Tactical Faith

Equipping Christians in Alabama

Joel

Perceptions of the Kingdom: The easy yoke

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Filed Under: Culture, Ethics, Spiritual Disciplines Tagged With: , ,

Dallas Willard reminds us that Jesus tells us to take his yoke upon us, learn from him, and we will find rest for our souls (Matthew 11:28-30). This does not mean that if we just connect to God, He will do all the work for us, so we can find rest. Instead, the often overlooked phrase in this verse is that we are to learn from Jesus. By taking His yoke on, we are like the young ox that is yoked with an experienced ox in order to learn how to do the work in the right way. Jesus is telling us that if we’re tired and weary, we’re not doing life the right way. We are meant to live in the rest of Christ. Instead, we are not really even the young ox, but an ox who has developed bad habits and a wrong way of working and needs an experienced ox to work with to learn the right way to do it. If we walk with Jesus, learning the way that He lives, seeing the things He sees, valuing the things He values, we find that life can be lived in rest and peace. Jesus promises us that His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

One example of this is found in a recent book by John Mark Comer, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Once Willard was asked about what is the single biggest thing we can do to help us be more like Christ, and he responded that we need to ruthlessly work to eliminate hurry from our lives. Now if you’re like me, this seems completely counterintuitive, as there is never enough time in the day to get even most of the things done I think I need to do that day. However, Comer lays out (relying on Willard) how we’re missing the point of life and the way we were created if our lives are ones of constant hurry. While we are busy trying to keep everything going in our lives, we are focused on the wrong things. We need to refocus on the things that matter, the things that Jesus sees, the values Jesus shows us. Yes, dinner still needs to be made, the kids still have homework, laundry needs to be done, and everything else, but with a realignment of values, those things take their proper places in our lives. This doesn’t mean that our lives are free of all types of stress, but when we live our lives the way we’re meant to live them, we are like the tool that is used in the way it is intended rather than the power saw trying to be a screwdriver.

Part of why life is so hard is that we are trying to live out of ourselves, working to make the decision every day to do the things we need to do to be like Jesus. Drew Dyck’s Your Future Self Will Thank You engages some of the contemporary brain science related to Christian formation, especially with respect to will power. When we fail to integrate these practices into our lives, then every day we have to use our will power to do these practices. However, will power is a limited resource, and if we have to rely on that resource to fuel our spiritual growth, on the days when the demands of life require us to use our will power elsewhere, we find that we lack the resources to do the practices to be more like Jesus.

Part of the reason that we have to use our will power to do these things is because these practices are contrary to the things we actually value in our lives. I’m not saying that we don’t want to value these things, but that what we actually value in this present moment may not be perfectly aligned with the things we want to value or know we should value. The goal of using our will power should be that these things become ingrained within us so that we don’t have to use our will power.

I have had a bad tendency to try to do fix everything at once in my life. Spend some time with God, get the workout in, eat healthy, exhibit otherworldly patience with my children, and get plenty of sleep, on top of everything else going on. When none of things is my natural inclination, I’m using my will power at each turn to make those things happen, and on a good day, before the sun goes down (far too early, as I write this in the late fall), my will power is depleted, and it is incredibly difficult to do things that I know I should do. Instead we help ourselves when we do one or two things, and focus on those things, choosing to do them, but not just to do them to check them off the list, but to do them in a way with the goal of making them a part of our lives. Over time, we have to use less will power and it becomes a part of our normal lives, but it takes a constant and persistent choosing in the beginning. Once it is a normal part of our lives, we are using little of our will power to make it happen, and then have the will power resources to add another presently difficult thing to our lives.

As we start to realign our lives to be more like Christ, developing the mind of Christ through disciplines, some of the difficult things may become easier, even when we’re not focused on those things. When I started regularly working out, my body started to desire more water than I was drinking at the time, and so I started to drink more water, which is healthier than I had been. In time, I found that I was naturally grabbing water when I wanted something to drink.[1] Similarly, as we learn from Christ as we walk alongside Him, we will likely find that as we work to add a practice to or eliminate a practice from our lives, as we are able to be successful once, the next one may be easier to do, or we may even find ourselves doing that thing we  previously weren’t doing.

However, we have to start. We have to admit that we don’t know what we’re doing and that we need to learn. We have to attach ourselves to Christ, not expecting Him to do everything for us, but to learn how to live, including the spiritual disciplines, not as a matter of things to do, but of ways to live in the rest that we have been promised in Christ. Yet, we seem to be unable to accept this reality most of the time.

