We want now to concentrate for this hour just on disciplines. Do ask the hard questions now about this. Think as we go along and you hit a knot in your mind, something about the disciplines because disciplines are absolutely essential. You don’t have to call them that but if you don’t act intelligently, you are not going to grow spiritually. And then, you find that you have to do different things at different points in your growth and your development so what are more appropriate disciplines at the beginning become less important and others that were not so important become more important. So, we want to talk about these, and we want to begin here by talking about the first heading. [1:21]
The Good Life Now
The Good Life Now—You will, I hope, remember from last time that every great teacher has to answer certain questions and how, if you want to appreciate Jesus, you have to take Him and His answers and put them down beside whoever else is talking, and then you begin to see what the power of Jesus’ life and teachings is. Of course, those teachings are designed to lead you and me into that kind of life that Jesus led. Now the vision of the good life, the good life now, is fundamental to our lives. You act in the light of the vision of the good life now and this is something, of course that is worked through repeatedly in the Psalms. The exploration in the Psalms about wellbeing—who is well off—is practically constant. It starts out, “Blessed is the man that walketh not in the way of the ungodly nor standeth in the way of sinners nor sits in the seat of the scornful but his delight is in the law of the Lord and therein he delights day and night. This man shall be like a tree”—see, that’s—this is about the good life and on and on. It’s relentless. So, the picture of the good life is central now to our use of disciplines because one of the things that our disciplines should help us with is keeping ourselves not only in the vision of the good life but living it. Another connection in which this is so important is we are constantly surrounded by others who are usually in a very confused way projecting other visions of who is well off and actually I kind of like that phrasing better than the good life because that phrase has just been ruined by the abuse that it has suffered from. Who is really well off? Here’s a statement from the Psalms. Psalms 73 and this is a great Psalm for balancing out the different ways in which one is apt to get caught in the tensions. This Psalm starts out, “As for me, my feet came close to stumbling. My steps had almost slipped for I was envious of the arrogant.” See, that was a competing picture of the good life. “I saw the prosperity of the wicked.” It goes on to describe how they lived and how they looked, and an interesting part of our life is to understand that God does not reach out and jerk these people up and whip them into line. We are saying “God, why don’t you do something about this?” And then that thought begins to slip in, “well, maybe I should go down.” And that’s many, many, things.
I am often almost overcome with sympathy when I watch the young people that I am privileged to be around and see how they are drawn in so many directions, usually self-contradictory and they are struggling with this. Well, this Psalm—I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it—talks about how he came to understand when he went into the sanctuary, and he got his vision right. And verse 23 and following of Psalm 73, “I am continually with you. You have taken hold of my right hand. With your counsel you will guide me and afterward receive me to Glory. Whom have I in Heaven but Thee and beside thee I desire nothing on earth. My flesh and my heart may fail but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold those who are far from thee will perish. Thou have destroyed all of those who are unfaithful to thee.” But then this great verse, “but as for me, the nearness of God is my good.” The nearness of God ….the Old Testament often uses the language…the Lord is my portion. In other words, what I have got is God. And living in the Kingdom of God is our good. It is living in the action of God. What is God doing? Well, a lot of things he’s doing, and we will need to talk some about that later on because many people tend to think that what is being spoken of here is just again especially religious moments. But the Kingdom of God is encompassing and everything that is good is in that Kingdom. And we want to look at that a little bit later. The nearness of God comes to us in many ways. That cup of coffee that Glandion is talking about; that God is near in all of the good things that are around us and we need to experience them as a manifestation of God’s action in our lives.
Now, for many people, when they think of discipline, they don’t think of the good life. They think of the bad life—hard times—they think discipline is something mean and tortured and, in this hour, we need to do a little bit to straighten that out.
