The Heart Behind It: Loving God Through Spiritual Disciplines

Pathways of Grace

Story of teaching kids to ride a bike - the trouble they all have is getting used to how to pedal. They always want to push backwards - which engages the brakes. This inevitably always ends the first session because those pedals aren’t doing what they want them to do.

Now this kind of experience is exactly how so many of us feel when we talk about Spiritual Disciplines.

When you hear the phrase “Spiritual Disciplines” what does that bring up in your heart?

For many, the constant cycle of guilt.

Commit, struggle, fail, lose hope, run away - lather, rinse, repeat.

“These pedals aren’t doing what I want them to!”

What if the problem wasn’t the disciplines? What if the problem is how we see them in our relationship with God? What if we’re pedaling the wrong way - using disciplines to gain favor with God or to make God happy with us is like pushing backwards.

What if Spiritual Disciplines were actually a way to enjoy the greatest love that has ever existed? What if Spiritual Disciplines were seen as tools to love God and enjoy Him instead of making God happy with us?

That’s what we really want as followers of Jesus. To love God is our first priority. This is actually the mission of our church:

Our mission: to Love God.

The greatest way you engage in loving God is to grow in obedience to God. And the greatest way to grow in obedience to God is to embrace what have been called the “Spiritual Disciplines.”

Summer Series - To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Spiritual Disciplines are the means by which we engage with and love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

So how does his work? How can spiritual disciplines be the ways that I love God?

What we really need is Jesus. We need Jesus to show us how to love God. And the beauty is that Jesus did show us how to love him.

Jesus makes that connection for us - there is a deep rooted connection to knowing God’s love, loving God, and being filled with the joy that God produces:

Listen to what Jesus says in John 15:9-11

John 15:9–11 NIV

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

Jesus says some incredible things here: how are we supposed to grow deeper into His love and obedience? And what’s the purpose?

Jesus builds a set of three connected elements in our relationship of love with Him here for us -

Remain in His Love

Keep His Commands

Be Filled with Joy

These are all interconnected: We remain in Jesus’ love - and keep his commands. We keep his commands and remain in his love and then our joy is complete - we are filled with the joy that comes only from knowing and loving God.

So where do spiritual disciplines fit in? They are the pathways that lead to these elements of our relationship of love with God.

Instead of calling them disciplines - lets call them pathways. Discipline - negative, automatically makes me not want to do it, and it doesn’t capture what the purpose of the Spiritual Disciplines is. A pathway is a something upon which a journey takes place. There is a destination, a purpose at the end of a pathway.

In order to understand how these spiritual pathways work in our relationship with God, we must see them in the framework of how Jesus has told us to love him. So lets look at what Jesus says here in our passage and as we do we will be clear on the place of Spiritual Pathways in our walk with Him.

What we want to grasp here more than anything else is to see that Spiritual Disciplines - Spiritual Pathways - are ways that bring us to know, love, and enjoy God.

As we begin - we begin with the most important element to our love of God - his love for us. Jesus tells us first and foremost to love God we must “remain” in his love.

Lets look at that this first element -

1. Remain in His Love

John 15:9 NIV

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.

Jesus calls us to remain in his love - to remain means to stay, to abide, to continue.

Any love that we produce has to come from the source of love - God himself. Trying to work up love for God on our own without going to the source is like making a fire at a campsite - you’ve got everything lined up - wood in place, kindling in the bottom, maybe a little newspaper. But then you realize, you’ve got nothing to set anything on fire with.

What is the starter that sets our hearts on fire to love God? It’s God’s love for us. And how do we know how God has loved us? One of the main ways is through the Spiritual Pathway of Scripture Reading.

You see, we so often treat Bible reading as a difficult chore. But what if we actually saw it as an opportunity to read and really know God’s love for us? And God’s love for us is most wonderfully and beautifully found in the Gospel - what Jesus did for us on the cross.

Let’s do this together right now - all of us - read this passage out loud together:

1 John 4:9–10 NIV

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Let that sink in for a moment. See - what Jesus is calling us to do here when he says “remain in my love” is actually a call to what we would call spiritual disciplines/pathways. Jesus is saying; the first step to loving me is knowing my love for you. So engage yourself in the pathways that bring you a greater and real knowledge of that love.” Very simply - read your Bible to find Jesus and His love. Don’t be ashamed; dive deep into the ocean of God’s love through reading His word, meditating on it, and praying it back to God.

