A Momentary Lapse of Reason

Just as it would be sheer insanity to expect a marriage to have depth of intimacy when we neglect our spouse, so too it is equally insane to expect that by neglecting the spiritual disciplines we will experience the abundant Christian life. In marriage, there are times in which we do not particularly feel in love with our spouse. However, if we choose to continue to treat our spouse with kindness and respect anyway, (unless the other spouse absolutely refuses to reciprocate) we will soon find that those feelings have not only unexpectedly returned but grown deeper and stronger as well. In just the same way, we will not always feel very much like Christians. But if we continue to faithfully do what Christ has called us to do, we will find that those feelings will begin to flow more and more often and that they will grow deeper and richer. Please hear what I am saying. I am not saying that feelings should dictate our Christian walk, being a sort of dipstick by which we evaluate our spiritual lives. Rather, I am saying that if we are faithful to our Lord, soon the cloud will burst and the Son of God will shine through. Put another way, we can’t expect to ever have any real depth of feeling if we neglect our spiritual lives and let the weeds spring up. However, if we take time to be holy, we will find that more often than not, those feelings of alienation, restless discontent, detachment—the perception of being cast adrift—will begin to evaporate and the joy of the Lord (which is our strength) will fill our hearts and the peace that passeth understanding will flood our souls. If we are not obedient to Christ, there is nothing that guarantees that joy and peace will characterize our lives; what is more, our lives are certainly going to lack power, for they will not bear the stamp of one who walks closely with the Lord: we play a dangerous game when we refuse to obey.

We have spoken of a certain amount of dedication and effort required on our part if we wish to experience abundant Christian living. What might this picture look like? Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And what is the greatest commandment? “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, body, soul, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself.” In classic Christianity, these objectives are met by several interrelated disciplines: (1) spending regular time in prayer, (2) diligently searching the Scriptures, (3) faithfully assembling together with (particularly a small number of) like-minded believers, and by extension (4) applying the soothing balm of Christian charity to the wounds of a hurting world around. If any one of these elements is not in place, our Christian lives will suffer. If none of these elements are in place, we are well on our way to spiritual suicide. Do you know what each one of these elements have in common? They all are forms of obedience. And do you know what else is significant about the fact that they all involve obedience? Let’s turn to the etymology of the word “obedience” to find out.

According to the Holman Bible Dictionary, obedience means “to hear God’s Word and act accordingly. The word translated ‘obey’ in the Old Testament means ‘to hear’ and is often so translated.” The dictionary goes on to report that “in the New Testament, several words describe obedience. One word means ‘to hear or to listen in a state of submission.’ Another New Testament word often translated ‘obey’ means ‘to trust.’” Of the three reference sources My Journal cites for the New Testament Greek, Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament is credited with the following three definitions:

1) prop., of one who on a knock at the door comes to listen to who it is (the duty of a porter)

Incidentally, My Journal also notes that parakoe, the negation of hupakoe above, is not actually found in the New Testament, though it does help to provide an excellent point of contrast. Apparently these three words are the primary (though perhaps not exclusive) ones used in the New Testament where the concept of obedience is expressed. In any event, it is interesting that built into each of these words is the concept of hearing. And that aspect carries over from the Latin as well. The article Christian Obedience: Beyond the Basics from the Holy Myrrhbearers Monastery (an Orthodox community for women, so named in honor of the women who went to anoint Jesus’s body) reports that “We know from looking at the English word ‘obedience,’ that it comes from the Latin obaudire, which means to listen well. Many languages do not have separate words for listening and obedience. Only as English speakers have lost touch with the roots of their language, have they gradually slipped into this separation and misunderstanding.” The article goes on to say:

There is one last paragraph that we will cull from the self-same before closing in on our discussion about what the various spiritual disciplines entail. The author of Christian Obedience: Beyond the Basics previously states:

Let’s review the four classic disciplines we mentioned: (1) spending regular time in prayer, (2) diligently searching the Scriptures, (3) faithfully assembling together with like-minded believers, and by extension (4) applying the soothing balm of Christian charity to the wounds of a hurting world around. Now we noticed that each of these has in common the fact that it is a form of obedience and we also examined the idea that to obey meant both to hear and to respond. With this expanded understanding of obedience, we also note that what each of these four disciplines has in common is that it does not exist in isolation. Each one involves a form of fellowship between God and man, man and man, or a combination of the two. We also realize that Jesus summarized the greatest commandments as loving the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and loving your neighbor as yourself. With the vertical relationship with God firmly in place, the horizontal relationship between man and man is a natural by-product. So then, our obedience to God is not a grudging duty, but rather a dynamic and breathing relationship in which we both listen and are given the opportunity to speak, letting our requests be made known before God.