History of the Disciplines
Disciplines are not necessarily painful. They are good things. In a moment, I will want to talk about the word asceticism and what it means and how that has been distorted—but a word or two about the history because the history of the disciplines is not encouraging. How did these things start? The disciplines start from people’s sincere desire to follow Christ in the way I talked about in the last hour. And actually, Jesus led his people into disciplines. If you were in the position of Peter or John or Bartholomew, you would think you were getting disciplined to get dragged around the countryside for 2½-3 years and actually all Jesus was doing was spiritual formation and He was pulling them off of their attachments to things. So, He had these stunning sayings. If you ever have time to study rabbis and how uncharacteristic Jesus was as a rabbi. For one thing, rabbis rarely, if ever, called people to be their disciples. Being a disciple of a rabbi was more like applying for admission to a university and you didn’t automatically make it. Usually, the rabbi took only the best and the brightest from the synagogue schools—young men—and then there was some process that they went through of selection. Jesus didn’t do that. Jesus went around and selected people, and you know the ones He selected? They were precisely the ones that were mentioned in the first beatitude in Matthew and to put in colloquial language, “they didn’t have a thing going for them spiritually.” They were fishermen, tax collectors—some of them we don’t know what they did—they were precisely the poor in spiritual goods. And actually, Jesus was viewed that way by a lot of His contemporaries because, do you know, Jesus did not go to school to be a rabbi? And on one occasion, they say, “How does this man know letters having never learned?” [11:43] Jesus was an un-educated person in the eyes of His contemporaries. So, Jesus selects these people, and He takes them through a process of leaving their families and taking care of their business and in some cases, their livelihood and it was goodbye for good. They didn’t know that in its full meaning, but they did know that they were having to drop everything and follow Him. Jesus, of course spelled that out in Luke 14 where you have a lot of people thinking they wanted to follow Him, but they didn’t really and in John 6, the same thing happens where He tells them that they have to eat His flesh and drink His blood and they say, “Yuk, I’m out of here.” They weren’t going to do that, so He actually discouraged people from becoming His disciples. It was not an easy life. On the other hand, it was a glorious life and now, whenever things continued to develop in the years after the book of Acts and suddenly, it becomes acceptable and perhaps even a glorious and a good thing to be a follower of Christ, then you have a lot of people saying this is not the way of Christ. The way of Christ is the way of self-denial; one of not being approved of and so you have the men and women who headed for the desert of Egypt and Syria, and they are the ones that give an identity to practices of various kind that become known as disciplines. [13:45] And so historically, the disciplines come out of trying to follow Christ in his practices and then seeing how that develops over a period of time, and it becomes one of great power and I believe that this is a part of God’s movement in history to establish this understanding of disciplines. It led to the practice of monasticism in various forms and Jesus Himself was nominal monastic and the disciples were not. It was an attempt of people to lead the kind of life that they thought that Jesus wanted them to lead. Now, that is partly based also on their misunderstanding of Jesus’ teachings and, in particular, the beatitudes.
What we call the beatitudes in Matthew 5 and Luke 6—if they are misunderstood make it appear that the conditions referred to in the beatitudes; “Blessed are they that mourn; Blessed are they that are persecuted” and so forth and so on. And Luke just says, “Blessed are the poor” leads to the idealization of conditions that are distortions of Jesus’ message. You get the idea that Jesus was poor and if you have that idea, then I hope you will re-read the gospels. Jesus was not poor. He had enough money that he could have a fulltime embezzler as his secretary treasurer. [15:45] He raised funds; He supported a ministry; He was not poor. Poorness, poverty is not a condition that is ideal for spiritual growth. Other—I mean, a little tension in saying things like that in a place like this but we just have to get this straight. The disciplines have a history that is caught up in misunderstanding involving things like if you are suffering, you are building merit so let me make just a blunt statement here. If you are going to practice disciplines, don’t try to be miserable. [16:08] It doesn’t help. Like, if you are going to practice solitude, don’t go out and sleep in a log or something, you know? Find a comfortable place where you can be undisturbed and peaceful, and it will not help for you to sleep on a bed of nails. The beatitudes are declarations of blessed-ness beyond human conditions. They are proclamations of the gospel. In Matthew 4, where Jesus is preaching, “Repent for the Kingdom of the Heavens is at Hand, He manifests the presence of the kingdom, and He teaches. As you know, the chapter divisions were not inspired by the Holy Spirit, and He moves into Matthew 5, that’s continuing a teaching. He’s proclaiming the gospel and the meaning of that beatitudes very simply, those