Tactical Faith
Equipping Christians in Alabama
Have you ever wondered if C.S. Lewis took his faith seriously? Well, he did. This might come as a surprise to very few, but if you have wondered just how much C.S. Lewis prayed, then you should hear out this podcast.
Matthew Burford interviews one of his professors, Dr. Lyle Dorsett. In this podcast Dr. Dorsett talks about C.S. Lewis’s letters, books, and dogs. All relevant to our faith. Dogs especially.
And let us take thought of how to spur one another on to love and good works, not abandoning our own meetings, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and even more so because you see the day drawing near.
Hebrews 10:24-25
“But you don’t have to go to church to go to Heaven,” said Tim, who had been at Brother Bryan Rescue Mission for two months before declaring this in my weekly theology class. The chapter title for that day’s discussion was “The Importance of the church,” which everyone in class was eager to nod in agreement with, maybe even an 1amen. However, each man in the class proceeded to tell me they haven’t been to a church in 5, 10, or some even 20 years. Unholy cognitive dissonance, Batman. There seems to be a disconnect here, but if I’m honest it’s the same disconnect I also had early in my adult life.
Is the church really that important? I mean, isn’t it really just about having a personal relationship with Jesus? Why does church matter to my internal, relational experience with God? Plus, Tim had accepted Jesus into his heart, so he knows he won’t have to suffer in hell for eternity. Hasn’t he accomplished the outcome church is designed to achieve – assurance of heavenly ever after? What more could we ask of the church once I finally ascend to and believe the Gospel?
Covid-19 has temporarily altered worship for millions of Christians around the world, and especially in the United States. With streaming services and Zoom proliferating, the relevancy of this topic cannot be overstated. How we understand what church is will greatly impact churchgoing well into the future. More pointedly, it will impact the spiritual lives of Christians well into the future. What do we call the streaming platforms? Are they “church” or something else? It appears some churches, especially in the West, have forgotten some paramount reasons for faithful attendance to a local church. I must confess that I did not hold the church in high regard during the early years of owning my faith. I had not forgotten the reasons for the church; I never actually knew them. I had always been told that the church was vital for spiritual health, but I was never taught why the church was vital for spiritual growth. Through failures, triumphs, time, seminary, ministry, and most of all, the church, I have come to believe the Christian life is impossible apart from the church.
This is the first of what I hope to be a series of blog posts for Tactical Faith to share some of the things I have learned through life, ministry, and Scripture regarding the importance of the church. Here is a list of some of the topics I want to cover in those post:
I’m going to share from Scripture, history, theology, and some personal experiences in order to share my thoughts on these questions. I believe that the church is the greatest source of hope for the trying times we are facing now and those to come. I hope this is a dialogue in which you feel free to ask questions and to share comments. The questions and feedback will spur us on to think rightly about the local church, which should lead to the glorification of God. Footnote: In this essay, “church” is not capitalized. I will address the difference in “church” and “Church” in a subsequent essay.
1 In this essay, “church” is not capitalized. I will address the difference in
“church” and “Church” in a subsequent essay.
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.
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.