What kind of a God is this whom we are commanded to love; what kind of God is this we both trust and obey? None other than the Heavenly Father who knows how to give good gifts to His children. And if we will take His yoke upon us, we will find that it is easy and His burden light. Yet with all things considered, that doesn’t mean that we can do just anything we want, anymore than being married means that we can do just anything we want. If a husband cheats on his wife, that is grounds for divorce. He is not free to sell their house on a whim without consulting with her first. If he is working late, she expects him to call her so that she won’t be worried about him. But each one of the restrictions his marriage places on him is there to safeguard and keep it, and if he does so, his marriage is something that will bring him great happiness and joy. In order to have security and trust, there have to be boundaries; there is no order without border. And in just this same sense, our relationship with our Heavenly Father does not entitle us to do just whatever we want without consequence to ourselves and others. Do you remember our discussion some time ago on the link between faith and fealty (Samurai and Mustard Seeds: Fealty’s Link to Faith)? In a word, any worthwhile relationship requires fidelity and suffers to the degree that it lacks it. It could be no other way.

Let’s take a closer examination of each of the four aspects we mentioned for developing a deeper relationship with God. The first we noted was spending regular time in prayer. Prayer is in many ways our lifeline to the Father, the pedicel that joins branch to Vine. Prayer is important, for if we do not maintain it, we easily become as vine tips that develop skototropism, growing toward the darkness rather than the light. Of all the prayers in the bible, the Lord’s Prayer is surely the most fundamental in teaching us to pray. Emmet Fox wrote an excellent discussion on the Lord’s Prayer that I read recently, and while I have given the subject much independent thought, we will only briefly highlight it here, our thoughts flowing with those of Fox. The complete Lord’s Prayer, as it appears in Matthew 6:9–13, is as follows:

The first line reminds us that we serve a God who is both relational (Our) and familial (Father). Nothing escapes His notice; He is omnipotent, in full control of all that happens on the earth, overseeing the affairs of men: (which art in heaven). He is the standard of ultimate perfection, in Him is no spot or wrinkle, and His very name implies “that which nothing is greater than”: (Hallowed be thy name). The first commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, body, and strength and we can confidently do so because God is a good God. We are to will His good even as He wills ours: (Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven). He is the benevolent Father who gives good gifts to His children and supplies all of their needs. Likewise, He will supply our own: (Give us this day our daily bread). Let us pause for a moment and ponder a parable.

It came to a certain king’s attention that one of his servants owed him ten thousand talents. The king decreed that this man, his wife, his children, and all his goods be sold to pay off the debt. But the man fell to his knees and begged his king to give him more time, so moving the sovereign with compassion that he forgave the man all. A short time later the forgiven servant came across another man who owed him a small sum of money: one hundred pence. But the king’s servant had no pity on the other man and ordered him cast into prison, heedless to his pleas for mercy. When the king caught wind of what had happened, he became wroth with anger and sent the shameful servant off to the tormenters to be punished until such time as he could pay all that he owed (Matthew 18:23–35). Our Lord has been gracious and forgiven us countless times when we did not deserve it; He expects us to do the same with others: (Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors). God does not tempt anyone to evil, nor can He do so. And when we are tempted, He provides a way of escape so that we may stand up under it: (Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil). All good things come from the hand of God; there is nothing that is good that did not. Alone in the universe, God is sovereign, holy, majestic, and worthy of eternal praise and honor: (For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever). All these things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report, virtuous, and praiseworthy, thus we fix our minds upon them; so let it be; let is be so: (Amen).