I often see this inability to accept reality in my children. They become convinced of doing things a certain way, although that way is incredibly inefficient or produces poor results. While they are able to get the job done, their methods result in a struggle that is ultimately unnecessary. However, the idea of doing something differently than they’ve known is not appealing and seems difficult, so they persist in their ways. As a parent, I try to show them a better way, but until they’re willing to try it for themselves, they remain convinced that the struggle is just part of doing those things. In the same way that parents long to show their children a better way, so does the Triune God long for us to embrace the way of living life by which we thrive. It often seems beyond our imagination to do so, yet it is the imagination that can play an essential role in this life coming about.

In the next post, I’ll consider the way that imagination can help us develop the mind of Christ.

[1] Of course, we then added another child to our family and the caffeine content of the beverage trumped everything else for the next twelve months.

Perceptions of the Kingdom: Spiritual Disciplines

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Filed Under: Philosophy, Spiritual Disciplines, Theology, Worldview Tagged With: ,

If discipleship, at the core, is really a matter of “having the mind of Christ”, then how do we actually change the way we perceive the world to see the world as the Triune God does?

The work of Dallas Willard has been a great source of understanding for me in this. Willard draws from Aristotelian ideas of virtue formation to help us do this. For Aristotle, one of the key means to become a virtuous person is to do the things that virtuous people do. As Christians, if we want to see the world as the Triune God does, then we should try to do the things that Jesus did.

Someone might object that I claimed in the previous post that it is not about our actions, so how can the key be found in our actions? We do not do the things Jesus did in order to master the specific actions, but as part of how we come to understand who Jesus is and how He sees the world. A great musician does not simply reproduce the performance of another, yet, she will study the great performances of the piece carefully. This study is in order to try to see what the other musicians saw when they performed the piece. She may even try to incorporate some of their techniques into her performance, but ultimately, the musician is at her greatest when she interprets the piece for herself and performs with her own understanding in mind. Similarly, some young athletes may try to imitate their favorite athlete, performing the idiosyncrasies of the athlete in order to be like that specific athlete who is great at his sport. Yet, while those idiosyncrasies may help the seasoned athlete, due to his body type, muscle structure, or some other reason, they may prove to be detrimental to the young athlete who is not the same person as the older athlete. Yet, there is something valuable in studying great athletes because you can learn about the kinds of things they see when they are on the field.

However, it is not enough to just look at the actions that the exemplars do in order to become great, but you need to train yourself to be like them. When put in the pressure situations, we rarely are able to make a decision to act contrary to the way we’ve trained ourselves to do things. The work we’ve done before that moment shapes what happens in that moment. This is why musicians practice scales. It is rare to actually play a scale in a performance, yet nearly every musician practices scales. Practicing the scales helps one be able to move between notes with little conscious effort, allowing one to focus on the actual performance of the music as opposed to correctly producing each note. Similarly, basketball players do lay up drills in warm ups, not because they expect to get easy, open lay ups in the game, but because if a lay up is a part of their basic muscle memory, they can then focus on making the adjustments necessary to make a shot like that in the game as opposed to doing the actions necessary to a lay up.

So what are the lay ups or scales in the Christian life? This is the heart of the spiritual disciplines as described by Willard. He breaks down the disciplines into disciplines of abstinence and disciplines of engagement.[1] Practicing things like silence, solitude, fasting, secrecy, frugality, and others helps to train us so that in the moments in our spiritual life, we are able to better recognize our dependency on God and make our bodies servant to our spiritual desires and needs as opposed to being enslaved to our bodily needs. Solitude is not about training yourself to be away from other people for the sake of being away from other people. Rather, solitude helps you to learn to free yourself from the external distractions by removing them and then start to address the internal distractions one would never recognize in the midst of the external ones. So it is with other disciplines of abstinence. These disciplines are not saying that the things from which we abstain are bad, but are showing us that when the desires for them are not properly ordered, they can take away from our experience of the fullness of life promised in Christ. By not allowing them mastery over us, we can use them in fruitful ways to further the Kingdom.

The disciplines of engagement are things like prayer, study, worship, fellowship, submission, confession, and others are things that disciplines that require our engagement. These are good things that are unnatural to us and so we have to take the time to practice these things. They will often feel unnatural when we start doing them. Additionally, these are disciplines that develop, such that you may think you’ve mastered one aspect, only to discover that there are deeper depths that you can enter at each level. However, it is important to remember that the goal is not to master these practices for the sake of the practices, but that these practices lead us to experience the world as Christ and to develop the mind of Christ within ourselves.

