Spiritual Disciplines

The Road between Do It Yourself and Do Nothing

Introduction

My family, growing up, was always working on "the house" in one way or another. I learned a lot about home improvement, including quite a few lessons about how not to do it.

One of our biggest projects was the reroofing of '93. A couple of you have heard this story before... don't worry about it. We got all the Mackintosh family together, we got all the materials and my Dad and uncle knew a little bit about roofing and probably read some books to brush up, and we headed up to the roof with hammers and enthusiasm.

Our house was a one story house that wrapped around in a long rectangle... quite a lot of roof to cover. We hired one part out, stripping the old roof off, and those guys worked hard for a couple days and got the whole roof bare to the sky while we had roofed only like twenty square feet.

What could possibly go wrong?

Sure enough, the rain clouds gathered.

We had few options at this point. One was to do nothing. The rain would pour down into the house, ruin the carpet and all our stuff, but the sun would just dry everything out again, right? We could just sit back and wait.

Another less costly option, and this is what we did, was to work harder and get that roof on before it began to rain. We started working twice as hard, and twice as fast. We had a lot of people with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of hammers. I think we even had one nail gun. We were getting better at carefully rolling out the tarpaper, lining up the tiles, and tacking them to the roof. We set personal records for fastest roofing of our lives... and got another 100 square feet done.

We were doing great things, high fives all around... except we had finished less than half of the roof.

Our own effort couldn't do it. Just leaving it unfinished was too much of a loss. We called in the Owens.

The Owen family was part of our church and owned, at the time, one of the largest roofing companies in Southern California. Paul Owen came over, with some of "his guys." I have never seen anything like it. They had one guy rolling out tar paper like giant red carpets in cartoons. Another guy flinging roof tiles like giant frisbees perfectly into place, while another guy stood back with his nail gun held like a machine gun... and there part looked better than our careful little nudging and measuring.

We kept working alongside them as best we could. Trying to pick up some tricks, learning how to do it right and do it quickly, and helping, in our slower smaller way, to get that roof on before the rain came down.

We had the whole roof tar papered, protected from the rain, and they were halfway done tiling the rest of the roof before the rain got started. Cheers all around!

It was amazing.

I learned a few lessons that day. First, the Owens are awesome at roofing.

Second, there are some projects that simply aren't Do It Yourself projects. Putting on a new roof is on my list. Sometimes, I just don't have the skill and just putting extra effort and will into it isn't going to do it.

Finally, when you have two really bad choices, like doing nothing or trying and failing to do it myself... go find the third option.

The Question - How do we navigate between Do-It-Yourself futility and Do-Nothing poverty.

Speaking of two really bad choices.

There are two errors we tend to make in our Christian walk, and by avoiding one extreme we often tend towards the other. Here is the dilemma. We all want to be good Christians, to be better people, to grow into Christ's likeness... but many Christians feel like they never actually get anywhere. Or they are even moving backwards.

Human Striving - Do It Yourself

One option is to look at ourselves as a Do-It-Yourself project. We will make some resolutions, and by sticking to them rigorously, by exercising self-control and strong will, we can stop a sinful behavior, bad habit or pick up some new virtue.

There is a logical argument here. We realize that God is righteous, and he calls us to be righteous. “Be holy, because I am holy.” 1 Peter 1:16

We try to become better people by our own will, our own strength, our own might. Here is where it gets really nasty. Mostly we fail, and when we do succeed, our self-satisfaction and pride are as much sin as whatever it replaced.

Paul wrote to the church in Colossi in Colossians 2 about just this sort of thing. Speaking about these rules and laws we make for ourselves about what we will touch or taste or see, based on merely human commands and teachings in order to improve ourselves he says:

“23 Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.”

That “self-imposed worship” can taken literally be will worship, or worship of one’s own will. So even when we appear to succeed by effort of our own will and effort, it lacks any true value, we exchange one sin for another.

Okay, now we all recognize that. We call it legalism, we call it moralism, we call it being-like-those-Pharisees, and we know it’s bad news. In fact, legalism strangles the joy out of life.

We simply cannot Do It Ourselves.

Do Nothing

The great news, the good news, the gospel, the gift of grace, is that we cannot strive for righteousness, righteousness is a gift from God, it is a free gift, salvation because Jesus paid the price.

This is fantastic, amazing news and we celebrate it, and we sing about it, and we love it. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosever believes in him shall not die but shall have everlasting life.”

So salvation is free! We do not have to strive for righteousness. We cannot strive for righteousness. Really there is nothing the Christian has to do, because Christ has done everything. So the Christian is just supposed to sit there and be happy. Or better yet, go about their lives doing whatever is easy or convenient or enjoyable, and just cuddle that warm cozy “saved” feeling. For God, one day, will just zap us and make us perfect!

And we have wandered into another danger, the polar opposite of striving for salvation by our own effort is total idleness and passivity. If human striving and effort is doomed to fail and salvation is a free gift, it does seem logical to just wait for God to reach down and change us.

We call this laziness, idleness, or antinomianism, the idea that there is no law that Christians must obey or follow. This denies the deep abundant life God has for us, the growing relationship with God and each other.

In fact, right after saying that human effort, will worship, is without any value, he goes on into Colossians 3, where we recently spent a whole sermon series. Put to death the earthly nature... rid yourselves of anger, rage, malice, etc..., clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience... Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.

