Meditation - to Om or not to Om

Q: So what is meditation and how is it different from prayer? Deliberately spending time to do nothing other than fill our thoughts with God and listen to him - it is contemplative prayer

Q: How is Christian meditation different from secular or Eastern meditation? In Eastern religions the aim of meditation is to empty our minds
In Christianity it is to fully think about God
New Age - In the West, meditation found its mainstream roots through the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when many of the youth of the day rebelled against traditional belief systems as a reaction against what some perceived as the failure of Christianity to provide spiritual and ethical guidance (this quote is from the Wikipedia on meditation but speaks volumes on the perception of Christianity, or more precisely Christian churches, as a place of where 'proper' behaviour, rules and regulations are more important than inner spiritual growth)

The counter cultural nature of meditation Pretty much all of the spiritual disciplines we will look at through this series are really counter-cultural and none more so than the concept of meditation. Meditation would never have been considered counter-cultural to people in Jesus' day, so why is it now?

Here's a clue, 9,192,631,770

This is the natural constant used to measure the second - The second is defined as being equal to the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. Whereas a thousand years ago, or even a couple of hundred, a day was sliced into just a few segments, dawn, morning, lunch, afternoon, dusk and nighttime we now divide a day into 86,400 seconds.

Our culture is now obsessed with time and doing as much as possible in the minimum amount of time. We multi-task constantly and even single tasking can seem dull, we consume energy drinks and slice our time time so thinly that we have progressed from books, to magazines, to blogs to tweets - 140 characters of information then onto the next piece.

Meditation means setting aside lots of time to achieve nothing external.

Carl Jung the famous psychiatrist said, 'Hurry is not of the devil, it is the devil'


Q: Why is it important? Joshua 1:8 - Do not let this Book of the Law depart from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it, then you will be prosperous and successful"

Its not just to be prosperous and successful (and these aren't necessarily materially just in case you were thinking that) - but to be close to God.
If you think about the relationships that people like Adam and Eve, Moses, Elijah had with God you can see that they talked to God much like we talk to eachother - Ex 33:11 God spoke to Modes 'face to face, as a man speaks to his friend'.

People turned away from that and wanted Moses to be their go-between, we go to church and expect certain people like the pastor to be more 'religious' than us and to spend more time with God doing things like meditating because that is his job. We've absolved ourselves of that deeper relationship with God.

When people do spend time getting close to God, He is able to use us powerfully to enlarge His kingdom.

Phillip and the Eunuch - Acts 8:26-39
Jesus and the Samaritan woman (John 4)
The Centurion - Acts 10:1-6 (Note that the Jewish hour of prayer was at 3pm)
What do you do in an hour of prayer - is it a big list?



Q: Why is meditation not a bigger part of our worship in the Western evangelical church?

1. Counter cultural - it's still too much of an ask for most churches to ask people to be so counter-cultural
2. It gets confused with works (this is much like the other spiritual disciplines)- Imagine a couple getting married, the priest speaks, then the groom says his vows, then the bride says hers, as she finishes speaking the groom let's out a Homer Simpson 'woo-hoo' and runs off yelling 'I'll be in the bar'. Every day the groom just spends a few minutes with the bride where he just asks her to do things for him and never spends time with her alone. Are they still married? Yes. Is is a real relationship - not really. We know that we have grace, we know that we can't get to heaven through works but we seem confused about how to relate to God and have substituted works for... different works, or sometimes nothing. We will organize church events but never to meditate or fast, those things have become reserved for the 'very religious'. So we think that saying we need to meditate or fast is like saying we need to do works. The confusion is that we don't engage in the spiritual disciplines to earn our salvation, that is already assured, but to keep up our relationship with God - we know that all relationships need work but we sometimes think that to say we need to work at something is to deny the grace of the cross - it isn't at all, they are different things but we get them confused.
3. Takes too much time and is too difficult
   

Meditation is a way we simply be with God and listen to Him. Important because we need to have an impact


Practical Spend 20 minutes meditating on one of the following topics

From Psalm 139:
O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD. You hem me in—behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,too lofty for me to attain.
...
For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

From Psalm 46
God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.

There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the Most High dwells. God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day. Nations are in uproar, kingdoms fall; he lifts his voice, the earth melts. The LORD Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress.
...
"Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth."

From Romans 8: For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present or the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

How did you find it?
In our group people said that it helped them really experience the verse rather than just read it and that it would really help them to remember it and be able to bring it to mind

Why is it quite hard to do easily?

• We're used to being over-stimulated
• We have too much busy-ness in our lives so we're unwilling to spend the time
• We're out of practice

Challenge
This month plan ahead to spend a block of 30-60 minutes each week in contemplative prayer, not asking God for anything but just to meditate on one aspect of Him. You will need to:

• plan ahead and mentally dedicate the time to God
• find a place free from distractions
• leave your phone somewhere else and turn it off
• pray about the time ahead of actually doing it

Life Lesson
Prayer and meditation are different aspects of building up and maintaining our relationship with God. They shouldn't be confused with 'works' and doing them cannot earn our salvation but is necessary for our relationship with God. Like all disciplines meditation takes time and work to do properly, and if we spend time listening to God in meditation he will reveal more of himself to us and enable us to have an impact on those around us.

The Discipline of Study

Have you ever tried to do something and found it was much harder than it looked - certainly the first time I tried snowboarding it was a surprise just how hard it was. I was experiencing the first of the 4 stages of learning.

The first is unconscious incompetent, where you don't yet know what you don't know - I didn't know how to snowboard, nor did I know how hard it was (a couple of weeks and I should be like Shaun White right?)

The second is conscious incompetent - you now know you can't do something, I spent a good while at this stage when I was faceplanting at 2 miles and hour learning to snowboard

The third comes after some practice and is conscious competent - you know how to do something but it requires concentration and thought - this is where I am now

The final stage is unconscious competent - you no longer have to think about how to do it, it just comes naturally

This session is about gaining an understanding of where we are at in terms of our ability to study and gaining some tools to help us progress towards unconscious competence.

Q: So why do we need to study?

• To know the truth
• To weather emotional , physical or spiritual storms
• To recognize and challenge bad teaching
• To be changed
• To be able to engage in meaningful debate
• To really engage in what is going on around us

The main grievance the new evangelical atheists have against Christians is that we don't reason things through and we're not rational about our faith. Writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins get really worked up about what they perceive as the deliberate ignorance of Christians who they regard as non-thinkers as far as anything to do with religion goes. Now if you read any of their books you'll find they display the same lack of reason they accuse Christians of, but there's no smoke without fire and many Christians do exhibit a woeful disregard to critical thinking as far as their faith goes.

Q: What causes so many Christians to leave their brains at home in matters of their faith?

• Symptomatic of other areas of their life - some people don't really think about anything
  
• Regarded as something for pastors or leaders - symptomatic of our consumer culture -we're just consumers of the message
  
• Using Christianity as a crutch or a club - they don't really believe it is true and they are worried about what they will find if they start digging
• Don't want to change - ignorance is bliss
• Think study is boring or study about Christianity is boring
• Its about faith, not about knowledge

So given that we don't want to fall into one of the above categories, how do we study?

Repetition - In order for us to be able to really study a subject it has to become familiar to us, repetition is an often maligned teaching technique, as it should be if that is all there is, but is vital in order for us to be able to be able to make associations and study effectively. It takes a certain amount of repetition for anything to sink in - think about learning a language, it takes a fair bit of hearing the same words used time and time again before we can easily bring them to mind.

Read Phillipians 4:8 - it talks about thinking about things that will build up our faith. Notice that is doesn't talk about thinking about avoiding sin - thinking about avoiding sin is like thinking about avoiding a tiger wearing a blue baseball cap and beating a drum - we never would have thought of it unless we were told to avoid it, but when we're told to avoid it it becomes hard to.

The second phase of study is Concentration - In the age of speed and multi-tasking, the ability to fully concentrate on a task is becoming lost and yet it is essential for solving hard problems or thinking through complex situations - these are things we cannot do with serious concentration.

Next comes Comprehension - The ability to string the concepts we have studied together so that we can replay them in our mind, it make sense to us and we can relate it to our understanding of the world means that we have comprehended the thing we are studying.

And finally Reflection - Means that we have not only understood what we were studying but have taken it to heart, we have pondered how it fits with the other things we have studied and we can explain it in different terms to other people with examples from our own experience if applicable.

If we really understand something we can explain even complex concepts to people in simple language - this is the acid test for how much we know the subject we have studied

Let's apply these steps to snowboarding - we have to do a certain amount of it (including all the accompanying falling over) to get anywhere (repetition), and we have to listen to what we're being told about doing it and think hard about how we put it into practice (concentration). Things start to click when we can link our actions to the results we are seeing - when we see the theory working (comprehension) and finally when we can do something we think about how we did it and what we could improve so we can explain what we have learned and what we need to do to improve (reflection)

Studying then applies to all we do, not just study of books, but we also need to know how to study a book. The secret to understanding a book is to really try to see things as the author sees them, suspending judgment until after we have had time to digest what the author is saying. The way to approach a book for study is to

Understand - what is the author saying
Interpret - what do they mean by it
Evaluate - how valid is what they are saying

Often we approach a book in reverse, with a view of how 'good' or accurate the book is going to be and then we see what it says.

