Practicing Faith: Conclusion

Hey everybody,
welcome back to the pastor talk podcast where we are really going to bring some hopefully conclusion to the last series that we’ve been sharing together are talking about practicing the faith,
you know, we’re really hoping that some of those common threads
that we’ve now seen woven throughout our conversations will be able to pick out will be able to evaluate and hopefully be able to see some of the things that have been building together in the course of this conversation.
Of course, if you have not yet listened to some of the preceding conversations,
you would do well to pause right here to go back to play some of those and hear some of the ground that we’ve walked and we’re glad that you have once again chose to spend some time with us today.
Yeah, today as we try to move this toward a conclusion,
we don’t really introduce anything new.
I think instead we kind of revisit some of those conversations and look for the themes that run throughout all of those things.
As we’ve talked about various kind of tools by which to practice a quote unquote spiritual life and the ways in which our tradition has helped us with ideas and practices that lead to that.
Lead us toward a growing awareness,
a sensitivity of God’s presence and God’s intention.
And Michael, I think as we bring those to a close in some ways,
we end up reinforcing some of the themes we started with in the introduction,
specifically that spirituality is not a giftedness that just falls on some people.
There aren’t Christians who are simply born spiritual or who,
by virtue of their tradition or their conversion experience or whatever,
that’s not a switch.
It’s a dial.
And all of us have opportunities in our daily,
our real day-to-day life to turn the needle a little bit,
to move the needle on our spiritual life and to continually live into a deeper form of discipleship in life.
There are lots of ways and in lots of areas,
whether that be forgiveness or prayer or study or journaling or joyfulness or being active.
There are so many ways that can enrich our faith life.
And I think what’s important in the midst of all of these conversations is that we don’t think of spirituality as some kind of magic ring that we either have or don’t,
that it really is something
that we can learn,
that we can make progress in,
we can grow in,
and that we can enact in our day-to-day life.
It is not the reserved rare air of monks and spiritual pilgrims that where we live and how we live,
there’s room for growth for all of us.
Yeah, when we began this series,
we talked about some of the stereotypes of spirituality.
And that’s a really even kind of tough word to make the overarching word of this series because it does conjure these ideas that we have picked up at different stages of our lives.
I think especially as young people,
if you have someone who was in your life who you would today call spiritual,
we tend to let those people become the touchstone of what the spiritual life is,
much like that’s true for our father or mother and what they represent of what the ideal person should be and these sorts of things.
But when we apply those stereotypes,
not only those that we’ve seen,
but those that we’ve collected in media or in certain devotional materials that we’ve read,
all those kinds of things,
the temptation becomes then that we create for ourselves a spiritual measuring stick,
an idea that I would measure up as a spiritual person if I did fill in the blank.
And I’m not here so much talking about that feeling that we hear people talk about all the time.
I wish I read the Bible more.
I wish I prayed more.
We all know the tools of discipleship.
We all know those practices that would help us along the way.
But I do think there is often this idea that we bring to those tools of the only way I could do it would be in my closet at 6.25 a.m.
every day with a devotional from G.K.
Chesterton or whatever it is for you.
I would encourage you to sort of survey the ground that we’ve traveled and maybe this is the right vantage to look back on it and ask the question,
how might I be able to move into a different understanding of spirituality?
How could I begin to claim for myself a new place in my own spiritual walk and discipleship that I hadn’t even considered legitimate or I hadn’t even considered to be part of the goal yet alone to exist.
And so I just think this is a great moment to stop and reflect not on can I do all of these things.
We’ve said numerous times that’s impossible.
The goal isn’t to become some spiritual grand master who can do all of it.
That person doesn’t exist.
It’s rather to identify where is God in your life right now and how can I participate in what God is doing and how might that shape me into a person who’s God minded,
which is really what we mean by this word spiritual.
Yeah, I think one of the struggles that particularly Americans may have is we tend to either want to be the very best or not do it at all and we struggle with the idea of grinding it out.
When I was a child,
I signed up, you know, I love the idea of playing the piano.
And so my mom,
we had a family friend who taught piano lessons and I went and took,
I don’t know, I think it was ended up being two or three piano lessons.
And then I quickly realized that I couldn’t have put it in these words at the time,
but I didn’t want to learn to play the piano.
I wanted to play the piano.
I didn’t want to spend years training my hands what to do and learning how to read music.
I didn’t want to go through that process.
I wanted to jump over all that and land at playing the piano.
And I think sometimes that’s a struggle we bring to our expectation of lots of things and spiritual life is no different.
I want to be, you know,
uber Christian.
Well, you’re not going to be.
You’re going to struggle with how do I forgive people who hurt me?
You’re going to struggle with I did pretty good.
I kept a journal for six days and then I got lazy and I didn’t do it for another two weeks.
And then I tried again that those starts and stops are the uphill journey of progress.
And we call these things spiritual practices because that’s what it takes.
It takes practice.
It takes work.
And I think sometimes, Michael,
we sort of infer that because it’s a faith thing,
it shouldn’t be an effort.
And the truth is that anything we want to get better at in our life,
spiritual life included,
we have to put some effort into.
We have to put some time.
It is not.
You may try to forgive the person who’s wronged you multiple times before you finally feel yourself letting go of that weight and living past that.
You may struggle with doubts and with anxiety for a long time before you finally come to a point where you’re able to quiet those voices.
You may wrestle with a regular prayer life or we all do.
And that’s part of the process.
And it is in the process that we’re sharpened,
that we’re shaped, that we gain those skills that ultimately we need.
But we never start there.
And I think that’s hard for people.
And I think that too often in the church,
we think that we follow Jesus and then that’s just a flat line.
That it’s just on or off, yes or no.
And it’s not a helpful framework.
It’s not a helpful framework.
And the temptation that’s present in this idea of practicing faith is the temptation of appearances,
is what other people see.
And I think it’s a very,
very tempting thing for lots of people for practicing faith to really be a demonstration to others of something that we wish was true for ourselves.
We want our spirituality to appear effortless,
to appear like it’s just so naturally part of who we are that it’s unquestionably true.
But the truth is,
if we’re honest, if we’re willing to dig to the substrata of our hearts,
we recognize that anything worth doing requires actual dedication and intentionality and work.
And that language of practicing is unbelievably helpful here.
When you go see someone who’s amazingly gifted at whatever they’re able to do, it appears effortless.
It appears to be part of who they are,
whether they’re a figure skater or a musician or an athlete.
It appears that they can do it without any thought at all.
And that has only been possible for them to whatever extent they can do it because of the work that they have put into it.
And quite frankly, it has nothing to do with the appearances.
If you counted all the time behind closed doors that they practiced whatever that thing was,
the amount of work that went into it is an infinitesimal amount that that work has actually seen.
And I think that’s a helpful image,
that idea of like the iceberg where there’s so much more under the waterline than there is above it.
Clint, that really what is required is for us to wake up with intention daily that we act upon,
that we will indeed practice faith.
And if you need help sort of conceiving of this,
I would encourage you pick up the collection of Mother Teresa’s journals,
very famously published, in which she didn’t anticipate having them published.
And yet we find after she lived,
the person who looked like she lived with with such deep faith so effortlessly in the quiet of her own spiritual moments felt greatly troubled and felt like she should have more faith than what she felt she had.
If someone like her can reach down into her heart and to find the struggle and the grief and the challenge of faith,
surely we’re all going to find it.
And I think what we seek to sort of find in this conversation is not hopes.
It’s not things that we put on the dream counter of our lives.
It’s true goals, the things that we say I’m willing to practice discipleship and for me it’s going to look like this thing or that thing or this tool or this practice.
It’s not waking up one day and just hoping that you’ll be able to forgive.
It’s far more intentional about I want to forgive,
I want to learn about forgiving,
I want to pray for forgiveness.
It’s all of those things being brought to bear with intentionality.