So it cannot be that Christians are just supposed to sit back and do nothing. Why would Paul, Jesus before him, give all these commands to change and grow, as if we were supposed to take an active role in growth?

We cannot Do It Ourselves. And we cannot Do Nothing.

The dilemma

You may identify with one or both of these tendencies. I think we often veer between these two extremes.

We get really motivated to change and we set up the Do It Yourself project, we have a plan and we just try really hard, but we soon realize we can't just be better by trying really hard to be better. We exhaust ourselves, and then sit back and do nothing for awhile, until we are dissatisfied or motivated enough for another burst of Do It Yourself energy.

Both of these "errors" are built on a kernel of truth. These two things are true:

We are called to be holy, to be righteous, to good works. There is some active component on our part.

It is God who changes us. True change comes only by the hand of the Potter.

Cooperation with the Divine

I love this passage in Philippians 2, the whole chapter really, which talks about imitating Christ in every way. Verse 12 and 13 capture this dilemma, this tension:

Philippians 2

“12 Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, 13 for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.”

First, there is this active component: “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” It is important to see Paul is not saying “work for your salvation” for salvation is still the free gift of God. But we are called to “work it out” whatever that means. Salvation is a process not just a one-time trick. Salvation is believing Jesus, remaining in Jesus, being transformed into full abundant, Christ-like persons, being resurrected into perfect new bodies to eternal life… the word “salvation” captures all of this. And we are active participants somehow in “working out” this salvation, there is stuff we get to do.

But, lest we fall into that trap of legalism, the trap of trying to “be better” by our own will and effort, Paul continues: “for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose.” It is still God who is ultimately changing us and it is to fulfill his purpose, not our own desire and ambition.

I find this principle here. God changes us and He delights in cooperating with His creatures.

God changes us and He delights in cooperating with His creatures, in letting us take part in our own transformation, working out our salvation.

Spiritual Disciplines

But how are we supposed to cooperate without falling into the error of either legalism, trying to do it all ourselves, or idleness, waiting for God to give us easy and instant transformation? When it comes time to get practical, to get down to what we will do, this is where we find ourselves slipping into one of those errors.

Icy roads

Yesterday I took the kids out to go sledding, and we are slipping and sliding our way out of the neighborhood onto Highway 7. Finally, we made it to the lane. Enough cars have driven down that one part of the road that you can see the pavement, but only on this one track. Every car on the road is sticking to that one track. Because, if you drift off to the left, you find yourself slipping and sliding off in that direction. If you drift to the right, same thing, you lose traction and start sliding all over the place.

So what is the balance, what is the middle road?

We find ways to place ourselves in active submission to God’s purposes. Ways to listen for His purpose. Ways to prepare ourselves for change. Ways to encourage and guide one another in that process.

We can get more specific. Sometimes “spiritual language” is vague language. Someone once called this work of submission “active passivity” which sounds awesome… until you try to do it. We can get very practical.

We call those ways Spiritual Disciplines, and we don’t have to make this stuff up. The great men and women of Scripture practice spiritual disciplines, Christians throughout church history have practiced and written on the Spiritual Disciplines, and even if you haven’t heard the term before, many of these practices will be familiar to you.

Prayer, fasting, Studying the Bible, these are Spiritual Disciplines. Service, Worship, Confession, these are Spiritual Disciplines. Perhaps less familiar might be disciplines like Christian meditation, Simplicity, Solititude or Guidance… but none of these are new.

What are Spiritual Disciplines?

Spiritual Disciplines is the collection of Disciplines, things that take effort, practice, intention to do, that nurture and feed and grow our Spirit, the growing part of ourselves that is alive to God, ultimately all that we are.

God changes us… but he uses means… and through these and other Spiritual Disciplines He delights in cooperating with His creatures.

“Our work is to place ourselves in the way of Christ and invite Him to work in our lives, individually and collectively. The Spiritual Disciplines are merely an attempt to describe how we can accomplish that work.”

1 Timothy 4:7-8 says: “7But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness;

 8for bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.”

Application

So we can get even more practical than a list of Spiritual Disciplines. Learning about the Spiritual Disciplines, focusing on one at a time, is a good start. But of course, learning about a discipline is not practicing that discipline. Better yet, as a fellowship of believers, we can take a Spiritual Discipline, learn how it is practiced in Scripture and in the Church throughout history… and then commit together to making that discipline a part of our lives.

And we are going to do just that.

We are going to meet Saturday afternoon in two weeks, that’s the 15th of January at 1pm. We will spend around an hour studying the Discipline of Solitude and then, for two weeks, we are going to discipline ourselves to solitude.

Two weeks later we will meet Saturday afternoon again and share what we learned and experience, then tackle the next Discipline. Then two weeks later, February 12th, we’ll do it again.

I expect you will find that some of the "Disciplines" you have already been doing for years, and you have a lot to teach the rest of us. Others may prove difficult and feel unnatural... it was really odd to me the first few times I spent time sitting in Silence and Solitude... it felt like wasting time. But the payoff can be profound, and has been for me.

Conclusion

I am eager for God to change me.... and for millennia He has encountered His people in and through the Spiritual Disciplines.

God changes us, but he uses means, and He delights in cooperating with His creatures. Let us, in the words of 1 Timothy "discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness."