Well, it’s wonderful to see you again and I have been looking forward to it and renewing our fellowship and finding out what’s been happening in your life. I am glad that you made it.
Now, I want to go back to the beginning with the Renovaré and talk for a few moments as to what it is we are hoping to do and you have in your notebook, a statement, a mission’s statement for Renovaré Institute because the Institute is not the same as Renovaré in terms of objectives. The mission statement here is basically Jesus’ words to his people before he left them in his visible form that they had been somewhat used to and turned the task over to them. And them, now, is us. So, the mission of Renovaré Institute for spiritual formation is to make disciples of Jesus immersing them into the Trinitarian life of the Kingdom of God and teaching them actually to do what Jesus says is best. [1:28]
Now, at a certain point, of course, we assume that you are disciples, and we talked last time at length about what it is to be a disciple. You are living as a student of Jesus; that is, he is your teacher, and he is teaching you how to live in the kingdom of God—how to live your life in the kingdom of God, as he would lead your life if he were you. That idea of claiming your life, the one you’ve actually been given and to take very seriously and with joy who you are and what you are doing here; that is crucial to understanding what discipleship is.
So, now then, the second part is to immerse disciples in Trinitarian life of the kingdom of God. Immersion. Baptism. In a fellowship and of course, our joy is to watch how that develops in a group like this over a period of just a few days. And, then hopefully, that would be something that would extend to you in your context as you go ahead to learn how to actually do the things that Jesus thought was best. So, our emphasis is mainly on that last clause. And that is the part that seems to be missing in our churches and our fellowships and in the Spirit of the Discipline, we talk about that at length at the outset, especially n chapter two and that is where we place the emphasis for the time.
Now, at the bottom of that page, you have a course description, Christian Spiritual Formation II: Living in the Divine Conversation and Character. Now that’s specifically what we are doing here this week. Last time, we talked about the theology of the person and the kingdom, how God relates to the world and what the person is like, and we have to review a few points on that to get started this morning. We will turn to that in just a moment.
There are twelve primary concepts that you go through in the two years that you are in the Renovaré Institute program. The ones that we are looking at this time are listed there. Three themes—learning how to hear God and we are going to spend the last day of our teaching here. That will be Thursday on that although we will mention it from time to time as we go along. Secondly, Christian spiritual Disciplines: Concept and History and then finally, Salvation as a Life. We have to rework the concept of salvation from what it is in most people’s minds in our culture, Christian and not, today. Today: What is Salvation?
Now all of these are directed at what I like to call the fine texture of the experience of the disciple. That is, we are looking at what actually happens and what are the experiences that we go through and that, I think, is what is most likely to be omitted when it comes to the day to day life of the Christian and perhaps even of a disciple because they simply are not provided with the teaching, the direction in experience and of course, it has to be experiential. That’s the key is you come down out of the theology that is just about God and about whatever comes under the heading of theology as it’s normally taught and now you are dealing with the theology of experience; Christian experience—the experience of the disciple.
So that’s what we are going to be working on and we are going to put a special emphasis on the fruit of the spirit—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, kindness; that’s the substance of the experience. That’s the framework from which we work and live. This is not a distant objective. That’s the way it’s often thought of—that we are trying to get there and maybe we will get there after we die. Instead, we have to understand the fruit of the spirit is the foundation of life in the kingdom of God. So, our session this afternoon is going to be explicitly on the fruit of the spirit, and we will present that as the foundation and framework of eternal living. Note the difference; we often talk of eternal life but usually that gets put off somewhere. So, it helps to say eternal living. Eternal living is something we are going to do now. We are not going to wait on that. Eternal living is living interactively with God, with the Trinity now. And the way that frames itself is in love, joy, peace and so forth. So, that gives you kind of an impression I think of what we are hoping for.
