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 questionQ: 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.
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
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.
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