The problem with many approaches to spiritual disciplines is that people do the disciplines for the sake of doing the discipline, believing that the actions themselves are the goal. Rather, these actions are like the scales for a musician or the lay ups for the basketball player. They help develop the spiritual muscles necessary for us to act in the pressure filled moments, so that we can attend to what is actually going on before us rather than be preoccupied with trying to think about WWJD. If we have the mind of Christ, that question is not a matter of trying to imagine Jesus as someone dramatically other from us, who experiences and lives in the world in a way almost incomprehensible to us, but it becomes a matter of seeing the value before us and acting in a way that upholds or enhances that value. The spiritual disciplines are an important way that we can help develop those perceptions.

Yet, the spiritual disciplines often feel like something that is more work that we have to fit into lives that are already too full. They feel like an overwhelming task to accomplish when we aren’t even finishing everything we need to do each day, feeling like we’re falling further and further behind. In the next post, I’ll address this and discuss the role of the disciplines in the life of rest we are promised in Christ.

[1] This discussion of different disciplines draws from Willard’s chapter ——- in The Spirit of the Disciplines.

Perceptions of the Kingdom

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Filed Under: Ethics, Guest Post, Philosophy, Worldview Tagged With: , , ,

Aristotle says in Nicomachean Ethics that every action is done aiming at a good. Before you start listing all the bad actions that people (especially you) do as clear counterexamples to this claim, consider your own thought process when you do something you would say you know to be bad. When you go back to the buffet for the third or fourth time, you may know that you’re going to be miserable and regret doing it, yet you go because in that moment, the partaking of that additional food is appealing and seems to be good. You aim at the good of enjoying food, but your understanding of enjoying food fails to consider the moderation necessary for actual enjoyment that is not fleeting. We can even look at more extreme examples like premeditated murder. When someone decides to kill another person, the murderer may recognize that the victim’s friends and family would be deeply hurt and, if caught, the rest of his life will be spent in prison. Yet, the murderer so strongly holds the belief that the world will be better for him if the victim is not alive in it, that the murderer acts, despite the negatives that could result. For Aristotle, being a good person is not about doing the right action, but about seeing what is good correctly, for an accurate perception of the good will result in right action. Because we all do what we perceive in that moment as good, the way we perceive the good is of the utmost importance. Additionally, the longer we incorrectly hold a perception of something as good, the more difficult to change it, as we fight back against the solidification of our perceptions of value that tend to happen over time.

However, the examples above point to the reality that we don’t properly perceive the good all the time, and that the idea of the good that some have is so misshapen that what is actually good may be repulsive to them. With Christians, Dallas Willard made the case in multiple places that discipleship is too often treated as an optional good for those who are really committed. The mindset is that actually living out the principles of the Sermon on the Mount are only for those “super-Christians”, clergy, or even no one, showing us how far we are from God. However, what Jesus lays out in the Sermon on the Mount is the way of the kingdom, both now and in the New Creation. If these things look unappealing to us now, what reason do we have to think that they will suddenly become appealing upon our death? Jesus tells us that eternal life is not primarily a matter of what happens when you die, but about knowing the Triune God (John 17:3). So if what is now unappealing or lacks value becomes appealing and valuable in an instant upon death, it is worth pondering if it is really you that exists in the New Creation.

If eternal life is something that can be experienced already, then we should be living in that life of relationship with the Triune God in the here and now. Then, as I talked about in a previous post, when you’re in relationship and genuinely pursuing that relationship, the way you see the world is changed, and what you value changes as well. Eternal life is then about learning to see and value reality through relationship with the Sustainer of reality.

While there are seismic shifts that can happen in the way we understand the world, these shifts are incredibly destabilizing and often leave us feeling uncertain of more than just that issue, including who we really are. If we are treating discipleship as an optional part of Christianity, or a secondary emphasis to evangelism, I think we’ve misunderstood what Christianity is about. I am not at all bold enough to make any claims about the salvation of those who hold such a view, whether just in theory or in practice, but it seems that at the very least, the process of transformation into Christlikeness has to happen, and if it fails to at least start in this life, we only further solidify the parts of our life that are contrary to that process, making it a lengthier and more difficult process in the life to come.