I think the journey of spiritual growth will ultimately take us to wonderful places,
but I think the struggle is it will always lead us there through difficult places.
And no journey,
Mother Teresa,
C.S.
Lewis,
the people,
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, others, the people we look to historically as giants in the faith,
what they have in common was that they all walked hard ground to get where they ended up.
And the same will be true for us.
And so one of the things I think is important is that we can’t start, you know,
another temptation we have in our sort of busy fractured cultural existence is to try and do everything at once.
And I think far better is to make a real effort in a small area than to have essentially no chance of doing everything at the same time.
And so whether that’s journaling,
whether that’s as simple as saying,
you know, I’m going to sit to begin with one minute in silence for a week,
and then I’m going to do two minutes.
And I’m going to work up to 10 minutes at some point.
And whether that’s prayer,
whether that’s I’m going to read it,
don’t say I’m going to read the Bible in a week.
Say, you know what, I’m going to read five verses of scripture every day,
if that’s what it takes,
because it’s far more important that we do something we’ll stick with.
The miraculous thing about our discipleship is that when we show up,
God shows up with us.
And so if you bring your best attention to one verse a day of scripture,
you will amazingly find that God meets you in that one verse.
If you give God two minutes of silence a day,
God will honor that and join you in those two minutes.
And I think rather than think we need to,
you know, eat the elephant all at once,
very, very much better for us,
I think, is to say,
I’m going to pick one area,
one thing,
and I’m going to work my way into it.
And I’m not going to jump in and say,
I’m starting with a marathon.
I’m going to jog 10 feet.
I’m going to run a block.
But I’m going to keep doing it.
And I’m going to do it over and over again.
I’m going to make a little bit of progress at a time.
And I think in the long term,
we can be amazed at the results because this is a lifelong effort.
If we are graced with 99 years on this earth,
the beauty of the Christian faith is that at year 99,
we still have a lot of growing to do.
We still have a lot of opportunities to deepen our faith and our service.
And we can never outgrow our relationship with God.
And so, you know, I think it’s important that we start intentionally,
we start small,
and that we work toward incorporating these practices into our real life.
Not the idea that we’re going to become someone else,
but the idea that we’re going to let more and more of God’s grace direct more and more of our individual lives.
And so much of this is wrapped up in intentionality.
It is so difficult living in the kind of fractured world that we do live in, the schedules,
the commitments,
the desire to do good things.
All of these competing interests do tempt us to not consider the underlying intentionality,
to just pass by,
to just try to do the thing.
But you can’t do that with spirituality.
You have to be willing to slow down and to ask yourself some of those really challenging questions.
Why is it that I’m pursuing this?
What you often find as you do commit to a spiritual practice is you can relate to the story that you shared earlier in the conversation,
Clint. What you really want is to have mountain top experiences with God every time you set time aside.
But you don’t want the long process of planning and traveling and climbing that mountain climbing actually requires.
We want to be master piano players.
We don’t want to practice the piano.
But the truth is,
if your intention is a vibrant relationship with a living God,
then step by step,
we must invite God to open our eyes to see the way that God’s working.
And I think so often we think that spirituality,
a practicing faith, looks like us doing a certain thing as opposed to slowing down and seeing what God desires to work within us.
And we do.
Maybe it’s an American thing.
Maybe it’s just a Western culture thing.
We do believe in this agency that we need to push the ball forward.
And what we discover is God’s just kind of waiting for us to drop the ball and to open our hands and to allow God to work within us.
And if we’re willing to take that really risky step of faith of saying, God,
instead of me setting the agenda on what this is going to be,
I invite you to set the agenda.
We suddenly discover that things that were before just going out for a walk suddenly becomes a prayer or hosting people,
being practicing hospitality, becomes a spiritual practice of giving to others.
We find in these strange,
strange places that God is able to work in amazing ways that we could have never imagined if we had but slowed down and open ourselves to His presence.
I think that ultimately when we use a word like spirituality,
it can be intimidating.