that human beings had marked out as un-bless able. Those that human beings had marked out as un-bless able are blessed in the Kingdom of God. What is the good life? The good life is life in the Kingdom of God. In the Kingdom of God, no matter what your circumstance are, you are still blessed because the Kingdom surrounds you and sees to it. That’s what Romans 8:28 is about. All things work together for good—by the way, it didn’t say the best—and it didn’t say so you get what you want—but for good…what’s good. Work together for what is advantageous to you in the Kingdom of God and to God’s purposes in your world. Everything that happens works together not individually. It doesn’t say that everything that happens is good, and it doesn’t say that everything that happens works together for good for everybody. If you are going to sign that check, you’ve got to have a standing. And that is, you love god, and you are called into His purposes. That’s the kingdom of God. Now, if you are there, then everything works together for good, and you are blessed…in time and in eternity. And that is why Peter in I Peter can talk about how people who are suffering and so on nevertheless have joy unspeakable and full of glory as they live for Christ in their world. The good life now is life in the Kingdom of God with Jesus Christ. It’s being a part of what He is doing and that’s open to every one of us because He’s doing right around us, and we find what that is and we engage with it, and we are called into His purposes. He directs us as we should and as a result, we have “joy unspeakable and full of glory.” You know you have to stop—we used to sing a hymn about that—but now we have other kinds of songs that don’t get around to that kind of wording very often and you may want to just look up that passage in 1 Peter 1 and dwell on it. And we’re coming to that this afternoon to talk more about joy. [21:02]
Calvin
Now, at this point, I do want to talk about Calvin. Calvin is not a name that is often associated with joy. But actually, if you have read the book, I bet you were surprised at various points and you say, “Hey, this old guy is okay.” But that’s because he knew the way into life in the Kingdom of God and I just want to go over, just some of the main points, but there are such lovely phrases like on Page 36, he is talking about the law of love on number 4. “The law of love does not only pertain to the sizable prophets but from ancient days, God has commanded us to remember it in the small kindnesses of life.” That’s a beautiful thing because actually life is lived in the miniature. That’s where we live it. And as you look back and you are thinking about your reading of the Old Testament, you remember these wonderful little things. “You shall not cook a kid (a baby goat) in its mother’s milk.” Now, you say, “Wow” what is that?—the tenderness of life. You see, “you shall not reap your corners, the corners of your field” If you drop some stuff, you don’t pick it up. If you drop some grain that you are harvesting, you don’t pick it up; you leave it up. And the small kindnesses of life just stand out all through God’s dealings with human beings and teaching us to draw ourselves into that. The small kindnesses of life come out of the generosity that we experience in the Kingdom of God because when we live in the Kingdom of God, we know that we are abundantly provided for and that we don’t need to be grubbing every little thing out of whatever we are involved in to get as much as possible for our advantage so we can be generous. [23:41] And I think some of those teachings go so deep into the nature of nature. Nature is a living thing before God and the earth…the original green ethics is in the Old Testament. Genesis 1:26 is where it starts and its care and love for creation as well as love for others. You love something when you seek what is good for it. That’s what love is. OK? We may not have much time to come back to that but it’s important to understand. You love something when you seek what is good for it. And we were given charge over creation to do what was good for it under God in Genesis 1:26 and following you will find that laid out. [24:41]
OK, now, I just want to take you through the main points now—the main divisions of the book. Calvin had artistic tendencies, and they come out right in opening the book—the goal of the new life is that God’s children exhibit melody and harmony in their conduct. What melody? — the songs of God’s Justice. What harmony? – the harmony between God’s righteousness and our obedience. Only if we walk in the beauty of God’s law do we become sure of our adoption as children of the father, and he goes on to talk about. Now, he says, what is the principle that we can follow to do that? And he gives you the principle here on page 17 and that is holiness. And again, many people today holiness is a world that scares them, and they think it’s dreadful. They think of sour unpleasant people who are grinding it out, but Calvin certainly did not have that in mind. At the bottom of Page 18, what is the plan for holiness? And he says to obey and follow Christ—to obey and follow Christ. The imitation of Christ on page 19, no 2 there, the Lord has adopted us to be his children on this condition that we reveal an imitation of Christ who is the mediator of our adoption. [26:40] And, he is very strong here and may make your—get you bothered about your eternal security and many people have experienced those kinds of words as the cause of eternal insecurity and so, you have to probably re-think your vision of Calvin as you read words like that.