The Christlike perspective is necessary in the New Creation, for without it, we may live in the Kingdom, but without an understanding and appreciation necessary for the flourishing we are all called to in the New Creation. So if we must gain this perspective, but it is presently a perspective foreign and unappealing to us, if clothed with that perspective in an instant, would we know how to function? This is not simply being given glasses to make things clear that were once blurry, but learning that what we thought was up is down,  what we thought was power is weakness, what we thought was ugly was beautiful. If we are able to immediately accept and thrive with that instantaneous change, what is the connection between these new people and the people we were before this change? It seems like all that we valued and even the way that we remembered our lives would shift so dramatically, that while it may be the same resurrected body, it may be the same embodied soul, but is that the person we knew ourselves to be before we died? [1]

However, if we are working to bring our perceptions in line with Christ, to see the world as He does, then, like Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, what we now see as a reflection in a mirror, we will then see face to face in the New Creation; what we know in part now we will know fully in the New Creation. It is as though we will gain glasses to see perfectly the things we strained to see here and now. Glasses only do good for people who are trying to see reality, but are struggling. Glasses don’t cure blindness, nor do they cure those who lack a commitment to truly experience reality, preferring to perceive things in ways that serve them most.

Working to gain that Christlike perspective of the world cannot be done on our own, but requires Jesus, for at the very least, we need Him as a check on us as to whether our perceptions are actually becoming more like His or not. We too have work in this, as no one can make us see things differently than we want to see them. An oversimplified analogy would be that of the magic eye pictures that were so popular in the 90s. What looks like a weird, formless pattern on first glance, becomes an interesting 3D picture upon looking at it in the right way. However, if you don’t look at it in the right way, you’ll continue to only see the pattern and not the picture that is within the pattern. You can train yourself to make it easier to see the picture, but it is a different way of looking at the picture than you typically look at the world. In Christ, the reality of the Kingdom requires you to train yourself to see in a way that is foreign to this world, but failing to do so, means that you fail to see the depth of what is going on in the Kingdom, not just in the New Creation, but even in the here and now.

Again, I am not saying that those who call themselves Christians but fail to strive toward a Christlike in the present will not be in the New Creation, for the Triune God does not want anyone to perish, but all to be saved (2 Peter 3:9). However, the work necessary to change our perception can and should begin now, because I believe the Triune God wants all of us there, not just our embodied souls, and there won’t be an instant in which our perceptions are completely and dramatically changed to appreciate the reality and beauty of the Kingdom.

How do we do this? I’ll lay some groundwork for this in the next post.

[1] The explanation of why an immediate, dramatic change in values might undermine our identity is discussed at greater length in a future podcast to be linked once recorded.

Arrogance

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Filed Under: Apologetics, Guest Post, Theology, Worldview Tagged With:

Guest Post by Dr. Joel Schwartz

I recently had a conversation with someone who asked how it could be anything but arrogance that would lead us to question God’s actions in the world. Someone making a claim about not being able to believe (or seriously struggling to believe) in a God who does a certain thing in the world, puts that person above God.  “Who are we to try to tell God what is right and wrong?” I see the submissive intent in such a sentiment, but I think it is misguided. We must ask the question of the intent of Creation and how that relates to our ability to understand right and wrong. If the Triune God created out of desire for relationship with creation, then we should examine how that should lead us to understand what God is trying to do throughout Scripture, and how we should approach this mentality of questioning. 

John Walton recently made the case that the Torah wasn’t given as a legal code, but as a guide toward wisdom. God was showing the Israelites the kinds of actions that a wise person does. The goal of wisdom cannot be reduced to the actions we do, for two people can do the same action, while one does it as a reflection of wisdom and the other for reasons ranging from social pressure to folly or some other reason that falls short of wisdom. As a parent of younger children, I’m learning that you give rules when your kids are young, but you must do that with the long term goal of having them internalize the intent behind those rules. If they are unable to move past the rules to the intent, they can struggle when placed in situations where the rules do not clearly apply. However, as they grow, the hope is that they come to see the good that is driving the one giving the rules. This is what God was doing with the Israelites according to Walton. 