And, you know,
realistically, Michael, as we said way back on session one of this podcast,
what we mean by that term,
what spiritually means is simply aware of God.
If we start with the assumption that God is at work in our lives,
in our world, that God is moving around us at each moment,
working toward His purposes,
then spirituality becomes really nothing more than trying to be aware of what God is doing and what those purposes are.
And the practices we’ve talked about are simply tools to try and help us investigate that.
And, you know, the reality of our culture,
and I’m not beating up American culture,
this would be true of any culture you lived in,
is that no culture is synonymous with what God is doing.
We can’t talk about the American culture as godly or Christian or this culture as Christian or that culture.
And what we have to keep in mind is that in an insane world,
the sane person looks crazy.
So saying no to things because we’re too busy by the American standard looks nuts.
Denying opportunities to push ourselves forward and to get likes and notifications and notoriety looks crazy.
But from the spiritual perspective,
those things as often as not are in our way.
They’re barriers to our growth.
And so what spirituality simply means is how can I be aware of God in my surroundings?
How can I be in some way able to try and discern what God is doing?
And then how can I join in?
How can I move past the barriers that keep me from being that person and instead move in a direction that is in keeping with what God wants for my life?
And really, that’s the simple goal of following Jesus.
How can I incorporate my faith into my life more effectively?
And I think, you know, the various things we’ve talked about,
the various historic and modern practices are tools that enable us to do that.
And you’ll never use all the tools at once.
There probably won’t be a job that demands every tool all the time.
But in forgiveness, for instance, there’s going to be moments where you’re going to need to be quiet and reflect.
You’re going to need to process why I forgive.
What does it mean to forgive?
It’s going to demand of us different things at different times.
And as we do that,
I think we become better able to see God around us in real ways.
There are so many ways in which we can get off track with the idea of spirituality.
And as you describe it,
Clint, I think many of us feel like that’s such a simple and life-giving definition of what it means to be a spiritual person.
It just seems so freeing.
Oh,
I just need to open myself to God’s work.
I need to respond to an invitation to see more than what I see.
That seems inviting.
It seems full of joy and hope.
And yet we need to recognize that for so many people,
that is not the image that spirituality conjures.
I think for a lot of people,
it conjures the image of fear and of guilt and of the lack of a personal well-being that I am not doing what I should be doing.
I think there’s very much this sense that we walk through life with some belief that if we could be more spiritual people,
we would be better Christians.
God would love us more.
We would be able to participate in our church in a more honest way.
I think a lot of people feel like they are an imposter and that they’re walking in the church and they’re walking with other men and women of faith in an inauthentic way.
And I think what you need to hear for anyone who that resonates with is that proper spirituality is one that is firmly rooted in the grace and love of Jesus Christ.
We had to start there when we talked about that very topic of forgiveness,
is that it’s all rooted in what Jesus has already done for us.
And the guilt that we carry around is a cross that needs put down.
It’s a burden that we need to give up.
At some point, we must discover the God who seeks to invite us into a light and freer form of life.
And that’s what the spirituality that we’ve sought to explore looks like.
And if you live on the side of the fence that that seems like a promised land,
that that’s a far, far distance away.
I think then we need to turn to these tools and we need to ask ourselves which one of these tools is the first right tool to begin to let go of some of these things that I’ve held on to.
To begin to reframe,
maybe even the right word is to relearn what it means to be a person of faith.
Because whenever our faith drives us into guilt,
Clint,
I’m beginning to worry that we’re moving away from the core source of our faith, Jesus Christ.
Yeah, I think it’s important that we understand,
Michael, that to be spiritual is not to be perfect.
It’s to be in relation to the one who is.
And, you know,
we are not called to the idea that we need to earn God’s pleasure by perfection.
That, I think, is its own kind of idolatry because that’s really more about us than it is about God.
You know,
I think parents will resonate with this.
When my children fall short,
I don’t love them less.
I may be disappointed.
I may be upset.
I may have feelings about them that differ from when they get it right and when they don’t,
but I don’t love them less.
