Making Spiritual Disciplines More Than Just Another “To Do”

Spiritual disciplines aren’t just one more thing to keep us busy. They don’t exist to occupy our mind. We don’t do them as penance. Spiritual disciplines are here for us as tools to focus on God, put him first and find our ultimate delight and fulfillment solely in God. Too often in the past, I have taught the “how to’s” of the disciplines without teaching the “Why”. The key ingredient to making the spiritual disciplines (things like prayer, fasting, scripture reading & rest) effective is identifying their purpose.

Why do these things? We do them because they draw us closer to God. Left to ourselves, doing the things that come natural to us, drawing near to God is difficult. It takes us doing things that at first don’t come natural to us (like abstaining from food!) in order to get in tune with God on a level that goes beyond the ordinary. Once we understand that these practices draw us closer to God they more easily become a natural and regular part of our lives. But before that can be true we have to really, really desire God. If we don’t desire God, we won’t desire to be closer to Him. If we don’t believe we can actually find fulfillment in God we won’t desire to draw closer to Him.

The effectiveness of the spiritual disciplines rest solely on our desire for God. Without that we are just going through the motions. Once we understand that and FEEL that draw and that desire, the disciplines become powerful, transformative and normative in the Christian life. What once felt so unnatural becomes a natural part of our lives. So before we teach the disciplines, let’s make sure we start with the “Why” otherwise we are just teaching more “to do’s”. More on the disciplines in some upcoming posts.

P.S. – As I have been studying through the disciplines I have been convicted that one has been missing from many lists is the discipline of waiting (read Psalm 37 and see if it doesn’t come across that way to you). It is also one of the most needed disciplines in Western culture today.

Shame: Us, God & Psalm 25

In the beginning, God made everything unashamedly good,  “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” (Gen 2:25). Fast forward one chapter…the fruit, a serpent, temptation…being like God?, a bite…another bite, fear & shame. It went like this,

“When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” – Gen 3:6-10

Their reaction to their actions was a classic shame response – they tried to cover it/themselves up (with fig leaves and actual hiding) because they were afraid. Shame has a way of making us afraid to face reality. Sometimes shame comes from something we have done. Other times we feel shame because of something someone has done to us.

Recently, I have had several conversations with people who are facing tremendous levels of shame and fear. They are going through this same process we see in Genesis 3 – poor decisions were made and ever since they have experienced shame, fear and have tried to cover it up. But you can only cover it up for so long before you realize that freedom only comes in answering God’s question, “Where are you?” When God asks that, he really needs to hear our honest answer. Maybe our answer is that we are in a really dark place because of our decisions. Or maybe our answer is that we are in a mess because of what others have done to us and we just cannot let it go. If we are going to get past the shame we have to start with telling God where we are, right here and now. If we aren’t honest about that and express it to Him, it can never be fully dealt with and healing will come slow, if ever.

One of the places I have turned in helping people deal with shame is Psalm 25. I am going to let this psalm speak for itself…just notice how the end of shame comes from God and our trusting in His guidance.

¹ To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul;
²     in you I trust, O my God.
Do not let me be put to shame,
nor let my enemies triumph over me.
³ No one whose hope is in you
will ever be put to shame,
but they will be put to shame
who are treacherous without excuse.

⁴ Show me your ways, O Lord,
teach me your paths;
⁵ guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my Savior,
and my hope is in you all day long.
⁶ Remember, O Lord, your great mercy and love,
for they are from of old.
⁷ Remember not the sins of my youth
and my rebellious ways;
according to your love remember me,
for you are good, O Lord.

⁸ Good and upright is the Lord;
therefore he instructs sinners in his ways.
⁹ He guides the humble in what is right
and teaches them his way.
¹⁰ All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful
for those who keep the demands of his covenant.
¹¹ For the sake of your name, O Lord,
forgive my iniquity, though it is great.
¹² Who, then, is the man that fears the Lord?
He will instruct him in the way chosen for him.
¹³ He will spend his days in prosperity,
and his descendants will inherit the land.
¹⁴ The Lord confides in those who fear him;
he makes his covenant known to them.
¹⁵ My eyes are ever on the Lord,
for only he will release my feet from the snare.