He goes on to talk about external Christianity is not enough and so on and holiness is, he even talks about perfection, and page 22 and following and he does talk about, we shouldn’t require that of people to be in our fellowship, but we should be constantly working toward it and should expect that it would be completed in our after-life. Now, skip on to 25: What’s the key to holiness? Self-denial. This is a shortened version of Book 3 of the Institutes, and the Institutes see there is a memorable phrase there that says, you want to know what the Christian life is? I’ll tell you in one word: self-denial. Now, what in the world does that mean? You know, we have seen generation after generation of people who have taken self-denial and tried to turn it into a legalism. And we certainly know that it brings us into anything but the “good life now.” The “good life now” is not a form of being miserable, denying yourself things that you want. Self-denial is a way of transforming your whole approach to what you want and that will come in the next session as cross bearing. You see, nearly all these phrases now, they send a chill down your spine because cross bearing, oh my, we have seen people doing that and trying to get asked to do it and it doesn’t look like a good thing now. But, self-denial, he talks about this on pages 25 & 26, his understanding of self-denial is that we do not regard ourselves as belonging to ourselves. That’s basic self-denial for him. By no. 2 on page 26, we are not our own but the Lord’s. It is plain that what error we must flee and to what purpose all our needs must be directed and then he lists four things there about not being our own. Neither our reason nor our will should guide us. We should not seek what is expedient to the flesh. Flesh is natural abilities and desires. Let us forget ourselves, and our own interests as far as possible. Let us live and die as belonging to God. So, what’s self-denial mean? It means that the self is not what we live for. We are not the governors of our lives. We don’t live for what we want, and he understood so well how the opposite of self-denial hurts us. On page 32, there is some wonderful language here at the top of the page. He says, “We are all so blinded and upset by self-love that everyone imagines he has a just right to exalt himself and to undervalue all others in the comparison to self.” He talks at length here about how things go in the human order. The bottom of page 32—the poor yield to the rich, the common people to the upper ten; the servants to their masters, the ignorant to the scholar but there is nobody who does not imagine that he is really better than others. Everyone flatters himself and carries a kingdom in his breast and you will remember those words of Paul in Philippians 2 where he says, “Let each consider others better than himself.” [31:40] That’s quite an attainment and you have to grow into that until that becomes a good thing—I mean not just something you experience as good and not just something that you do because you think you should be that way. Wonderful teachings here about how we do our deeds of charity and love for others. On page 39, there is some nice teachings about how people do deeds of charity for others out of the spirit of haughtiness and look down on them. Now, then, on page 40, he turns to God’s blessing. He says the blessing of God is what makes the way of self-denial a wonderful way to live. We don’t strive to attain what we think we need or want but we live in self-denial and leave to the Lord to provide for us in the ways that are best. There is a teaching on page 46 that can be a trouble to people. No. 4 there, it says, “In short knowing that whatever may happen is ordained by the Lord. He that is the person of self-denial will receive it with a peaceful and thankful heart that he may not be guilty of proudly resisting the rule of him to whom he has once committed himself and all his belongings.” Now there’s a problem in that it is slipping over into the attitude that God has caused things that are bad in your life, rather than that He has permitted them. Causing things and permitting things are very different. Obviously, God permits everything that happens to us: that’s Theology 101 I guess you would say. But to say that He brings it about: that He causes it, or the language here is “ordained by the Lord” gives you a very different understanding of things and this is one of the things that has had a very ambiguous role in Calvinistic theology. There is a phrase that developed in Calvinism in Scotland, “Kiss the rod.” And “kissing the rod” is a way of saying that you love the pain and that you accept it as a gift from God. Well, actually, that’s not all bad but it depends upon how you come to think about God if you do that. And to receive everything that comes as something that God has ordained is a case of what he comes to call “cross bearing” on page 47. [35:09]
Cross bearing refers to the difficulties that come in life and he says, on page 47, that cross bearing is more difficult than self-denial. Life is hard, full of labors, full of countless griefs and cross bearing, as he describes it, means to accept all of the bad things that come into your life as blessings to be received with an eye to what God is going to do about them. I will say again that there is much to be said for that—much to be said for that. But it isn’t, I think, biblical to tell you the truth. Taking the cross refers to your general resignation of your will to God. Cross bearing means to live in that posture. You have resigned your will to God. And too often, people mistake the cross of Christ that you receive for the difficult things that are imposed upon you and you will hear someone say, “Well, he’s my cross; I must bear him,” or “she’s my cross,” or whatever. Those are crosses. Now, if you are bearing your cross, you will do much better with them than if you are not. But it is elevating troubles more than they should be elevated in life to treat them as the cross. So, now, he goes on. These are good teachings on page 49; the cross makes us humble. On page 51, the cross makes us hopeful. On page 52, the cross teaches obedience and so on. I don’t want to take time to go over all of those because I have to go on to some other things, but now the attitude of bearing the cross as Jesus taught it, “No one can be my disciple unless they take up their cross and follow me.” What did that refer to? When Jesus gave that teaching, He had not gone to the cross and no one expected Him to go to the cross. The cross is one of the commonest things that you would see around Jerusalem or other Roman ruled cities. And everyone knew what it meant when you saw a man carrying their cross out to be nailed to it. It meant the end of their life. And now, that’s central to the Christian teaching—the fine texture of the Christian life as I referred to it earlier. Absolutely central to it—you have to have resigned your life. Listen to these words, “If you then be crucified with Christ, risen with Christ, seek those things that are above where Christ sits on the right hand of God.” What is that? That’s the Kingdom. Set your affections on things above, not only things on the earth for you are dead. That’s it. See, the