And that’s the promise and the freedom that we’re given as we seek,
you know, to live out this idea of spiritual.
You know, some of the most spiritual people out there are not disembodied.
They’re earthy.
They’re real.
And it’s my contention that part of the struggle of Christianity is that the world doesn’t see enough real Christians.
We have this idea that Christians are called to be something other than real people following Jesus,
and that we have to become something else in order to be faithful.
And I think that it hurts our witness at times.
I think the real person who is able to share their struggles as they work on themselves
and as they seek to let more and more grace in and through their life is a powerful testimony to the work of God
and the way that God works in real people.
And to me,
if more of us could do that more consistently,
I think the church would be benefited by it.
You know,
it’s interesting that you say that, Clint,
because we might be surprised to learn that the early church,
thousands of years ago,
struggled with the idea that Jesus would be fully human,
that he would be earthy.
There was just knockdown debates and arguments because people could not get their mind around.
God, the Creator,
would put on this dusty,
dirty,
ugly,
stinky flesh.
It just didn’t make sense.
And I think that is a thing that many of us can relate to,
that we know ourselves well enough to know that we don’t like this dirty, earthy flesh.
We don’t like the fact that temptations come,
and we give into them.
We don’t like that relational moment is one in which we lash out in anger instead of grace.
We don’t like that we can’t forgive,
but we don’t feel like there’s any other option.
I think so much of our experience is trying to get away from what’s happening and not fall into it.
And that is one of the just unbelievably,
unimaginably life-changing promises of the Gospel,
is that if you for a moment will trust God and trust and believe that to be spiritual is to be who you were created to be,
that there is truly a God waiting for you if you are willing to give up for a moment putting on appearances.
What you’ll discover is the you that is there is a you that’s already loved,
is a you that’s beyond what you could possibly achieve on your own.
But you have to be willing to fall into that.
You have to be willing to give up some of the agency and claim and striving and yearning,
the letting go of the flesh that we often so naturally turn to.
We think that spiritual is being out and and airy and always attuned to things outside of us when actually God lives within us by the power of the Spirit.
And to become spiritual means to recognize a part of ourselves that most of us build walls to avoid.
Yeah. By the time that people listen to this,
Michael, we will have past Thanksgiving and we will be turning the corner toward Christmas.
And members of the congregation have probably heard this before.
But several years ago,
I reflected in a sermon on the Nativity set.
And, you know, the idea that you have this this pudgy chubby cheeked baby that looks perfectly happy laying in straw.
You’ve got a mom and dad who are just thrilled that shepherds and animals have shown up.
And, you know, and then these wise men come by and they say,
oh, by the way, we mentioned to Herod,
who seemed to have a real interest in where your baby might be that on our way here.
And the idea that we take that scene and we we polish it up and we make it serene and peaceful when the reality is it was messy.
Mary was hurting.
Joseph is confused.
The shepherds are showing up and they’re filthy.
The animal,
you know, there’s nothing about that that is what we try to make it.
And you have this in very,
very messy human moment where the Son of God enters the world and we
want to make it pristine.
And the reality is we just don’t get a lot of pristine moments in our life.
There are a few.
They’re wonderful.
They’re beautiful.
They should be celebrated.
But the daily grind of living out the faith is messy and it’s hard.
And it’s a couple steps forward and then some steps back and then doing it again and again and again.
And that’s we don’t love that message.
But that’s the reality of what following Jesus looks like of just consistently and constantly trying to give Him glory to get ourselves out of the way and follow Jesus.
And we hope that during this series there have been some tools that might be helpful to all of us as we seek to do that.
You know, if you’re not a contemplative person,
you might take upon the challenge maybe in this coming year to what does it look like to sit and have some time of reflection,
some time of journaling,
some time of prayer.
If you’re a sedentary person,
what would it look like to go take a prayer walk?
What would it look like to get in tune with my physical self in a way that might help me grow?