¹⁶ Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am lonely and afflicted.
¹⁷ The troubles of my heart have multiplied;
free me from my anguish.
¹⁸ Look upon my affliction and my distress
and take away all my sins.
¹⁹ See how my enemies have increased
and how fiercely they hate me!
²⁰ Guard my life and rescue me;
let me not be put to shame,
for I take refuge in you.
²¹ May integrity and uprightness protect me,
because my hope is in you.

²² Redeem Israel, O God,
from all their troubles!

If you are dealing with shame, hand it over to God…follow His lead and let him redeem whatever it is that has happened to you or that you have done in order to get beyond what you are going through. When God deals with it, that is a profound act of grace.

Review of the Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament by G.K. Beale

I just finished reading the Handbook on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament and it was worth the read. I don’t review every book I read but I try to make sure I review the ones worth reading. There are a few things about Beale’s perspective that I found helpful. First, he has done his homework. He has studied this topic for several decades and over the last few years has put out several resources to help people understand how the New Testament writers understood and used the Old Testament through their direct quotations and allusions to various OT texts. Second, he respects scripture as the inspired Word of God and views God as the ultimate author of scripture. That has implications in his approach that impacts the book in a major way and I found it very helpful (more on that in a minute). Third, at least in this book, he is thorough but concise…a quality few seem to possess.

This handbook is basically a “how to” on his approach in an effort to inform you how to work through this subject on your own with actual texts. Another resource he published recently is his New Testament Biblical Theology is a theology of the NT based through the lens of the OT. I purchased this as well and haven’t read it but it is HUGE and looks exceptionally good (it is expensive). Third is a commentary he wrote with D.A. Carson called Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament. This book is more of a verse by verse commentary (where appropriate) of how the NT writers used and interpretaed various OT texts and appropriated them into the NT in various ways and for various purposes. I haven’t seen this book yet but I can only imagine it would be well worth purchasing.

The Handbook begins with a discussion of challenges that have to be addressed in understanding the issues involved in understanding how the NT writers used the OT. Those challenges range from whether or not the NT writers really cared about the context of the OT scriptures they cited down to the very definition of typology. Beale believes that virtually all OT allusions and quotations were used by the NT writers in view of their context. What is more, since God is the ultimate author of scripture (p.24) and had a hand in guiding the process of the production of scripture from start to finish, all scripture is used contextually among authors because underlying it all is God as the ultimate author of Scripture and God certainly understands what He has said in earlier writings contextually (both historical context and literary context).

Beale spends a lot of time on typology and the debate that has surrounded how typology is to be defined. Does typology require the original passage to have understood itself to be a forward looking prophesy in order for it to be understood that way in the NT (authorial intent of a scripture being prophetic)? For instance, Deuteronomy 18 talks about a prophet like Moses who was to come. That passage is a type for Jesus. The text itself is forward looking and looking for future fulfillment.

In chapter 2, Beale writes about direct quotations in the NT of OT passages and allusions (probably the trickiest) in the NT to the OT. Quotations are pretty easy to find. There is usually an introductory formula (as it is written, etc) that identifies the NT writer is purposefully making use of the OT. Allusions are a bit trickier. Beale defines an allusion as, “a brief expression consciously intended by an author to be dependent on an OT passage.” (p.31). How tightly connected to the OT does something have to be for us to understand the NT writer had in mind that they were making an allusion to something in the OT? They can allude to a specific verse, a word, a theme, etc.

