There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.
It’s the set of the sail, and not the gale that determines the way they go.
Christian spirituality means living in the mature wholeness of the gospel. It means taking all the elements of your life – children, spouse, job, weather, possessions, relationships – and experiencing them as an act of faith. God wants all the material of our lives.
Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.
Individualism is the growth-stunting, maturity-inhibiting habit of understanding growth as an isolated self-project. Individualism is self-ism with a swagger. The individualist is the person who is convinced that he or she can serve God without dealing with God.
But sooner or later we find that not everything is to our liking in this book. It starts out sweet to our taste; and then we find it doesn’t sit well with us at all, it becomes bitter in our stomachs. Finding ourselves in this book is most pleasant, flattering even, and then we find that the book is not written to flatter us, but to involve us in a reality, God’s reality, that doesn’t cater to our fantasies of ourselves.
Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, ‘What does this mean?’ but ‘What can I obey?’ A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances.
Watch what God does, and then you do it, like children who learn proper behavior from their parents. Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of himself to us. Love like that.
In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego.
Meditation is the primary way in which we guard against the fragmentation of our Scripture reading into isolated oracles. Meditation enters into the coherent universe of God’s revelation. Meditation is the prayerful employ of imagination in order to become friends with the text. It must not be confused with fancy or fantasy.
So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.
The Scriptures, read and prayed, are our primary and normative access to God as He reveals Himself to us. The Scriptures are our listening post for learning the language of the soul, the ways God speaks to us; they also provide the vocabulary and grammar that are appropriate for us as we in our turn speak to God.
The temptations that use the raw material of good for evil can continue unrecognized for a long time without awareness.
The psalmist’s and the Christian’s waiting and watching – that is, hoping – is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in his creation and vigorously at work in redemption.
The truth of God explained their lives, the grace of God fulfilled their lives, the forgiveness of God renewed their lives, the love of God blessed their lives.
And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes.
The experts in our society who offer to help us have a kind of general-staff mentality from which massive, top-down solutions are issued to solve our problems. Then when the solutions don’t work, we get mired in the nothing-can-be-done swamp. We are first incited into being grandiose and then intimidated into being infantile. But there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility.
It is far easier to deal with people as problems to be solved than to have anything to do with them in community.
If we don’t know where we are going, any road will get us there. But if we have a destination – in this case a life lived to the glory of God – there is a well-marked way, the Jesus-revealed Way. Spiritual theology is the attention that we give to the details of living life on this way. It is a protest against theology depersonalized into information about God; it is a protest against theology functionalized into a program of strategic planning for God.
We have been told the lie ever since we can remember: human beings are basically nice and good. Everyone is born equal and innocent and self-sufficient. The world is a pleasant, harmless place. We are born free. If we are in chains now, it is someone’s fault, and we can correct it with just a little more intelligence or effort or time.
We do not qualify as biblical simply by quoting the Bible. We are biblical only when we share life in the wilderness with those who are tempted and fall, when we carry the cross of Jesus, and when we love extravagantly in Jesus’s name.