The Bible is the most important book we can study, and there is no set way to study the Bible but here are a few important ways
Read the whole Bible - not necessarily straight through but read whole books at a time so that you remember the flow and context of each chapter. Read the same book several times in a row so that you have learned chunks of it and can see them in a different light.

Q: What kinds of styles does the Bible use to get its message across? Prophesy, Simile, Parables, History, Literary, Poetry, Comedy, Hyperbole, Instruction

So it is important to understand the context of the passage we read, is it meant to be taken literally, as an instruction for the people to whom it is being spoken, a parable? In particular Jesus often spoke in ways that were not meant to be taken literally and he would often say 'He who has ears to hear, let him hear'
Q: What does Jesus mean by that phrase?


Q: So how are we supposed to know how to interpret what we read?
Well there are some things to remember about how we understand the Bible, such as: we know that God doesn't change, we know that He is consistent in character, we know that He is Love and we know that he is not bound by our limited view of a human lifetime and instead sees eternity, so his perspective and timing do not always make sense from our limited viewpoint.

When we look at the Bible we need to bear this in mind - we also need to understand the context of the passage, usually by reading what has just gone on before or what is about to come.

Let's use these thoughts when we look at a Bible passage to answer the following question - If study is so transformational why is it that the Pharisees and Sadducees were so criticized by Jesus for their lack of transformation?

Read: Matt 23:8-10.
But you are not to be called 'Rabbi,' for you have only one Master and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth 'father,' for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called 'teacher,' for you have one Teacher, the Christ
Q: How is this passage meant to be interpreted
Q: What is Jesus saying in the passage?

So let's put some of the lessons into practice, looking back at the chapter before and the verses preceding this we can see that the Pharisees and Sadducees were trying to trap Jesus with clever arguments, reading a little ahead we hear Jesus saying 'For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted'

So this is not meant to be taken literally, it is meant as hyperbole (an exaggeration made to make a point). Jesus is saying that to gain an authoritative title for the sake of show or to be in a position of authority because you like the trappings of that role completely goes against the nature of authority. People in authority need to regard themselves with extra humility because of the responsibility that goes with their position, the potential for them to misguide people and the impact if they are not doing a good job is higher than for those not in authority. As James says (James 3:1) 'Not many of you should presume to be teachers, my brothers, because you know that we who teach will be judged more strictly'.


Hopefully that all made sense, now let's try it with this passage - you should set aside at least 30 minutes for this.

Challenge 1 - To put some of this into practice read Luke 14:25-35 and spend time thinking about what it meant, the context it was in, who was it aimed at and what was the intention of it.

Here's the passage, see what you make of it

Large crowds were traveling with Jesus, and turning to them he said: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. "Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying, 'This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.' "Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace. In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple. "Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is fit neither for the soil nor for the manure pile; it is thrown out. "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."

Consider both asking and answering the questions that come to mind as you read this as an important part of study is to capture these questions as you read (e.g. What style is the teaching in? Who is the audience?)

Feel free to use any study guides or ask others - something that it is very helpful for effective study of any book is to understand the thoughts of others on the same or similar subjects which we can gain from reading other books or from discussion in groups. It also helps course correct us if we start having really way off thoughts.



Challenge 2 - Find a subject to really study, if you're not sure what you could study here are a few suggestions

• Your Classroom Dynamics
• Why do we have religious denominations
• Why schoolwork can be dull

email me back your thoughts on the subject, it doesn't have to be one of the ones above - don't write lots of words for the sake of lots of words, remember from last week that we should aim to make things 'as simple as possible, but no simpler (Einstein)

If it seems difficult and that 'nothing is going on' think of the story about a woman who wanted to be a writer but always seemed unable to get started. When she was asked what she saw that was interesting to write about she couldn't find anything and when given an exercise to write 500 words about the things she saw she was unable to complete the assignment. Eventually her teacher told her to write simply about the step to her front door. The woman sat and focused on the step where she saw ants moving in and out of a crack, a receipt for something she had forgotten she had bought and many other things that she normally would never have noticed. Now the woman couldn't stop writing and wrote thousands of words - she had learned to properly observe.