This idea resonates with what Jesus was doing in the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:21-48, Jesus is taking a number of prohibited actions, and pushing deeper, not just to the intent, but in the way we perceive the world and the value in it. For instance, he says that feeling an intense anger with your brother is akin to murder. I don’t know about you, but I don’t seem to have ready control over when I feel intense anger or not (although we all have control as to how we respond to that anger within us). Some say that Jesus is saying that wanting to do something is the same as doing it or dwelling on the idea of doing something is the same, but I think it is more helpful to think of it in terms of Jesus pushing us farther, to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mathew 5:48). Jesus is serious when he says we should not feel that intense anger if we want to be perfect. However, given that the feeling of anger is often outside our control, Jesus is pushing us to go beyond our actions to the way we see things. Bruxy Cavey has said that there is no response to any situation that is better when done out of anger than when done out of love. The difficulty is training ourselves to have a lens of love toward a situation, when we’re already so proficient with an ingrained lens of anger. This is what Jesus is pushing toward with the Sermon on the Mount, such that we do not allow ourselves to feel justified and fulfilled by our doing certain actions. Rather, if we are to be like Jesus, we need to try to see the world as Jesus does. 

Seeing the world in the same way is an important part of any meaningful relationship. If my wife and I see things differently, it can result in conflict. For instance, my wife finds Folgers coffee made in the coffee maker to be insufficiently different from my hand-ground, third wave coffee beans that I use a cone filter and gooseneck tea kettle to make (yes, I’m a coffee snob, thank you, Brett Jameson), such that she’s pretty much just as happy with Folgers as she is with the coffee I make. I joke about how this just further confirms her lack of taste (I mean, look at who she married!!). While this doesn’t cause detrimental conflict in our relationship, it is a difference that reflects how we see the world differently and could lead to conflict (i.e., if we came on a difficult time financially, whether my coffee is worth keeping in the budget, or concerns about the ethics of mass coffee bean farming in order to save money, etc).  

As Christians, the most important relationship we have is with the Triune God, who does accurately perceive all that is in the universe. We can trust that when Jesus tells us how things are, that is how things actually are. When we are told that “our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers, authorities, and principalities,” that if we see someone with flesh and blood and our response is to see them as our enemy with whom we are at war, we’re seeing them incorrectly. When Jesus tells us, “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”, loving your enemies doesn’t mean wishing a painful death upon them, or all kinds of evil. I’m pretty sure that Jesus doesn’t want you to pray for those who persecute you to just stop persecuting you, but to genuinely want good for them (which will likely involve no longer persecuting you, but that may not happen as quickly as you’d like). When Jesus says that those known by God are those who clothed Him when naked, fed Him when hungry, and visited Him in prison, their reaction tells us that these are people who didn’t do it to earn points with God, but because they saw a need and met it, unknowingly serving Jesus at the same time. Jesus is pointing us to a way of life that does not make sense in a context where we’re used to seeing might make right. 

Yet it doesn’t appear we are expected to have it right in order to be in relationship with the Triune God. Abraham, often held up as an exemplar of faith, demonstrates a disturbing lack of faith throughout Genesis (presenting Sarah as his sister to try to save his life, impregnating Hagar, etc). He was also called a friend of God, despite his seeming lack of trust in many instances. David, a man after God’s own heart, was a murderer and an adulterer. Peter denied Christ after three years spent living with him, yet became the leader of the apostles (and still needed to be rebuked by Paul). These people were obviously not required to have everything right about God in order to be held up as someone close to God. Yet, as they grow closer to God, I think we see that they are transformed by their relationship with God.

God is willing to meet people where they’re at, whatever views they hold of Him. If someone claims that they are unwilling to believe in a God that does something (assuming it to be something God actually does), then I think it is much more in God’s nature, assuming He created to enter relationship with creation, to meet the person there and let that be a starting point.  When we encounter God and continue to pursue God, our views of God cannot help but be changed, just as we continue to learn more about all those that we enter into relationship with. However, forcing someone to abandon that view in order to be in agreement with us and our ideas may push them away from growing in that relationship, rather than allowing God to show Himself in the timing and ways that person can handle. 

The problem occurs when we think we have everything figured out and we know God fully. If we get to the point where we believe we have complete knowledge of God, then God must perpetually fit inside those parameters. I know my wife incredibly well, but I’ll admit that I still learn things about her on a regular basis. These things I learn are rarely, if ever, completely shocking, but over time, I realize that I didn’t quite know her as well previously as I do now, and I anticipate this to continue through the rest of our lives. If this perpetual growth is true in our relationships with finite beings that we share the most intimate parts of our selves with, how much more is it with respect to the infinite Creator and Sustainer of the universe?