If you’re struggling with bad thoughts of the past or with people who have wronged you,
if there’s someone in your life that you’ve just never been able to take the knot out of your hand and to let go of it,
spend some time thinking about that.
Because whatever it is,
wherever you apply yourself,
the promise is, again, that God meets us there and wants us to move forward and wants to help us do that.
And so we hope there’s been something in this conversation perhaps that could be beneficial to you as you seek to do that.
Yeah, I think you said it well earlier,
Clint, when you mentioned that you don’t ever use every tool in the toolbox on a job.
In fact, there are some tools that only have one specific purpose.
And a recurring theme in my own life,
as I’ve watched some of the saints,
some of those mature women and men of the faith,
is really not that they have an extraordinarily deep toolbox.
It’s not that they have an endless supply of tools.
It’s often that they slow down enough to really listen.
And then with wisdom,
they pull out a very well-used tool from the toolbox.
And I wonder if that might help all of us.
Instead of trying to fill our lives with some spiritual superpower,
if we would instead look for those humble tools that we could commit to.
And some of that is not even close to rocket science.
It’s always amused me that back when bookstores were a thing,
you could walk into the bookstore.
There would be an entire shelf full of spirituality,
Christianity,
everything that went from sort of biblical interpretation all the way to just pure self-help with Christian names on it.
And the thing that’s interesting about that is that we are so drawn to read all of this commentary about the faith instead of engaging in the faith itself.
And I wonder if all of us would do well,
instead of going out and buying another book from that bestseller,
to simply open the book that they are seeking to illuminate at its best,
to enter into some intentional time with the one that they’re describing.
Whether that be we set some time aside for prayer or for reading of the Scriptures,
for maybe
that’s a devotional that we make
time for.
Maybe that is some of these practices that we’ve talked about that involve our body or that involve relationships.
Whatever it
is,
I think it’s better if we’re willing to go back to the fundamentals,
we’ll discover in that there’s a richness that we pass by.
When we keep trying in these sort of short-circuited, fragmented ways
to reach and grasp for the spiritual silver bullet,
instead of the very clear,
slow,
methodical,
and really practice-filled life
that the real spiritual practice
requires.
Yeah, nobody starts a spiritual giant.
In fact, there aren’t many spiritual giants out there,
and so I would say that is not to be our aspiration.
Our aspiration is,
how can I, in my life today,
follow Jesus Christ and keep my eyes open for what God might be doing in the world and wants to do in me?
And,
you know,
we don’t need to overcomplicate it.
It is not complex,
but it is not easy.
And, you know, I think that the Christian faith often lives at that place.
It may be simple,
but not easy to do.
And so as Christians,
we encourage one another,
and we are fortunate to stand on the shoulders of millions who have gone before us.
And we benefit from their experience,
their thoughtfulness, their practices.
And so, again, we hope that as we’ve tried to sort through some of that and look for what has been helpful in our tradition to many, many people,
maybe there’s something that lands for you,
and maybe there’s something that offers you a chance to move forward in an area in your life.
Well, in this conversation, we seek to provide
some summary to that which has come before,
and this then will serve as the conclusion to our series on practicing faith.
We would love for you to engage with us in conversation if this series has maybe spurred a
new desire in you,
if you felt encouraged.
We’d love to hear that.
If you’ve been challenged and you intend to take up one of these tools in an intentional way.
We would love to hear that.
You can, of course, comment if you’re with us here on Facebook.
Many of you are joining us by podcast.
Feel free to email us, office@fpcspiritlike.org.
It really give us a call at the church.
It doesn’t matter.
We’d love to hear about you and how you may be taking these tools and using them as you seek to grow.
But from this point on,
we’ll turn our attention next week to a new series.
We will talk a little bit about that when we arrive at it.
But we’re glad for this time that you’ve spent with us and hope if you found it helpful,
you might share it with someone else.
Yeah, we just thanks for hanging in there with us.
We appreciate all
of you that take part in these conversations.
And as always, we hope that there’s something that sticks.
And so if that’s the case,
we’re grateful to be a part of it.
Take care.