Renovaré Institute, to my mind, is to present an alternative system of education—an alternative system of education…alternative to what? Alternative to the one you are likely to get in our world and even in our churches in many cases. We are thinking of an alternative system of education that would produce an alternative type of person. The aim of Christ is to come into the world and to overwhelm this fallen sinful world—to overwhelm it with His presence. You have pictures of this in the scripture—like Daniel 2, where you have the image of the great idol that is set up and it has a head of gold and goes all the way down to the feet of clay and what happens is a stone cut out without hands in Daniel 2. You may want to look at that and think about that while you are here. A stone without hands; God knows how to do that. Human beings don’t know how to do that. A stone cut out without hands appears and crushes the image and fills the whole world. That’s the kingdom of God and the intent is God is going to bring into the world—He has brought into the world and now, there is a people and you and I are it. We are a part of that stone and God’s intent is to overwhelm evil with good in human history and we get to be a part of it. That’ s eternal living, see? So, the problem or the limitation that we experience as the people of God is not that we don’t have enough people, or we don’t have enough money. The problem is simply that we do not do what Jesus told us to do. Now, we have to work on that because we are apt to think of some little lists of things that we have received from our culture and not understand that Jesus, when He gives the words about making disciples submerging them in Trinitarian reality, teaching them to do everything. You see, He’s talking about the transformation of human character in society. That’s what He is talking about. [11:55] He’s talking about fulfilling the promise He made to his friend, Abraham that in you and in your seed, all of the families of the earth will be blessed. OK? And, how’s He going to do that? He’s going to do that through the transformation of human character. And with the transformation of human character will come an amazing power to accomplish what is good without killing people. The human way is always at some point; you hit ‘em—and you hit ‘em hard. And over and over again, the people who were identified explicitly with Christ wound up hitting them. But, Christ hits them with something else and that’s through us. Transformed lives capable of bearing incredible power without harming people; that’s Jesus. [13:13] And, of course, His whole life was designed to illustrate that. He preached the kingdom of God. He manifested the kingdom of God. He took the best shot of an evil world, which is always death. And He just got up on the other side and showed the kingdom of God beyond death. Now that’s what He invites us to be a part of. So, what we have to watch for is the transformation of character, and the problem is simply to find out how to walk into what Jesus said and experience the transformation that He gives us and watch the power flow from that. Now, often we get run over; that’s ok because we know about resurrection and actually, we are living there now. You are already dead; did you know that? That’s the picture. You are past death; now you are operating in a different realm. So, we don’t need a lot of heavy programs. We don’t need a lot of money. We just need to learn how to walk into the fullness of Christ living in the kingdom of God. [14:45]
Now, I just want to review a few concepts quickly. Most important is the kingdom of God itself. What is the kingdom of God? It’s God in action; it’s where God is doing things. I describe it here as the range of God’s effective will and I hope you have been able to pick up on that language and able to begin to be familiar with it in your own life—God in action. You enter the kingdom of God when you submit yourself to His presence and the only way I know how to do that well is to submit yourself to Jesus Christ and if someone has another way, well, I won’t try to talk them out of it but I will recommend that they trust Jesus Christ and that is how you enter into the kingdom of God. He said, “Seek first the kingdom of God,” Jesus said that, “and His righteousness and everything else you need will be given to you.”
You will not find a fringe benefit to equal that no matter what union you belong to. “Seek first the kingdom,” because the presupposition is when you seek it, you will find it and you will live in the range of God’s effective will. And then the gospel of Jesus is that life in the kingdom is available to us now. We can experience the kingdom and live in it by placing our confidence in Jesus for everything and by being His constant students precisely because we have confidence in Him. That’s the way it works. Confidence puts you in touch with the reality—the reality gives you more confidence. You grow. You become someone who is increasingly able to live your whole life in the kingdom of God. It is a whole life. One of the hardest things, I believe, to get over in the current context—it isn’t a religious activity. Now, hopefully, religious activities will be that; namely, eternal living but we have to grow out of the idea that this is a special little category and that we somehow do this little religious thing and usually that we do that on our own too. It’s just that it’s religious and then we go back to our life, which we are running too and we are trying maybe to add God on for a little help. You know, add a little God for your projects. That’s where we have to have a radical shift in our understanding.
