together and makes our experiences one life. When the soul isn’t functional, our experiences are shattered, conflicting, set against one another. We don’t have integrity.
What does it mean for your soul to be lost? It means that your life doesn’t have a center that organizes your activities. You can’t have that center until it returns to God, and God restores the soul.
AA got its start from the church. It is very sad that AA had to be invented to help people, many of whom were in the church, because they could not be honest about what they were living through.
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AA isn’t just the meetings. It’s what goes into the relationships that come out of those meetings—the commitment of people to how they live with one another. Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the most brilliant illustrations of discipline and what it does on earth.
In relation to spiritual disciplines, the most helpful distinction is the difference between trying to do something and training to do something.
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What does it mean to train? To train means arranging our life around those practices that enable us to do what we cannot now do by direct effort. The point of training is to receive power, so we arrange our life around practices through which we get power.
To train means arranging our life around those practices that enable us to do what we cannot now do by direct effort. The point of training is to receive power, so we arrange our life around practices through which we get power.
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A discipline is an activity that I engage in to receive power. We tend to exaggerate what we can do through trying, and we tend to underappreciate what we can do through training.
We tend to exaggerate what we can do through trying, and we tend to underappreciate what we can do through training.
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trying harder does not work any better when trying to be like Jesus than it works when trying to run a marathon or trying to play the piano. Significant transformation involves training to do something—not just trying. Spiritual disciplines are training exercises to give us power to live in the kingdom.
Significant transformation involves training to do something—not just trying. Spiritual disciplines are training exercises to give us power to live in the kingdom.
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The disciplined person is not someone who does a lot of disciplines. The disciplined person, the disciple, is someone who is able to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. The whole purpose of disciplines is to enable you to do the right thing at the right time in the right spirit, so if something doesn’t help you to do that, then don’t do it.
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Spiritual disciplines are not a gauge of my spiritual maturity. The disciplined person is not someone who does a lot of disciplines.
The disciplined person, the disciple, is someone who is able to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. The whole purpose of disciplines is to enable you to do the right thing at the right time in the right spirit, so if something doesn’t help you to do that, then don’t do it.
- Note: Including things that were once useful disciplines. Once the enabling has happened, leave the discipline behind. Once you’ve crossed the river, no need to carry the boat any further.
My wife loves hearing that Jesus never journaled. The Bible is full of people who loved God, who lived under the Spirit, who fought sin, who grew in virtue, but they never went down to the stationery store and bought a little blank leather book and started filling it out. Now, if journaling helps you, if it helps to focus your mind as it does mine sometimes, by all means do it. If it doesn’t help you, don’t do it.
Spiritual disciplines are a means to an end. This is where the relationship between discipline and grace is so important. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says discipleship is simply the reception of grace, and receiving grace is simply what discipleship consists of.
In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer says discipleship is simply the reception of grace, and receiving grace is simply what discipleship consists of.
But we have not done a good job of teaching people how to live by grace.
As Dallas says, we often think that it’s sinners that need grace so much, because we have shrink-wrapped grace into the forgiveness of sin, but grace is way more than that. It is the power of life, and the reality is that saints burn more grace than sinners ever could. Dallas will say that saints burn grace like a 747 burns jet fuel.
The idea is not to grow in being forgiven for your sins. It’s to grow in learning how to live by grace, to receive the power of God in your life to do what you can’t do on your own.
But how do we grow in being loving, in being joyful, in being patient?
Folks sometimes ask how I know which disciplines to practice. A really good way is to start by asking, “What would my life look like if I was living fully in the kingdom?” Then ask, “What barriers keep me from living that way?” Finally, ask, “What are practices through which I can receive power to be freed of those barriers and obstacles?”
“I’ll do these really important disciplines,” because it’s about
Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. There’s a difference between being busy and being hurried. Busy is a condition of the body having many things to do. Hurry is a condition of the soul in which I am so preoccupied that I cannot be fully present to God or a person. Jesus was often busy, but he was never hurried.
Anything can be an activity. For example, for a month, when you are on the freeway, drive in the slow lane on purpose. That’ll kill you, won’t it? When you go to the store, for a month deliberately get in the longest line. Deliberately. For a month, when you eat your food, chew.
A spiritual discipline is something you can do. It affects the mind and the body; it disrupts the normal patterns of thoughts and feelings that flow through you, which gives other thoughts and feelings a chance.
This is why the self-help advice that you can choose your attitude is shallow. You really can’t. You might be able to for a moment, but things like attitudes become embedded in our body. We badly need an understanding of the importance of the body in the spiritual life and what it means to have a body that can live without us thinking about what we are doing.
The will is very good at making big choices—to get married, to go to a church, even to decide that I will drive in the slow lane for a month. The will is terrible at trying to override the habitual attitudes embedded in my body and my mind.
Let’s say I want to be more joyful. What do I do? Well, again, in most churches, what most people understand is, I’ve got to go try harder to be joyful. But go back to the Old Testament, and look carefully. There are feast days, and people are invited to eat food that they love to eat and to drink things that they love to drink.
there are other people in your life who do not give you joy. They are like black holes of joy. They suck joy out of you like a Hoover. But on that day, you say to them, “I cannot be with you today. This is my joy day. I’ll be with you again tomorrow.”
Our churches desperately need people who become spiritual doctors. That’s one of the ancient descriptions for those who engage in soul shaping or soul craft or soul care—the cure for souls. It was understood to be very much like the cure of the body, where there has to be diagnosis and wise prescription and, of course, an understanding that only God can heal. Our world desperately needs wise, skillful practitioners of the cure of souls.