Finally the life lesson for the week

Life Lesson
Study is the observance and understanding of all we see through repetition, concentration, comprehension and reflection. It is vital for our growth and change as Christians, provided we undertake it with an attitude of humility so that we do not learn for the sake of having more knowledge, but in order to serve God more fully.

Kicking Off: Quality, The Law and Spiritual Disciplines

Welcome to the 180 blog which will accompany (hopefully) all of the studies we do from here on. The idea of sticking this onto a blog is to give those of you who miss out on coming to a study the gist of what we discussed and something to get your grey matter sparking.

For the rest of the 2009/2010 school year we'll be looking at the spiritual disciplines required for an impactful life. A lot of the studies will reference Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline which is a long-standing classic in this field.

The disciplines show us nothing less than how we lead a life that pleases God- a big claim which we'll dig into a lot more.

The book's opening pages have a statement which reads ‘The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people’.

Q: What do you think the writer means by deep people?

I'll leave this question for a while and come back to it later, in the meantime how abou tthis question

Q: How can you tell is a person is a good Christian?
Hmm, tricky one. It might be easier to tell a bad Christian as they would break lots of the rules that we've built up in the church. But do those rules really tell us what someone's heart is like?
So how can you tell a good Christian and is a Christian merely a follower of rules? Well, fortunately the Bible tells us that that isn't the case at all, but why is it that so many Christians are just rule followers? And it's not like being a rule follower is a truly good thing - when our Christian life is simply made up of rules we quickly become tired of putting on a front and keeping up the pretense of being good and we spend all of our energy on keeping up appearances. Ultimately this is not satisfying and we end up having a very different public and private life with the private life being the one where we can be 'ourselves'. So if this is what Christianity is like then no thank-you very much I'll find some other hobby to play at.

Thankfully true Christianity isn't about rules but about our relationship with God and growing ever closer to Him. As we get closer to God then we become more like Him and we attain a spiritual depth that we cannot hope to match by merely following rules. So how do we grow closer to God - how much effort does it take?

The answer to this question is not so straightforward - the Bible is very clear that we cannot will ourselves to be better people, if it is in our own effort then we're back to following rules. but likewise if we make no effort then what is the difference between us and someone who does not believe? Herein lies the conundrum - our journey to being more Christ-like demands 100% commitment from us, and 100% dependence on God. All we can do is practise the spiritual disciplines and trust God will change us by His Spirit - not to appear to be nicer Christians, but to actually be more Christ-like - quite different things. I'm reminded of one of the Narnia books where someone asks about Aslan saying 'is he tame?' to which the answer is 'no, but he is good'. I think that is the type of Christian we are called to be, not tame or 'nice' in the traditional sense but truly good. The spiritual discipline are the way in which we make ourselves available to God for him to change us.

Richard Foster talks about some of the encounters he has had with 'deep' people and how those have helped shape his life when a few words or actions from someone who is really in touch with God can have a huge impact on those they come into contact with.

So, point 1 - the spiritual disciplines are the way in which we allow God to work in us to make us deep Christians who are aligned to His perfect will and able to make an impact in the world.

Sean came up with a great passage that summarized this - Philippians 2:12-13
¹²Therefore, 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, ¹³for it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose.

So remembering this let's look at an important and ultimately related subject: Quality

Q: How do you define Quality?
Q: How do you measure Quality?

These may seem unrelated to spiritual disciplines but we'll shortly see that not only are the answers pretty fundamental to our understanding of spiritual disciplines but they also help explain why being a Christian can often seem frustrating and draining rather than joyful as it is supposed to.

A: The best definition of Quality that I've come across is 'Fitness for Purpose' - which means that it's not to be confused with luxury which embellishes quality with unnecessary trappings. A good way of thinking about quality is simplicity or to quote Einstein 'Make it as simple as possible, but no simpler'. Then all that is left is what is necessary for the purpose for which it was made. I'd also recommend the book 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' as an excellent philosophical novel about Quality.

The answer to the second question, about the measurement of quality is more difficult. A good answer is that it has the same characteristics as a reference model. However often we try to define the characteristics which has all sorts of undesired consequences and similar to money, it becomes the root of all kinds of problems. But before we discuss that let's dive into a fairly involved passage from Paul's letter to the Romans, Rom 7:5-25.

So, my brothers, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit to God. For when we were controlled by the sinful nature,the sinful passions aroused by the law were at work in our bodies, so that we bore fruit for death. But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.