That’s how we begin if you have your notebook open to the first page of the outlines. That’s where we begin to deal with living in the divine conversation and character because that isn’t something that you turn on and off like a faucet. [18:12] Well, like you might say, “Well, I’ll turn on the hot water” and you turn the faucet. This is not something you turn on and off; it’s whole life and spiritual disciplines have been historically a way of trying to come to terms with this; not for religious purposes but for life purposes. Spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us, though there have been many misunderstandings of them and there still are, designed to bring us into a place to where we routinely and easily turn to the kingdom—to the presence of God in our life wherever we are, whatever we are doing and we come to the place where that isn’t a little extra thing we add on; it’s just a part; it’s like breathing. You know, you don’t think, “Oh my, I ‘ve got to breathe.” Another job. It’s a part of your life. Right? Children often go through a period where they wonder how they keep breathing when they are asleep, and they can get worried about that. But, of course, soon they learn just to trust it and it will go. Now, that’s where we can come through the spiritual disciplines exercise in reliance upon Christ. And that way, we are living in the kingdom of God continuously. And that’s what makes spiritual disciplines practical. Making theology of the disciplines practical. We are actually talking about making the disciplines practical, but we need the theology, the understanding to help us do that. So, now you have to understand that as a person, you are part of a world that is unseen because that is the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is invisible. The spiritual world is invisible, but you are invisible too. Did you know that? This is what we’ve talked about last time as giving the total human system. See, Jesus says now, “What’s the one commandment that includes it all?” “Well, love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength and your neighbor as yourself. “ Love is not a visible phenomenon. God is not a visible phenomenon. You are not a visible phenomenon. OK?
So, now if you have to think in terms of living in two landscapes, two different landscapes…and now the watch word of Renovaré is of course, II Cor. 4:16-18 where Paul is talking about how his life has gone. He had a hard life. But he says, “Therefore we are not discouraged for while our outward person,”—now, that’s the visible one—“is decaying”—going downhill, “our inward person is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, works for us an exceeding greater weight of glory while we look not at the things that are seen but at the things that are unseen.” [23:37]
Now, see, you are naturally in the unseen environment. You are a spiritual being with a body. That’s one of the ways you differ from angels. You do differ from angels and that’s a good thing because God has a different plan for you and me than He has for angels and that is one reason why He inserts us in the visible world through our bodies. You get born into the world through your body. That gives you a place and then you start to develop your kingdom or your queendom as you learn what to do with all of these parts and the curse of humanity is that it turns to the body apart from the spirit and that’s where you get in Paul over and over the opposition between the mind and the flesh and the mind and the spirit. That’s the mind of the visible and the mind of the invisible. God, of course, is spirit; His kingdom is spiritual. He invites us to bring our kingdom into His kingdom and that’s how it’s meant to work and if we don’t do that, we are in serious trouble. And that is why Paul says, in Romans 8, “the mind of the flesh, the mind that is focused on the visible is death” because everything visible is going to cease. But the mind of the spirit is life and peace so now, that’s where we stand, and the teaching of the scripture over and over returns to this. You remember some of the big stories of 2 Kings 6 where Elisha and his butler or something of that sort are surrounded by the armies of Syria and the butler is worried and he comes back into the house and says, “Oh, my, Elisha, we are surrounded,” and you remember how the story develops. Elisha asks God to open his eyes so that he could see the invisible—see the invisible and remember the famous word that “they that are for us are more than they that be against us” and the Lord opened the butler or the assistant’s eyes, and he saw that the landscape was full of horses and chariots of fire. Now, fire is an emblem of energy and power as well as glory and that’s what you don’t see unless you really want to see it and have a little help from God. But that’s what you can see, and you can come to see the kingdom probably not in terms of horses and chariots today. It might be automobiles or trains or 747’s or something of that sort but in that day, horses and chariots were sort of the front line. It wouldn’t be so today, so you learn to see things in the kingdom of God. [26:28]
So, you have the two landscapes now and we are a part of it and the process of spiritual transformation is the process of reclaiming all of these elements of you and me for the kingdom of God. So, that’s what spiritual disciplines and that’s what the action of God, because spiritual disciplines are only a part of the story of redemption, and we will deal with that at greater lengths shortly.
So, now your first point there in your outline is how can we become like Christ? And the answer is by doing one thing. That is, by following Him into the overall style of life He chose for himself, and you look at Jesus and you need to think about the things that He did when He was not doing something remarkable. How did He live His life? He lived His life by choosing a path of activities that would keep Him constantly in the presence and action of His Father. That’s what He did. That was a major part of what He learned in His time here on earth of identifying with us. So, it is as I say in The Spirit of the Disciplines; it’s the “off the spot” activities that really matter. “Off the spot.” You see, that again is where we have to shrift our thinking away from the idea that what really matters is what we do when we are performing. It isn’t the performance that matters. The performance flows naturally from who we have become in our identification with Christ and following him into His overall pattern of life. That included, as you know from your studies, extensive times of solitude and silence and prayer; service—obviously, He was a marvelous student of the word of God, and you have to think about how He got that way. Did He come with it already pumped into Him? You see, many people think that He was just quick with all that because after all He was the Son of God. They don’t seem to take in the fact that He grew up in what was a relatively normal family. How normal it could have been with Him around is of course a problem, but He seems to have just grown up normally with His family and gone through the rituals of the synagogue and the temple and all those things. The synagogue was a place of study and learning and where young men especially learned the scripture and learned to watch how it was interpreted and handled and of course, He was quite good at this. So much so, that when He was twelve, as you remember, He made an impression on the professors down in Jerusalem by asking and answering questions but then He went back home, and He was a son who was responsible in His family, grew up and increased in grace and strength and wisdom and so on and became an ordinary working man. We say “working stiff” now but probably He wasn’t a stiff. He was learning how to do all the things that He taught when he went into his public ministry. That’s what He was doing. Now, we become like Him by following Him into his practices.