The second thing we suggested was a diligent study of the Scripture. Imagine, for a moment, if God came down and wrote in an obviously “God-language.” Could any man understand it? But His plan of salvation is designed for humanity and takes man into consideration at every step of the journey. Therefore, the Holy Scriptures have been recorded in the human vernacular. As such, they consist of sentences that are themselves comprised of nouns, pronouns, predicates, adjectives, adverbs, and other parts of speech. Additionally, there are many different literary formats throughout the bible, from the poetry of the Psalms to the historical narratives of the Gospels. There are also a number of different literary devices such as hyperbole, metaphor, simile, parallelism, chiasmus, and many others. Further, the men who were inspired to write these words were not merely recording them in isolation, but were rather shaped by their culture and obediently writing to known audiences. Sometimes what was written was prophetic, sometimes poetic; sometimes it was austere and straightforward, at others it was strewn with metaphor and simile.

There is a tendency of many Christians to close their minds to these types of considerations, because they feel it is an affront to the status of the bible as a book of books. But it is one thing to say and agree in the abstract that the author of the bible is God and that the book is inerrant and quite another to parse it out in the particular in our daily lives. In order to do this, we all must employ some type of interpretation to the text—some type of hermeneutic—because in the end, what we are dealing with is symbols on the printed page that are representational of ideas but not resemblant of them: that is to say that the four letters “f-i-s-h” in no way, shape, or form resemble the thing that comes flopping up on the shore, but they do nonetheless represent that thing: their representation is purely symbolic and conventional. Likewise, symbols always require some degree of analytic process, whether we are talking about the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek of the bible, or if we are talking about understanding the love letter penned us by our beloved. The warm or spiritual emotions can only truly be said to follow once understanding has taken place. For most of us, the hermeneutic we adopt by default is the one supplied us by our pastor, priest, or various radio personalities we hear. But from whence did they get their hermeneutic? At some point, there has to be an engagement with the text in order to derive any sort of meaning.

If we wish to get the most out of our study of the bible, we should remember that all Scripture was written in a specific context, against a specific backdrop, with a specific intent in mind, and when we can get to the heart of all of these things, we will have much greater insight into how it is applicable to our lives today in contemporary culture. We must be careful to avoid reading anachronistically, our inferences derived only after we have, to the best of our ability, understood the intent and idea communicated. We should be somewhat wary in an indiscriminate use of proof-texts, for single sentences can be lifted from extended passages, and once removed from their larger context, they can be made to say most anything the ventriloquist wishes them to say. The bible, as my father always says, is its own best commentary, but in order to be so, it requires care and consideration so that the hermeneutic we derive is a valid one: one that was there before we got there, not one that we have merely read into the text. As much as we are able, we need to look at Scripture in the largest possible context, seeing it as a whole and examining its individual parts with the ultimate view of putting them back together to aid in a greater understanding of the whole. The Holy Spirit will help quicken our spirit and reveal truths to us, but we must roll up our sleeves and do our part; the more diligently we study Scripture, the broader the arsenal through which He may speak. All things considered, the Sacred Scriptures are the source by which the Christian faith has remained unified throughout the years, pointing us to Christ, establishing the key doctrines of the faith, and producing literally millions upon millions of secondary texts and commentaries. In sum, the Holy Scriptures form the doctrinal backbone of Christianity.

The third point we desperately need for spiritual growth is the assembly with like-minded believers, preferably in small settings where each of us can use the gifts God has given us. We need to be able to come together in a setting in which we can be vulnerable and transparent and in which we feel accepted, affirmed, supported, and challenged to walk the Godly lives God has called us to lead. If we do not have the fellowship with other believers, Christianity very quickly loses its meaning. And at the risk of being burned at the stake for being a heretic, not all churches are created equal. In many instances, the institutional aspects of the faith have begun to crowd out the humanity, leaving not a faith that breathes, but a procedure that suffocates. It has been my observation that often the most productive times are in small settings that meet on a regular basis to fellowship in each other’s homes and/or other intimate venues. We desperately need to have this kind of interaction with other believers in which we can share our trials and the cares of our week, along with the joys and the triumphs. Without such interaction, we soon die slow deaths.