Honesty: if you don’t read your Bible you feel like a second rate Christian. And you doubt if God’s going to really be happy with you that day.

But what if we saw reading our Bible as not something to make God happy with us but a guaranteed spiritual pathway to knowing and remaining in the Love of God?

What this passage does, more than just show us a call to spiritual pathways, is it shows us what we actually need to have a right view of spiritual pathways.

Here’s the street level truth: You cannot love God unless you know what His love is like for you. You cannot grow in deeper joy and obedience to Jesus unless you know His love for you. It’s the foundation for everything. Unless you get this right, you will be pedaling backwards with your pursuit of loving God. You cannot get on the spiritual pathways of knowing, loving, and enjoying God without putting first things first.

Take this home with you: You cannot work up more love for God on your own. You do not have the capacity to make yourself love God more. God has to step in and show you what love is before you can love Him. And He does this through the pathways of grace.

Why is this such a big deal?

Because too much has the church made Spiritual Disciplines into means by which we make God happy with us.

This is why Jesus is telling us first in our pursuit of loving God we have to remain in His love. Because if you don’t, you will turn spiritual pathways into a new law where if you don’t do them God’s not happy with you, where if you miss your disciplines you will not be accepted.

We have to stop this. It’s not helpful and doesn’t truly bring us into a deeper knowledge of Jesus. So lets hit the restart button - instead of calling them spiritual disciplines, or even spiritual pathways - lets call them Pathways of Grace.

Pathways of Grace

Here’s what you and I need every day - because at street level we will forget it or turn back into a works based way of thinking with God and our pathways of knowing and loving Him.

We must remember Jesus, who is the eternal Son of God, lived in perfect and glorious love with the Father and the Spirit from eternity past. He is God himself - the Eternal Son. And in love, He stepped into time and became our atoning sacrifice - a sacrifice that satisfied every requirement for us to live eternally with him. He took on flesh - became made like one of us - truly God and truly man. He then took that life and laid it down willingly to pay for our sin which separated us from him.

This is important: he did that not because of anything good in us, not because of any love or works he could see in the future to get from us, but because this is who He is: love. This is what true love is: free, glorious, eternal, immeasurable, fantastic love!

And now we enter into that love by one way: grace through faith. We do not earn it, we can’t ever gain it, it is accessed by exercising faith in Jesus - turning to Him and trusting in Him completely as Lord and Savior.

And when we enter into that relationship by grace - we are given so much more than just fire insurance. We now live a life of grace. And God continues to love us, grow us, strengthen us, and change us by that grace.

Every day - take this first step on your pathways of grace - remember the greatest grace given to you and what that means for you right now -

If you are a believer in Christ here’s what you need to hear daily.

You cannot be more loved than you are right now.

You cannot be more accepted than you are right now.

You cannot be more of a child of God than you are right now.

You cannot be more forgiven than you are right now.

All of this is because Jesus loved you and died for you.

Before we do any discipline, before we take this journey together, we all need to let God’s love flow deeply down into our hearts.

This is the fire that lights up our love for God.

Illustration/Application - My own struggle: I went through a very disciplined period of my walk with Jesus. I prayed and prayed daily for the blessing of the Holy Spirit upon my life, I fasted twice a week, I read my bible extensively daily, but guess what I still felt empty. Because I was trying to pedal backwards. But one day - I was sitting at my job at lunch time reading my Bible. And something happened - I was reading and all of a sudden it was like Jesus and his glorious love and grace in the gospel started jumping off the page at me. Verse after verse I was struck with the love of God. And here’s what I realized - that I was trying using my “disciplines” to punish myself and try to finally get to God’s love. I was like a prisoner who was already set free but fighting to get back into the courtroom to plead with the judge to set me free.

But Jesus, by His grace, broke me free from that, but I still struggle. This is why I need the Gospel daily. This is how we remain in His love - to continually start with this. This is why we need the Gospel to put our spiritual pathways in their correct place.