There is a wonderful verse in John 6—I think it’s 6:29 or maybe—I’d better look it up where He has performed a miracle of feeding a bunch of people and they like that. They thought that was great and so they came for some more food and Jesus is telling them to don’t labor for the visible food but for the food that brings you eternal life. [31:15] So, they asked Him, “Well what should we do to do the works of God and He replies. It’s a stunning statement and we must work our way into it. Jesus answered and said, “This is the work of God that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” That’s verse 6:29. Today, we have to go back to that because belief today is normally understood not as belief but as profession. The difference between belief and profession is when you believe something; you are set to act as if it were true. That’s belief. But we have had to adjust our understanding of belief and faith to the point where we can allow people who only profess to believe but don’t do what they profess to believe can be believers. And that’s a major part of the difference between a Christian and a disciple because a Christian now is understood as someone who professes certain things. They don’t necessarily do what they profess. That’s almost a cultural form. We assume that and then we have people called pastors and their job is to get people to do things they don’t want to do. And really don’t want to do them because they don’t have the beliefs that go with them. Right? See, if you are riding with someone in an automobile, you don’t have to try to get them to do the things that they need to do to drive the car. You know, it’s unusual at least if that’s so because they have beliefs that motivate them to put on the brake, turn the wheel, and so on, so they don’t have to have someone trying to get them to do the things because their beliefs have settled into their bodies, and they just do them. Belief is like that. So, when Jesus says believe in Him who God has sent and that will be the work of God, what He is saying is, “Trust Jesus.” And, that means, that you will do the things that He did and say the things that He said as well, of course. [34:11] You trust Him. Now, we become like Christ by doing one thing and that is by taking ourselves into the pattern of life that He shows us. You know, it’s not so much that that’s new. You go back to Proverbs 3:5, I think it is, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart.” You have probably all memorized that. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart.” Don’t trust your own understanding and actually that’s just another expression of that distinction between the flesh and the spirit. In all your ways, acknowledge Him and He will smooth your paths, direct your paths. But the problem is how do you do that? Now, when Jesus comes, He doesn’t bring the kingdom of God into reality. It’s been here ever since God’s been here. What Jesus did was to open the kingdom of God to everyone…no matter what description it was, and the door was Jesus. So, how did He open the kingdom of God when He said, “Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand.” He’s saying, “It’s available to you” and it was available to everyone through Him. And that’s why people were just beating down the door to get in is because they saw the kingdom of God in Jesus and He changed the whole significance of how you approach the kingdom of God. We come to Jesus, and we trust Him. That means we are ready to act as if He were “it” and because of that, we step into His practices. The key is not just listening to what He said and trying to do that. That will kill you. And it has killed generation after generation of people who do something like, they hear a command that He gave, or they read the Sermon on the Mount and then they try to reduce that to laws which they then try to do and try to impose on others and it just spreads death right and left. You can’t do these things. You have to become the kind of person who would do them. See? So, you are not a person that is full of anger and wrath, children of wrath, as we were called and now someone comes along and curses you and you say, “Well, I’ve got to bless them because Jesus said I had to bless them. But there is no blessing in me. And if there isn’t blessing in me, then I can’t bless them. At most, I’ll just grit my teeth and perform some little ritual and call that blessing.” So, now it is very important to understand this. We are talking about the practicalities of living out the life. It’s extremely important to understand. You don’t try to do the things that Jesus said. You try to become the kind of person that Jesus was. And how do you do that? In general, by following Him into His practices and His practices of living with God in God’s kingdom. That’s what Jesus did. There were some dramatic moments in that. For example, clearly, His baptism was an occasion where there was a progression because you know it has that language that shows up in various places in the scriptures. The heavens opened. What does that mean? When the heavens opened, what is there all along becomes visible. In some measure, see it happened on the day of Pentecost. Remember what happened? A sound from Heaven and something came sensibly present—something like flames sat upon people. See, that again, you know its fire. Thank goodness this didn’t singe their hair. It was a different kind of fire. Fire stands for the energy of God, for the presence of God and of course, we can’t comprehend the energy of God. See, that’s where the glory becomes such a big thing in the teaching of the Bible. Glory. The first letters in glory spelled glow….glow. Now, that’s fire: that’s when Paul says, “My God, shall supply all of your needs by his riches in Glory.” It will help you a lot to just study Glory sometimes and watch how Paul in Ephesians, for example talks about the praise of his glory to the praise of his glory. See, that represents the intrusion of the other world. Now, spiritual disciplines are a doorway that is made available to human beings for the intrusion of the other world in forms that we can stand it. We are very limited. We are finite. God has for each of us, but we have to grow into it slowly and He has arranged for many ways of doing this.