What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, "Do not covet."But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead. Once I was alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death.
For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good. Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So Paul is really saying that Law isn't wrong, but if our focus is on the law then the law becomes a trap for us. Keep that thought in mind as we flip back to the question around the measurement of quality. Let me give you an example from my work - its a little techy so stay with me as there is a really important point at the end of this.

The other day I was keeping one of our vendors on their toes by getting involved in the code reviews of the software they were delivering. I've been coding for a long, long time and had the privilege of coding with some pretty outstanding developers - which means I've picked up a lot about what makes good code. Good code is as simple as possible, adding or subtracting anything from it would only make it worse. This code was not good.

For a start the code was messy, which may seem like an odd comment when code is supposed to be all about logic, and stranger coming from someone whose desk looks like it has been deliberately obfuscated; but messy is a bad, bad sign when talking about code quality. Part of the mess was caused by the code formatter forcing the code to 80 columns wide which meant that some expressions trailed across multiple lines. Then there was the lack of any comments saying what the code was doing, horrible exception handling and numerous other issues. I made my comments, gave them a generous 'D' and told them to fix it. When the code came back I had a whole new set of issues such as code riddled with comments that added no value and still the code was messy.

What has this got to do with the measurement of quality you'd be justified in asking? Well a lot of the problems were to do with the developer trying to meet the quality measurements. Ultimately, quality code is as concise and easy for the next person to pick up as possible. That would be the definition of quality code (at least my definition). Now although this is a good definition it is difficult to follow for a coding novice, so companies introduce guidelines in order to make it easier for novices and to promote consistency between coders. The guidelines say things like 'don't have lines that go over 80 characters', or 'ensure there is a good ratio of comments to code'. This is all well and good but if you don't understand what quality is it is still easy to follow these guidelines and still produce really bad code, in fact sometimes the guidelines cause the code to be bad, as they do in the 80 characters per line rule - this is simply a throwback to when coding was all done on mainframe terminals which typically only supported 80 characters on a line, these days with hi-res monitors and better editors it is pointless and makes things worse.

The act of measuring people according to a set of guidelines invariably means that they aim to hit the guidelines rather than exhibit the behaviors the guidelines are intended to drive. I worked at a company whose help desk was measured on the time they took between calls with the aim of reducing it in order to service more people. What actually happened was that lots of the helpdesk staff called themselves in order to drive down this figure and then had the phone on while they surfed the web or engaged in some other work avoidance behaviour of their choice. The measurement had the opposite effect to that intended and at the risk of over quoting Einstein 'not everything that counts can be counted, not everything that can be counted counts'.

Let's take a step back here as I've deliberately thrown out some thoughts and passages and its time to bring them together and get to the point. We've got

• Quality - Fitness for Purpose
• The Law vrs Freedom in Christ
• Code Reviews showing that guidelines don't always produce good code
• Spiritual Disciplines being the way we put ourselves where God can complete his good work in us and make us more like him.
  

So putting all of this together and to apply the concept of Quality; a Quality human would be one who is fit for purpose. What is our purpose, well we are created in God's image to serve God and reveal Him to those around us through our words and actions in the strength of God's spirit. We now see that this lines up well with spiritual depth, so we see that practicing the spiritual disciplines gives us depth which equates to fitness for purpose or Quality.

We also see that regulations aimed at achieving the same effect end up becoming diversions or end up replacing the very thing they were aimed at guiding us to. So we see that the law, or the expectations of what is right behavior and all of the other trappings we hang around our faith can end up drawing us away from the goal of our faith which is a relationship with Jesus.

Life Lessons - this is the summary bit so if you remember nothing else then remember this part

Our fitness for purpose as Christians, or our depth/quality, comes not from measurable things (the law) but from building up our spiritual discipline so that we become more like Jesus, not just appear to be more like Jesus. Practice of spiritual disciplines leads to true Depth (a.k.a Quality which equals Fitness for purpose as humans)

Conversely is our efforts are simply to obey the law it leads to a preoccupation with the law rather than the spirit of the law and then onto surface Christianity which makes us ineffective and ultimately means we will reject God because it is too hard or lead a compromised Christianity.

If we are not spiritually deep, everything we do as Christians will be hard and have limited effectiveness. So if we are constantly thinking that being a Christian is hard and not really worth it, it may be because we are trying to do everything in our own strength. Maybe we are always trying to do what we’ve learned is right behavior rather than what God is directing us to do.

In this series we will put into practice the spiritual disciplines and wait on God to transform us more and more into his likeness so that we can be good Christian rather than tame ones.