fellow carrying his cross knew that his life was over. Now, then, having entered into resurrection life in the Kingdom of God with Christ, we have a different life. You are dead and your life is hidden. What your life is, you don’t know, and others don’t either because it is hid with Christ and guess what? Christ is now hidden. You don’t see him all over the place, do you? He is hiding; you are hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life shall appear, then you also will appear glorious; there is that word again. You get to glow. You don’t get to glow much now. It might set the brush on fire if you did. But, when Christ—there is coming a time when you will appear. Now then, the flip side of that is in the next verse, verse 5 in Col. 3, “Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth.” Mortify is death and you’ve been told—you have died; that’s the cross. To bear the cross means to accept the fact that your life apart from God is done. Now, then, guess what? It’s still around so you have a job. What is the job? Mortify and boy, there is hardly any more unpopular word in church today than mortify and I enjoy asking churches from time to time—What is your program on mortification? And some of them say, business meetings. [Laughter] But, Paul is realizing that we have this other situation that is embedded in our body and in our social relations and so on, so we need to mortify the parts of our life that are still at a natural level. And then that’s what Colossians 3 goes on to talk about. [41:24]
Romans 8:13, “If you through the spirit do mortify the deeds of the flesh, you will really live.” Now, what has happened over and over is that people have tried to mortify the deeds of the flesh by the deeds of the flesh and that is a really unhappy life. And it falls in—that’s where back to our discussion earlier—it falls into making things happen. So, I was raised in a context where at church you wore a certain kind of clothes or didn’t wear certain kinds of clothes. If you were a bit further north, you couldn’t smoke if you were a Christian but if you go south, you go out in front of the church between Sunday school and worship, and it looked like a cloud had descended. Ya’ know? It wasn’t the one that goes with the fire and the pillar. [42:31]
OK, so now then taking care of that then on page 67, you get hopefulness for the next world. We just have two things to go here. One is hopefulness for the next world and this of course, is a very great thing. The hope that now lies in the new life and its extension. There will be a natural progression, and Jesus has taught us that for those who live in His word—that is actually what their life is, they will not experience death. They have already experienced it. They will not experience death. You may want to look up John 8:51 & 53; that becomes a standard teaching. You might want to put II Timothy 1:10 with that, that says, “He has destroyed death and brought life and immortality to life through the Gospel.” So, the assurance that we are part of something that is everlasting; “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” Some of your modern translations have cut that last verse down to refer to the temple. But sometimes you know, you correct translations just by looking at the context and the context of the 23rd Psalm is not about sitting in the temple. You get some of that in Psalms 23 but “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” is referring to dwelling with God wherever. So, that’s really important and the blessing that comes with that is one, which is really important for Calvin to stress because he’s so often misunderstood. He thinks this life is good. This life is not bad; it is not simply a veil of tears and on page 72, the blessing of this present life should not be despised. God is kind; He gives us good things in this life, and we should enjoy them and praise Him for it and let the goodness of the good life that comes with life in the kingdom extend to all of the things that concern our life as much as possible. [48:08]
Now, the final point in the blessing of the present life has to do with accepting our post—the idea that where we are, God has placed us. The bottom of 75, “This life is a post at which the Lord has placed us, and we must stay at it until the Lord calls us away.” And that is tied onto page 83, the right use of the present life. Now, I must say quickly it means to enjoy your life under God. So, the good life now is not just one where all we have is our relationship to God. His nearness is our good; that’s right. But there is much more to our good life than that and Calvin even includes wine at the bottom of 86. He was not troubled about things like that. But we always live—whatever the joy, we live in moderation. We discipline ourselves to enjoy abundance with moderation. You might just mark the very last line on page 89. He is talking about gratitude and living with gratitude so that when you bless your food, you are really blessing it.
And you approach it with joy. We carry our devotion to Christ into all of our life including our business and we learn at the bottom of 89 to bear poverty quietly and patiently and to enjoy abundance with moderation. That, of course, is Paul again in Philippians 4. [47:22]
So, now, the point of being faithful to your divine calling which is the very last stage here on 92 & 93 is one of the strongest points in Calvinistic spirituality. It is the reception of your place in life as God’s blessings so whatever you do, and this carried over to the foundation of America in the earliest days where people thought of every calling as God’s blessing. If you think of how desperately we need that in our world today where job hatred is epidemic and people are very dissatisfied with what they have to do and rather than being discontent with that, God calls us to accept it and to know the glory of God in the place where we are positioned. We do get positioned by our birth. Our birth determines our entry into the physical world and it’s a great challenge for many people to accept that. But, if we are going to know the “good life now,” it is really important that we learn to accept that. It doesn’t mean that we stay there necessarily, but we accept the point that God chose where we would be born, who would be our parents, what kind of culture we would be born into and so on. And we accept that and move from there and not try to disown it. You may remember that the only commandment with promise as Paul says is honoring our father and mother and it’s a great spiritual assignment to come to grips with that. To honor our mother and father, even if they are not very honorable and to be thankful for their life through which our life came and it is very hard to be genuinely thankful for your life and believe that God has done well by you if you are unable to see that in the context of your mother and father. [49:57] So, now that goes so deep that you almost have to spend a lot of time on that but it is something that many people—going back to what Keith was asking about memories and images—there’s a lot of redemption required there and very often, we have to come to the point to where we can feel pity for our mother and father before we can begin to honor them.