Prayer, for example is, among other things, is a tremendous discipline. It enables us to do things that we can’t do on our own. One description of prayer that I like is God’s power sharing arrangement for a world of recovering sinners. Try that on. Think about it. Prayer is God’s power-sharing arrangement for a world of recovering sinners. If most of us had great power like is laid out in the scriptures, we probably couldn’t manage it very well. We have to grow to the point we can. You remember that John says of Jesus that the Father gives the Spirit to Him without limitation. For me, He more or less has to administer it with an eye drop or something, just a little bit. How much can He take? How much can Willard stand? But that’s the way of growing into more. And then we have other disciplines we will be talking about those as we go along in the second hour this morning. [43:32]
More about the disciplines and what they are. But the spiritual disciplines are avenues that we can access the reality of God’s glory, His kingdom in our lives and that is how we put off the old man and put on the new one. Now, see what’s going to happen here in terms of this diagram is we are going to be renewed in all of the dimensions of personality that Dr. Jesus laid out in Mark 12 where He says, “Love God with all your heart, all your mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.” What’s in my body? What is in my body is unfortunately a readiness to do a lot of things I shouldn’t do. How do I get those out? That’s a part of the process of putting off the old and putting on the new. And the answer to that is I will use my body to put myself in a position to receive from the kingdom of God and Jesus, my Savior and teacher in the kingdom of God. One example and we will talk more about it later is silence. Now, in silence you give God an opportunity to do what you usually try to manage with your tongue and that turns out to be a radical shift because we are so used to managing our world with our words. That’s why, as James says in a really humiliating way that the tongue is a world of iniquity. He actually says that the tongue is set on fire of hell. Now why did he say that? Because he observed the role that speaking plays in human evil. And he observed how many times people start a war or get in trouble just because they can’t shut up. That’s a deep teaching and that’s why James goes on and says that anyone who can control their tongue is perfect. Someone says that the tongue is the bodily instrument that is perhaps closet to the heart so what is in the heart gets out of the mouth as Jesus, you remember, he spoke of that also. Paul, on the positive side, “let your words be full of grace, blessing.” See, that’s putting off the old and putting on the new. And that is something we learn through the spiritual disciplines. That’s in part, our body. Because unfortunately, our tongue is ready to do stuff that our mind doesn’t even want it to do. And perhaps our spirit is set against an..blahblahblah……there it is. And this is illustrated over and over, and the process of transformation is one where we employ the disciplines of the spirit in order to change what is in this diagram. The mind is probably the central thing that we work on because if we are going to do much with our whole life here, we transform the mind. When Paul says, “Don’t be conformed to the world but be transformed by going to church.” [Laughter] Well, you know, that should help if what happens when you go to church is the renewing of your mind. All right? Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind and actually, that’s what church is supposed to be about. And that would be a discipline. It would help with our mind. Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind and that goes along with submitting your body as a living sacrifice because all of the spiritual disciplines are bodily behaviors and that’s because of how this is set up now. You can direct your body to do things that will lead to the renewal of your mind. That’s why scripture memorization of passages is a primary way of renewing your mind. It will do it. But you are going to have to situate your body probably to memorize, and that’s one reason—one of the few reasons I like long airplane trips (14 hours or so) because you can take a passage of scripture and you can just live there. No one will bother you except maybe now and then a stewardess or steward will want to give you something.