And when we do this - Jesus tells us that’s when real love on our part starts to happen. And that shapes our hearts to love God through submitting ourselves to his rule over us - to follow Jesus in obedience - which is the second element that Jesus is pointing us to in our love of him -

2. Keep His Commands

Let’s go back to what Jesus said in John 15:10

John 15:10 NIV

If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love.

This is yet another call to our pathways of grace. How can we learn to obey Jesus more? By remaining in His love, and pursuing to keep his commands. But Jesus purposefully includes himself as the chief example of loving God.

So how did Jesus love God? Jesus kept all the commands of God - every single one of them. But think about this - Jesus never obeyed begrudgingly. Jesus never obeyed only because he had to. Jesus wanted and loved to obey His Father.

And that’s really the problem with us, isn’t it? When it comes to really submitting our lives to Jesus, it feels like we know what we have to do but lack the heart desire to do it.

And that’s where the Pathways of Grace come in. This is why we pursue to love God - through the ways he has established.

Because really what we need is a work of grace: we need our hearts to be changed to see that our ultimate joy isn’t in anything this world can give us but in God himself.

And the way that God has given us to change is to partake in these pathways of grace - paths where he gives us more and more grace to change from the inside out, and thereby grow in our obedience to him.

Let’s say I struggle with something many people struggle with: patience. I have a hard time waiting for something; I have a hard time waiting for God’s timing for anything. With patience, what I’m really struggling with is God’s sovereign control over my life and all things. What I’m really struggling with is obeying God by trusting Him in his good ordering of all things in this world and in my life.

So how can I change? Well, I need grace in my heart to change. How do I get that grace? Well, we start with reading and thinking deeply about Scripture. Then I begin to pray - praying that God would change me to know His loving wisdom in ruling all things and give me grace to be patient. Then perhaps I fast - I abstain from food for a day and wait upon the Lord, seeking His grace to change me, and maybe I do this on a day of solitude where I can really hear God’s voice. These are what we would traditionally call spiritual disciplines - but what they really are are pathways that God has told me that he’d meet me on! Finally, I pursue the pathway of grace of going to church and I hear a sermon. And I feel like the pastor spoke directly to my heart and something changes. My heart is different - and now patience isn’t so difficult anymore!

This is the connection to what Jesus is saying - that to remain in His love and keep his commandments requires His grace and we find that grace on the pathways of grace.

This actually happened to me. But it wasn’t with patience, it was with anger. In my early 20’s, I struggled with so much pain and anger from losing my mother and a difficult home life. I was in a place where I was wandering. And I went with my brother, who is also a pastor now, to church and I sat in silence the whole time and I prayed as I had been praying - Lord I’m so angry, I don’t know what to do. And I sat down at church, and in the middle of service, God did something. All of a sudden, I felt the grace of God soften my heart and I said, “Jesus, I don’t want to be angry anymore, please take this.” And this massive burden flew off my shoulders, and something changed. My heart changed. And Jesus met me on that pathway of grace - of prayer and being a part of the gathering of believers.

If you want to grow in loving God - get yourself on the pathways of grace. Because Jesus will meet you there. And you’ll get something that no one else could give you - a joy that surpasses anything in this life.

3. Be Filled With Joy

Jesus says something incredible if we’ll hear it: John 15:11

John 15:11 NIV

I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

This may sound foreign to you but let what Jesus is really saying sink deeply into your soul: Jesus wants His joy to live in you. This is Jesus’ desire: that you would find joy in the only place it can truly come from: from God himself.

When we pursue to love God, what we get is actually more than we could ever give - we get the unstoppable, unbeatable, soul-filling, world changing, never ending Joy of Jesus the Son of God.

So here’s the God given motivation to our pursuit of loving God through pathways of grace. A joy that you could never find anywhere else.

God has hardwired us to pursue what we think will make us the most joyful. Not happy - we all know emotional happiness is fleeting. But a deep down abiding state of true gladness. The Joy that Jesus gives is soul-happiness.

So if you’re like me - you need soul-happiness not some emotional high. You need something that only God can give you, and so do I. We need Jesus. We need to remain in His love, to love him with our submission to him so we can experience His presence and be filled with His joy.

So on this journey this summer - would you come with me to put ourselves on the pathways of grace where Jesus will meet us?