Ok. That’s a long story but I wanted you to look at Calvin’s version of the good life now: holiness, self-denial, cross bearing, those are fundamental, but they don’t destroy life; they open it up to goodness. And, or course, that’s just an elaborate way of taking our kingdom into the Kingdom of God. Your kingdom is the range of your effective will and you take that into the Kingdom of God. Well, what does that mean? Well, holiness, self-denial, cross bearing—taking your position in life as from God and living with it there.
Well, you may want to make comments or ask about that later, but I do hope that you will have a profitable time with Calvin.
Now, if Wesley posed a problem, I would have you read Wesley’s tract on Christian Perfection but Wesley is not a big problem now. Right? I mean you don’t find people in bondage to the struggle for Christian perfection. [Laughter] Or, you know, I don’t see that. I would like to sight that bumper sticker that says, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” You see, “just forgiven,” is taken by many people as the whole story and they don’t understand that there is quite a distance between “just forgiven” and perfection. There might be something interesting in that interval for us to explore. So, but now, I would say 150 years ago, instead of Calvin’s book in the situation like this, you would want to bring Wesley in because he did have people in bondage and the Wesleyan movement basically broke down over an attempt to give a legalistic reading to perfection. [52:35] I hope that makes sense to you because this is a major episode in our past that led up to setting aside the disciplines as irrelevant which is what we have fundamentally in post-World War II evangelicalism and history has a tremendous grip on how we experience our lives today as we are following Christ.
Well, I want to move on to point two finally. Not finally, but next. On your outline, disciplines and asceticism. Now, I have put up here; it looks like I am going to get it on both sides what a discipline is.
This is the concept. The concept of the discipline and many people have trouble with asceticism because especially post reformation people have thought that asceticism was a bad thing and this even has come to the place where it affects our language so that if you go to a dictionary and you look up aesthetic and asceticism, you will find it treated almost 100% in terms of monks and hermits or spiritual exercises but you need to understand that, that is not the meaning of it as it comes into the New Testament. And the word is not used a lot but there are some of the cognates that are used there where in the Greek teaching, the ascetic did not have to do with suffering or with religion. It referred to all modes of practice, exercise, teaching, instructing, even furnishing and adorning. It didn’t refer to anything specifically religious but just to the realization that human life requires training, exercise. There is almost nothing in human life that is worth doing that you can do without training. Dancing, speaking French, carrying on a conversation, being at home in the Bible, saving money—which is a major issue for our culture today—understanding that what debt does often is simply to relieve you from discipline. Credit cards have been one of the greatest enemies of moderation and self-control that has ever been invented and it will get worse as we go along. For example, if people in times when people had to actually spend money to get things, they knew what money was and usually when they considered getting something, they would say, “Now, why should I? Do I really need that?” If you have a credit card, you don’t ask that question—you say, “why not?” And the move from why to why not is one of the deepest shifts in culture that has occurred in the western world in the last fifty years. When you think about the problem of our governments getting ahold of money, it’s partly because they don’t know what money is. They don’t know what it is. They think it’s getting people to say “yes” to certain things and so this idea of discipline goes very deep. But it does not have to do with self-imposed suffering. It is not a matter of earning merit, but a matter of purposeful training and in teaching it, we need above all to help people see that discipline is absolutely necessary to any life worth leading. I shall say that again. Discipline is absolutely necessary to any life worth leading. We need to help people understand that. It’s life spiritual formation. It’s a matter of which one you get—which life do you get? Discipline is a major part of morality because a primary function of morality is to give us a place to stand to not do what we want to do and to do what we don’t want to do. See?