How are the spiritual disciplines important for transformation? Putting off the old person and putting on the new because they enable us to open our lives to the Kingdom and the power and glory of the Kingdom comes through to us in ways that we can learn from and grow from. And that works on this system. So, now, in order to go on through our time together, we need to have those two ideas—the Kingdom of God and the system of the human being. Now, we want this to come to the place to where we would just routinely and easily do the things that Jesus says because we have become different kinds of people—routine, easy obedience. [50:08]
When we are confronted with a temptation, we have enough presence of mind—we don’t have our body running away; our mind running away; our feelings running away because when most people are confronted with temptation of sufficient strength, they simply have no place to stand to look at what they are being tempted to do and say, “Why would anyone want to do that?” That’s where transformation has been preceding. Temptation is of course not sin. It lives right next door to it and that’s why you don’t want to go there. You want to be standing in a position where when what might be a temptation to you does not look interesting because now you are living in the Kingdom of God, and this can have many forms. It isn’t just the colorful kind; for example, when trouble comes and you tend to be depressed and discouraged; well, is there a way of living where we don’t go to that place of depression and discouragement and begin to exude gloom all around us and yes, there is a place to go and we are going to be looking at the fruit of the spirit and that’s the place you go. You live there. You live love, joy, peace and so forth. [51:49]
Now, you have in your outline there a third point. It may look a little funny and we don’t want to pick on Calvin and actually, if you would and if you have the Golden Booklet with you, if you would bring that with you to the next session. I want to talk about explicitly Calvin’s teaching about the spiritual life. But we live in a context where some parts that have been associated with Calvin and his theology have discouraged people from engaging in spiritual disciplines. And there are various reasons or causes for that as it has come about. One is—concern for the sovereignty of God; one of the emphases in Calvin’s theology is a great weight on the sovereignty of God and the idea that this mutates into is that God has to do everything. Right? This has some really troublesome parts to it—why in one direction would lead one to say that God causes everything bad to happen. I don’t want to try to deal with that now but the other side of it is He causes everything good to happen and if you are going to grow in grace, it must be that God makes it happen—that you are passive and if you got active that would drive God away. You would just have works and so, we have many people today that when they hear about spiritual disciplines, what comes up in them is the idea that this is works, not grace. That exercises a really destructive influence on any effort you might make for spiritual growth. So, now you are caught. You have someone standing there staying, “put off the old person and put on the new.” Sounds like something you are supposed to do or grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Sounds like something you are supposed to do but can you just do nothing? And it happens? Well, that is where, some people who are pretty deeply involved with what has come to be identified with Calvinism gets stuck. So, what can we say that might be helpful to them? Well, the first thing we want to say to them is that grace is not opposed to effort. In fact, you’ve hardly seen anyone move and work like someone who has been caught on fire with grace. Paul, for example, in 1 Corinthians 15 is—Paul had an inferiority complex—a spiritual inferiority complex, and he had people grinding it in on him. You aren’t an apostle. You never saw the Lord. You weren’t one of the twelve. And he felt this strongly and he felt it to be a threat to his ministry so in 1 Cor. 15, he is talking about that, and he is talking about how that the Lord appeared to him last as one born out of due season. You remember that, right? And then he goes on and says, “yet I labored more abundantly than all of them.” Now, he caught himself. And he says, “yet not I”—“yet not I”; now see that’s the key to understanding the issues of grace and works. You work but what comes out of it is “yet not I.” When you engage in the spiritual disciplines to transform the scene of the self that is always an opportunity for grace to come into your life. Now, what messes up the picture here is the history of the disciplines because they went through a long period when they were confused with merit, and there was a period of time in the Christian church as it existed then when it was even thought that your sufferings in your disciplines and in your life could add to the merits of Christ which the church had on tap, and in the sacraments they administered the spirit, the grace to the person whatever the occasion was from confession and the mass and extreme unction and they would provide the grace that they had on tap and your sufferings added to that. That’s one reason why the disciplines also became associated with suffering;–that if you are not suffering, you are not having disciplines. In the next hour, we have to come back and talk about asceticism a bit because that’s a part of the story that has made it difficult for people in our time, especially reformation and post-reformation people, to think biblically about disciplines. Right?