If you are not currently a part of a small group of believers, may I suggest that you start a small meeting in your home? Perhaps a bible study, a book study, a time simply of tea and fellowship? maybe a group that has a similar hobby, like golfing, or gardening, or weaving rugs? Most any informal setting where you can get to know one another and begin to feel a part, most any setting in which you begin to feel like you are with family, most any setting in which you know that when you share the burdens on your heart, others will grieve with you, that when you share your joys and your triumphs, that they will celebrate with you? Nothing will sabotage your faith, your joy, and your power faster than not having the mutual support and encouragement of a group of believers to whom you truly feel connected and a part. You may understandably have a phobia when it comes to assembling with other believers because you have been badly burned or wounded before. But may I invite you to take those first baby steps toward healing and reconciliation, reaching out again to your brothers and sisters in the faith? I do not say that you should necessarily reach out again to the same people who hurt you before—it might take a long time to truly forgive and move past these grievances—but the fact is, you need to have at least (as the barest minimum) one other solid Christian with whom you can fellowship on a regular basis. You may be able to subsist without it, but I guarantee your garden will not be well watered and your solidity as a believer is certain to suffer and be a bit wilted around the edges.

The fourth consideration, the final and natural by-product of the other three, is an increasing concern for reaching out into the world around us and making what difference we can. This single area can be a Christian’s greatest struggle, and it is undoubtedly one of my own. If you are at all like me, you tend to be a coward for Christ, overly concerned with what others will think of you. That is but one of the benefits of assembling with like-minded believers, for if we truly feel connected, we will have far less need to gain approval from outside sources. The fact is, being accepted is what our hearts crave: we all love to be loved, we all want to be wanted, we all need to be needed, we all want to feel like we have worth. And if we do not get this kind of affirmation from our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, it will make it far more difficult for us to take a stand during those times in which we find ourselves standing alone. Perhaps you can see why mere church attendance is often not enough, because it is so easy for church to seem so far removed from the real world that it does little in terms of inculcating us against the pressures against which we have been called to stand. That is why an informal fellowship can be so freeing, because we can all get together and be authentic and honest.

If all we do when we come to church is the same that we do throughout the rest of the week—that is, if all we do is try to gain approval by doing the things we think the others will find acceptable so that no one will think ill of us—then that is a near certain indication that church is not functioning in its proper role in our lives. If this describes you, my counsel would be that you take the aching hunger that has been stirred up in your heart right now and ask God to help you find a group of Christian friends who will allow you to take the pious mask off and be real. Surely it will be ugly sometimes. But we get nowhere at all if we simply hold the poison in. It must be released, and the only proper way to release it is in a Godly, supportive environment where all the people there are rooting for you, intent on seeing you succeed. It may take a little bit of time to find such a group, but if you make it a matter of prayer and keep your eyes open for the opportunities God presents to you, you might be amazed at just how quickly the new plan might unfold and in ways you could not have imagined. But you should also know that when you start praying for these things, you have an enemy that will begin to dog you much harder than ever before. Hell shutters at the thought of Christians gaining strength and support through fellowship. Remember this fact and don’t get discouraged. Real spiritual progress rarely happens without an incredible fight.

Archive note: See also the discussion forum thread regarding this newsletter.

Now comes the paragraph where I am supposed to wrap this thing up and finalize it with a nice pretty bow. But you know, getting this newsletter written has been one of my hardest assignments yet and now that I am on this end of it, I think I know why. There are quite a few of you out there in Le Penseur land who haven’t had someone talk this frankly with you in the course of your entire Christian lives. You certainly don’t hear it at church. And the same enemy of yours who does not want you hearing these words, doesn’t want me writing them either. I had no motivation to write this week, though my topic was given to me by Thursday of last week. There was no escaping it. I knew I was to write of obedience and the deeper Christian walk. I also knew that I was not qualified; I knew that these very same issues I have written about are also a struggle for me; I knew that I had very little insight or inspiration. But I also knew what I was to write: there was no mistaking God’s leading this time around. I knew that I could write about a lot of things I would much rather write about: exciting things, interesting things, thought-provoking things, tantalizing things, but I had my choice: I could either be obedient and write about obedience, or I could be miserable because I knew that I was going against God. I knew that if I went against God, all my supposed brilliance would be little more than cotton fluff and just as quickly blow away in the breeze. And so, a ridiculous number of hours later, this newsletter is about ready to come to a close and I know that in many ways it was not me, but in spite of me, that it came together as it did. With these concessions out of the way, I will not even try to apply any polish to the conclusion but simply say adieu to you; may my obedience mark an increase in your own, just as the Body has always been designed to function when men take their hands off and let the Spirit take control. It may scare us to death sometimes, but the alternative is to stagnate and die.

“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.”

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