Only discipline can deal with desire and at this point, if we had world and time enough, I would like to spend a whole day just talking to you about desire in the New Testament and the universal teaching of the New Testament is this, “if you do not discipline desire, it will absolutely ruin your life. It will tear your soul apart….destroy you.” One graphic teaching in I Peter where he says, “I beseech you brothers as pilgrims and strangers, abstain from fleshly lusts that war against the soul.” Abstain from fleshly lusts that war against the soul. This is I Peter 2:11 But, this is the teaching over and over. What is in the world? Lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, the pride of life: that’s what the world runs by desire and desire is not attuned to what is good. Where do wars and fighting come James asks in chapter 4. Where do they come from? He just tells you. Well, they come from your desires. “You lust and do not have so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain so you fight and quarrel,” and so forth. That’s James 4: 2&3 [1:00:13]
Discipline is absolutely essential to the ordering of our lives. Disciplines are what enable us to do what we should do as distinct from what we want to do. All right? And then as we enter into that, the power of God—God’s presence and power, moves into our lives so that we are not operating just in terms of our natural abilities. God is on the side of good. God is good. Love is directed towards what is good, not towards what you want. Be careful about saying what you love because many times it just means what I want.
Now, if you are teaching a child, one of the things that you know is you have to help them not do what they want. And hope that they will internalize that so that as they grow up, they will not be mastered by their desires. Now, asceticism classically has that meaning. Asceticism is a process of training, which enables you to order your life around what is good, and that is always for the human being under God. And so, God is first. Right? Your spirit or will then come under God and that will bring your soul under God and your soul is the principal which organizes everything in you so that you have your life, and that structure will keep you from being destroyed by desire. When Jesus’ teaching in John 4 to the lady at the well—He starts talking to her about thirst and water and He says, “Anyone who drinks of the water that I shall give them will never thirst again but the water that I give him will be a spring rising up to everlasting life.” Well, now, that poor lady—I often wonder what she was thinking as she heard this—actually she says, “give me some of this water so I won’t have to come here and draw.” Right? And, then He led her to what thirst had done to her by saying, “Go bring your husband’ and this woman had been beaten to death by desire—not just her own but the desires of others and that’s what you see in many of our families today. They are wrecked by desire. I think what Jesus was saying to the woman is if you get what I have go give you will never be dominated by desire again. Never. You will not be driven by your desires.
Now, desire isn’t bad in itself. That’s the mistake of the Buddhist and the Stoic is to say that desire is bad. Desire essential and you can’t do without it. You can only fake it. And that’s a hard job but desire is meant to be subordinated to what is good. What is good should govern our lives and it is in constant war with what desire goes after. That’s the story of our social life. Imagine what our government, our education system, our business world would be like if it was governed by what is good and not what people can get that they want and many times, it’s by manipulating the desires of others that we control them—and to move out of that to what is good—now, that is where one of the dimensions where the individual can begin to think about their affect on their community. Many people have this idea that if you get into spiritual disciplines, it’s all kind of private. And you worry about privatization. You have never seen anything more powerful in social transformation than the transformation of individuals into Christ-likeness. Never. And you go back and you study history and you begin to realize the power of individual transformation before God because you cannot make it private. It affects everything you do. It touches everyone. Love and justice go together See, we have this myth in our culture that justice is one thing and love is another thing. But you can never do justice to justice with justice. [1:05:47] It’s only when love is the over-riding theme that justice does justice. Otherwise, it will just make a lot of people mad. And it’s the misunderstanding of justice and there are real issues of justice—don’t misunderstand me, but they are issues of love. When injustice is done to people, that is rooted in lovelessness. And if you tried to take care of the justice without dealing with the love part, it will do some good but it will miss what you want—in the way for example, of community. And you see this if you think in terms of trying to have a family that runs on justice. I mean you have to put your imagination to work on that and try to imagine a family where they are just trying to be just to one another. Or they are dealing with one another in terms of “I want you to do justice to me.” And you will begin to see the limitations. Justice is important but it has to be governed by love and love goes to the deeper root of things: not desire alone but what is good. And disciplines under Christ enable us to move in that direction.