Disciplines are occasions of grace or to use a phrase that often is used…means of grace—a means of grace. Now again, you have to keep out of that “means” stuff “merit.” Grace is not opposed to action; it is opposed to attitude—earning. Effort is fine. Effort and grace go together; that’s why Paul could talk the way he did about how the grace of God had come to him and given him a ministry to the Gentiles and how he could say, “I labored more abundantly than they all.” That’s such an interesting little perception into Paul’s mind—that he would say that and then he would, “Oops, I didn’t do it. The grace of God is what did it.” And if I can convey to you that meaning in that verse, I think it will help you with this point that troubles so many people. See, the occasion for grace—now, I need to say something that I hope will help you with what grace is and you may have picked it up from your readings, but grace is God acting in our lives to accomplish what we can’t accomplish on our own. Grace is God acting in our lives to accomplish what we cannot accomplish on our own. [1:01:30]
Now, once you understand that, then you see that’s not inconsistent with acting. In fact, God calls us to act with expectation that He will act with us. And that’s how we grow in grace. I mean how would you grow in grace? Well, you would grow in grace by increasing the activity of God with you. Now, I don’t want to rush on over these things that are so important. See, that’s how you grow in grace. How do you do that is the next question? Well, you do that by a progressive modification of your mind and your spirit so that you are more and your body and your social context and your very soul so that you are increasingly expectant of God acting with you to do what you cannot accomplish on your own. [1:02:48]
That’s going to be a process of character transformation because God in His mercy is going to call you into growth so that whenever you are tempted to say, “I labored more abundantly than they all,” you will catch yourself, and of course that transforms your whole life. So, humility and peace and all of these things come with that kind of growth. There is a really important understanding here about—you know, as you grow, you undertake more and more. You undertake more for God, right? And God usually, I believe, will respond by preparing you for more power—your character and power go together. We see constantly what happens in cases where people have had more power than they have character and God gives power to people often because they are needed to bless other people and you look at someone like Samson, for example and obviously you think well, how did that happen? Well, God needed Samson to serve his people, but Samson did not have the character to stand up under the weight of the service. He was not a humble man. He was a man eaten up by his own desires and finally, of course, that defeated him, and we need to acknowledge to the person who is bothered along Calvinist lines, we need to understand that growth in character is what is at issue for us. [1:05:18]
We give you some of these mind-blowing promises of Jesus about prayer. John 14 is loaded with these promises; “If you ask anything in my name, I will do it.” Now, obviously, the weight there is on being able to ask in His name and that is not learning to say Jesus, in a high pitched as distinct from a low pitch voice or say it over and over…that’s the kind of superstition that Jesus taught against in prayer. You don’t—it isn’t a matter of getting your mouth right. It’s a matter of becoming a kind of person who when they ask, they are able to ask entirely for what is good for God and that means that we have to enter into a special kind of relationship. You remember that Paul says in Romans 8, “We do not know how to pray as we ought.” Now, you all have to take all the teaching about prayer and put them together. But the spirit helps our infirmities so if you are going to pray in the name of Jesus, that’s going to be a joint action between you and the Spirit of God. So, learning how to live there is going to be a part—you know, I don’t know—I have never met anyone who, like Jesus, could just get anything he asked for. And you hear a lot of troubling teaching about prayer, frankly. Because it does emphasis somehow that if you just say the words right and all of that, that you can get it or if you have enough faith…whatever that is, you get what you asked for. Now, I ‘ve never know anyone who is even close to being able to just get anything they asked for and I’ve seen a lot of people who had been forced into a kind of falsity in their prayer life because they were trying to do that and I for one, can personally say, I thank God that He doesn’t give me everything I ask for.
So, when we come on these marvelous statements about prayer, we are talking about a kind of life interactive with God in which grace flows and we grow, and I can say that I have increasingly seen the response of God in prayer over my lifetime and various stages I have gone through where I can kind of get an idea of what that’s about. You know? And so, I would say, we could and should come to the place to where there was nothing, we were afraid to take on in prayer but that we would do this in our interactive relationship with the Spirit of God that guides us. We get the sense of, “well, maybe I won’t pray for this, or I will pray for that or how I would pray for that.” And that is a major part of what goes into teaching about the life of discipline in the Kingdom of God where we are interactive. We are living in the presence of God, and we are able then to become like Christ by following Him into his activities. You understand that as a progressive life of growth and you see it increasing in you as you go along. And you become a different person because you are confident of Christ being with you as you live in all aspects of your life.