Growing Spiritually is…
The quote of the year for me from Donald Miller,
“It’s not a hard, fast rule to be sure, but the idea is that sitting around looking at your spiritual belly button isn’t going to provide an object lesson for your faith. The idea is that faith makes sense in the context of some other pursuit.“
Read the rest of his blog to give this quote some context, but the better we church leaders are able to communicate to our people that growing closer to God and discovering more about God and falling into a deeper love of God is done in the context of every aspect of life not just what we term “spiritual contexts” like Bible reading, study, meditation, prayer, etc. If I am paying attention God will reveal Himself in how I feel about Chocolate Chip Cookies, especially warm gooey ones…Mmmmmmmmmmmmm.
The Context for Spirituality is not Spirituality | Donald Miller’s Blog
The Context for Spirituality is not Spirituality
I don’t read very many books about faith. And I don’t listen to very many sermons about faith. I’ve not known exactly why for some time, or at least until lunch yesterday. Those books were fine (I may have even written one or two) but they didn’t seem to be very applicable to my life. And it’s never actually helped me to “work on my spirituality or my relationship with Jesus” either. What has helped me is finding myself lost in the woods and calling out to God, looking for wisdom in the scriptures.
Yesterday, at lunch, my friend David mentioned he’d spent some time in Colorado with the guys at Ransomed Heart. David used to work with them and went back to hang out with them for a weekend in the mountains. He mentioned that one of the guys reminded him that spirituality was not a context. I asked David what the guy meant, and Dave said what he meant was that you learn about God while learning to fly a plane or raising a child or planting crops in a field. It’s not a hard, fast rule to be sure, but the idea is that sitting around looking at your spiritual belly button isn’t going to provide an object lesson for your faith. The idea is that faith makes sense in the context of some other pursuit.
And that might be the reason I don’t migrate toward conversations specifically about faith.
In the Bible, God guides people through stories. Stories is how He teaches people about themselves and Himself. He doesn’t get the children of Israel out of Egypt instantly. God drags it out, creates plagues, guides them through positive and negative turns, all to shape their faith. He does the same with Joseph, giving him a vision, then immediately letting him be thrown into a well by his brothers.
If we think we are going to grow in faith by sitting around at a Bible study, we are wrong. That stuff is fine, but without a story, without diving into something really difficult, something that requires us to look to God for support and wisdom and comfort, it will be more difficult to become a person of great faith.
Exodus – 2000 years later
Thanks to Rob Bell’s book, God wants to save Christians, and the yet to be published book from the folks at the other Mars Hill, Redemption, as I read through the Bible this year I am more sensitive than ever to the prevailing theme of Exodus throughout scripture.
After God sends Moses to lead his family out of slavery in Egypt – granted it’s over a million family members, but they are family none the less – the family becomes a nation with an organized form of government, laws, and religion in a relatively short amount of time. After this critical moment in God’s interaction with us God continually references the Exodus events as his identification and as proof that He cares.
When God has had enough of the rebellion and a turning point is necessary for these people He uses Exodus language to announce through His prophets how He will discipline and how He will redeem.
I just finished Hosea, a prophet who lived 2000 years after the Exodus who announces the future destruction of the Northern Kingdom, Israel,
“5 They will return to Egypt
Assyria will rule over them
because they refuse to repent!” (Hosea11:5, NET)
The Northern Kingdom will again be taken into slavery because of their rebellion. It seems a cruel punishment. God even declares that pregnant women will have their wombs cut open and their babies heads will be dashed against the rocks. Wow! Pretty violent, and if we remove this discipline from the context of 2000 years of patience shown to the Israelites by God I think we might have an opinion of God as merciless. However, He’s given them 2000 years to follow Him. He rescued them from slavery in order to follow Him. Instead the people of the Northern Kingdom and especially their kings disobeyed the law and worshiped other gods. I think 2000 years is about 1999 years longer than I would have given them.
What about you? Is God patient, merciful, gracious, kind, and just? Or is God some kind of malicious, jealous, and enraged ogre?
Selfish vs. Godly Ambition
When we find ourselves in a place where we know that we can do more, better, bigger, than we currently are doing it might be good to remind ourselves that we’re fallen and imperfect people who rely on a perfect and Holy God.
Everything I’ve ever done is laced with selfish ambition. Why? Because I’m not completely sanctified. If you want to go to the next level of leadership you need to allow God to crucify your selfish ambitions, but that is only half the equation. You also need God to intensify your godly ambitions. There is a fine line between those two motivations, but they will determine what gets rewarded and what gets disregarded. I think there are lots of leaders who are accomplishing great things for the kingdom, but it will go totally unrewarded because they are doing it for the wrong reasons. And it is our motivations that will one day be revealed and judged by God.
The difference between selfish ambition and godly ambition is sort of like the difference between self confidence and holy confidence. The source of the motivations are polar opposites while the actions on the surface seem to be the same. It’s so easy to do the right things for the wrong reasons and appear to be godly. May God sanctify our motives. May God crucify our selfish ambitions and intensity our godly ambitions. May the glory of God be the only motivation driving us!