Now, I have already said that there’s no official list of disciplines. You will have seen this already in your reading but just to put it up here for—there’s not one way of dividing disciplines. If you read various writers, you see them dividing them in different ways. I divide them in terms of the inner dynamics of the person. [l:07:58] And those dynamics have to do on one hand with abstinence and the other with engagement. Now, all of these are practices—a discipline is always a practice—is something you choose. All of these are practices that have had wide-spread usage among Christians and they sometimes are misused, misunderstood, probably one of the most misunderstood ones here is fellowship—where we think fellowship is something you do in fellowship hall with knives and forks. Fellowship is a very deep kind of thing where you are intimately involved with others in a process of life. Intimacy is a matter of lives being involved with one another and fellowship requires intimacy. That’s just an illustration but the disciplines of abstinence serve to empty out of our lives things that have too much possessed us. They empty out of our lives things that have too much possessed us. So, solitude, which in my understanding is perhaps for a person who decides to start moving the most fundamental of disciplines. [l:09:52] Solitude pulls away all of those things that we normally refer to to reassure ourselves that we matter and mattering is really big of course. Solitude breaks our dependence upon other people for our sense of well being. Silence of course is in the same ballpark. You need to have silence if you are going to have solitude and both of them take us off of our standard ways of reassuring ourselves who we are, what we are doing, what’s good and especially of seeing ourselves through the eyes of other people. If you leave your position for a time of solitude, you may worry about whether or not things will run without you or perhaps, they might find out that they can get along quite well without you. And busyness is one of the things that solitude delivers us from because it helps us realize that the world is not on our shoulders. That’s the emptying out part—silence; we no longer control the world with our tongue. Fasting—very important discipline and it means you can fast from lots of things but it basically means abstinence from food. That’s the core of fasting. [1:11:50]
You have to learn how to do it. That’s true of all of the disciplines. If you go into solitude, you spend your first hours, perhaps your first days, wondering what’s going to happen. You have to work through in a discipline the point of control over you that company or sound or food exercises and you begin to stop thinking about all that poor food that is missing you, you see. And, you say, better it go to waste than to my waist. So, you work through a process and you learn frugality, chastity and so on. I don’t have time to talk about all of those now. Perhaps some of them will come up later. [1:13:02]
Study; obviously that’s engagement. That is a primary way that you renew your mind and when you study the lives of people who have gone in it, you’ve seen how solitude and silence, study and worship go together. But now when you go into solitude, don’t plan to study. You have to break something—you may have to break the habit of study over you—you have to look at what is dominating and then you engage in practices that will help you. Now, practically speaking, most of these show up if you simply familiarize yourself with the lives of people who have gone this path. And, you discover others that have gone this path that are of no use—like, for example—the way the Irish monks used “cells” which were basically little holes in the ground that they dug out for themselves where they could be alone. Self-flagellation is also not of much help. So, you find a lot of distortions in the effort by just looking at the lives of people who have moved on down the road with these. Now, the important thing to understand at this point for our studies is what these do and what they don’t do. They can make you grouchy. If they make you grouchy, don’t do them. Back up. They can make you sick. They can get you caught up in self-righteousness. I don’t know how many people I have had tell me that they planned a 21-day fast and on the 20th day, Aunt Mable from Cincinnati came and they had to break their fast. I think that was a gift from the Lord. They probably would have been totally insufferable if they had made it to 21 days. So, you have to have a sense of what these things are doing and you have to know how they work and remember that the guideline is always love, joy, peace, longsuffering and they should minister to those things. If they don’t minister to them, don’t do them. They are not righteousness. Disciplines are not righteousness. They are wisdom. Wisdom. They enable you to get to good ends by good means. That’s a discipline. So, you don’t brag about them. The ideal actually is to get to the place you don’t need them. And a good test for whether or not you need one of them is how hard it is for you to do it. And if it’s hard, probably you need to go back and maybe think about it some more and receive some teaching and now you always want to be listening for God’s presence teaching, for Christ to be with you in disciplines. Never go it alone. And if you do that, then you will find that these disciplines enable you to do what you can’t do by direct effort, because they will change you on the insides. Some of them have a kind of generalized effect; the old saints always knew that if you were well feasted, that would enable you to deal with different kinds of needs like human approval because fasting goes to the root of such a fundamental desire, which is food. I always like to talk about fasting before we go to lunch to see how many people decide not to have lunch. I am just kidding. I am just kidding. Actually, one of the things that fasting does is it really teaches you how to appreciate food. And you know, so often, we don’t appreciate it food; we just shove it in and go. It doesn’t do us much good. Fasting deals with such a fundamental teaching. What it does is it teaches you how to be strong and sweet when you don’t get what you want. Disciplinary effect of fasting is basically that. Now, you can see how that is a very concrete application of the cross. And it trains you—ok, I don’t have what I want, so what? Now sometimes getting what you want has other bearings; it has to do with what is right and so on. But, if you pursue it, getting what you want isn’t just because you want it. You get it because it’s something good, it’s beneficial and of course, food is good and beneficial if we use it rightly. But, now you have to think, we live in an epidemic of diabetes. Where does that come from? Food is a major spiritual issue in our world just like automobiles and houses and televisions and all the other stuff that we base our happiness on. We live in a society of consuming where we associate our well being, the good life, with consuming. And that is one of the benefits that you gain if you live through periods where the power is off because now, your capacity to consume depends very largely on electricity. So this gives you a better perception of where you are living when you think in terms of practices that liberate you from what is not good and tie you into what is good. That make any sense? OK, well if that makes any sense, let’s quit there and see if we have some questions or comments.