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Disciplines of engagement are things we ordinarily wouldn’t do; they strengthen our doing muscle. With disciplines of abstinence, we refrain from stuff that we normally would do; this strengthens our not-doing muscle. For example, in study or worship, I’m engaging in activities. In fasting or silence, I’m abstaining from activities.
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Spiritual disciplines are not about doing them for themselves. If we think that it is just about doing them just to become more spiritual people, we can do great damage, and self-righteousness becomes a huge problem. Always keep in mind that we ought to have both great devotion but also great freedom in the disciplines.
Many, many years ago I wanted to learn how to pray, so I got involved in an Ignatian prayer group. We made a commitment, and we prayed each day and then gathered every week to learn. One of the men in the group came in one day and said, “I have now prayed thirty-two days in a row.” Our leader, Sister Jean, replied, “Tomorrow, don’t pray.”
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“Aim at depth, not breadth. If you get depth, you will have breadth thrown in. If you aim at breadth, you will get neither depth nor breadth.”
at depth, not breadth. If you get depth, you will have breadth thrown in. If you aim at breadth, you will get neither depth nor breadth.”
Solitude isn’t about what I do; it’s about what I don’t do. Solitude is a practice of abstinence.
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And that’s not a bad definition of solitude: it is wasting time with God.
It felt like an enormous waste of time. And that’s not a bad definition of solitude: it is wasting time with God. It’s easy for me
In solitude, I’m free, and the disciplines are always about producing freedom. That’s true also on the natural level: It frees a baseball player to make a great catch. It frees a musician not to have to think about the notes but just to make great music. If a discipline is not producing freedom in me, it’s probably the wrong thing for me to be doing.
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Study is not about becoming an expert at biblical trivia. (We all know about those folks, and many of us are those folks.) It’s about having a mind out of which flows a life of love and joy and peace, because it just looks that way.
Servanthood as a practice can be a way to pursue humility without trying to be humble. Disciplines can save a pastor from being overwhelmed and a church member from despair about progress in the spiritual life, because they give us a concrete journey.
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed” (Romans 12:1-2). Really interesting grammar there. He doesn’t say, “Transform yourself,” but it is a command. There is something we’re supposed to do, but we can’t do it ourselves. It’s a passive command, a passive imperative: “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Yes, there’s the mind.
Here’s the thing: I could sit in that class and listen to somebody give evidence that the carabiners and the halter would make me safe. I could sit there for a hundred years. I could repeat that talk. I could affirm it. But that would not change my body when I got up on the ropes course. Information alone does not transform. It’s indispensable—I have to have that information—but it is not sufficient.
Information alone does not transform. It’s indispensable—I have to have that information—but it is not sufficient.
But we believe that if we just pour more exegetical and theological information into people, we’ve accomplished something. What we need is a ropes course for discipleship, so that, as Dallas would say, “We come to believe with our whole bodies what we say we believe in our minds.” That’s one of the ways to think about spiritual formation and the role of disciplines. We are coming to believe—the palms of my hands and our armpits are coming to believe—that the ropes course is a safe place for us to be. That’s why spiritual disciplines are an essential part of our strategy for teaching them to “do all that I command you.” There’s no way that we can do the ropes course of life, because that requires a transformed body and a transformed mind. The idea of presenting my body is I make my body available for spiritual disciplines, though I may be really bad at it.
The idea of presenting my body is I make my body available for spiritual disciplines, though I may be really bad at it.
But, I asked Dallas, where are the churches that are producing abnormally loving and joyful, patient, courageous people in inexplicably high percentages? I didn’t mean places that have particular techniques or methodology.
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The main thing that should and could happen, and that I think is happening, is that disciples of Jesus be conscious of one another beyond the boundaries of their local organization or assembly or however they identify themselves.
we don’t want to mistake church services for the real life of Christ, but we want the life of Christ to be in our church services.
Jesus says there’s one thing that is the mark of a disciple: how you love one another. He doesn’t say how you love the world. God’s business is to love the world, and we should probably stay out of that—though we should care about the world. Loving other disciples is the heart of the matter.
That would be an interesting liturgical question; start the church service with “What’s bothering you?” And then the people could respond back, “And also you?”
You start out with how are you. Well, I’m a recovering sinner. So, how’s your recovery going? What are you experiencing as hindering you? Then you listen to people talk, and you try to address those issues. Of course, it is important for us to say that this is a divine work. It isn’t a technique. But we do need to do certain things, and we do need to not do certain other things. John: It seems like in churches we end
But getting there is our main problem, of course. If you could get a person to begin talking about what’s bothering them—not what they think should be bothering them, but what’s really bothering them—then you can begin to move into the area of the kingdom by your presence and your teaching and by learning to bless and be there in a way that you’re waiting for God to act.
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- Note: A major reason I gave up hope of relating to someone in a church context --- the air is too thick with conventions and expectations about how you should think and feel.
The first chapter of Bonhoeffer’s Life Together is one of the most priceless, precious pieces of work you’ll ever read.
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Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another. It isn’t just words. It’s the actual putting forth of your will for the good of another person.
isn’t “bless you” said through gritted teeth. It’s a generous outpouring of our whole being into blessing the other person.
One of the problems in blessing is to get the other person to hold still long enough to receive it.
is really a challenge to come to the place where you can just receive, and it’s a part of the grace of life with others to be able to receive their blessing.
One of the sad effects of how we give benedictions in our church services is that people are thinking, When are we going to get out of here? or other things. This isn’t always true, of course, but they are apt not to receive the blessing that is given to them.
This is about the manifest presence of God. We know that God is present everywhere, but he is not manifest everywhere.
Think of the church as a place of blessing. Why do you go to church? To receive and give blessing. Again, you need a little time, and we need to make sure that there’s enough room in our church service for God to accomplish something.