One of the best assets in this book are the resources and bibliographies that Beale (and his grad assistants!) have compiled. He frequently makes suggestions of further resources to help you in your study. He recommends NA27′s list of OT allusions in the NT (Nestle-Aland’s Novum Testamentum Graece 27th edition) as well as C.A. Evan’s book Ancient Texts for New Testament Studies: A Guide to the Background Literature as he goes not only into the NT’s OT allusions but also OT allusions in the NT from the Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Philo, Josephus, Qumran, targums, and so much more! Another interesting book he cites is H. Gough’s The NT Quotations Collated with the Scriptures of the OT (online at google books) that actually works the other way around by working organizing the NT citations but in the order of the OT. So it would start with Genesis and list any NT citations/allusions.

After the first two introductory chapters just described, Beale lays out his methodology in chapter 3 and spends the rest of the book working through parts of his methodol0gy. Here is how he works through these passages (p.42-43):

1. Identify the OT reference
2. Analyze the broad NT context where the OT reference occurs
3. Analyze the OT context
4. Survey the use of the OT text in early Judaism
5. Compare the texts: NT, LXX, targums, MT, etc
6. Analyze the NT’s author’s textual use of the OT passage (what version is he citing or did he do his own translation?)
7. Analyze the NT writer’s interpretive use of the OT
8. Analyze their theological use of the OT
9. Analyze their rhetorical use of the OT

He spends the rest of chapter three giving more explanation of each of these steps and then spends the remainder of the book giving even more specifics.

Chapter 4 – Works through Step 7
Chapter 5 – Works through Step 8
Chapter 6 – Works through Step 4 (He has a lengthy bibliography in this section that is nearly worth the price of the book)
Chapter 7 is a case study that puts all the steps into action.

Does the Bible Condemn Bad Handwriting?

There is this little Hebrew word that is only used three times in the Old Testament. The word is באר (ba-ar). It means to make something really, really plain. The first place this word is used in the Bible is in Deuteronomy 1:5 where Moses “explains” the Law. Literally, he makes the Law plain and clear to the people. Preachers should take note here that it is important we make God’s Word clear and understandable to those who listen but this doesn’t just apply to the spoken word. In Deuteronomy 27:8 Moses told the people to write the Law on some stones that they were to set up at Ebal. He told them to write “very clearly”. The thought here is not that they change the words of the Law to be more understandable but that they write them neatly so they are legible. Last, we have Habakkuk 2:2 where God told the prophet Habakkuk, ““Write down the revelation and make it plain on tablets so that a herald may run with it.” In other words, write it so largely and legibly that people can read it on the fly. As the herald runs around with the message there will be no mistaking what it says. Why is that important? It is important because God has a message for His people that He wants them to pay attention to.

Of course today, few of us hand write much of anything. We have nice fonts that are easy to read set against clean and clear backgrounds of the color of our choice…and you can make them as large or as small as you like with the click of a button. Legibility is not the issue today and no, the Bible is not really condemning poor handwriting at large. But what God does want from us is to be able to communicate His message to the world and to Christians in a way that is clear and easy to understand. In a single word the Gospel needs to be made accessible to whoever is willing to look or listen. It is important that we learn to communicate things well and really think about our words whether through the written word (writing books, blogging, facebook, twitter, email, texting) or through the spoken word (preaching, teaching, personal conversations).

The difficulty of  באר (ba-ar) is that making something clear and simple usually takes more time and is more difficult than making something complex. You have to work at it.

Experiential Study of the Psalms

We studied the Psalms in our 20s & 30s class a few months ago. In doing so, we made an attempt to not just talk about the psalms but to allow the voice of the psalms to speak into the class itself. We wanted to hear what they say and then reflect on them rather than get caught up into all kinds of lecture on poetic tools, authorship, and all of that (all good topics for study of course!). I also just uploaded this in the Bible Class Archive. This study put the free material in there over 3000 pages!

Here is the pdf of that study we called Psalms In Real Life

Teaching the Psalms: Experience First, Discuss Second

When I started teaching the psalms a few months ago I started with a pretty standard teaching method, discuss your topic for a while and then dig into some examples. After doing this a few times I realized it didn’t really work as well for the psalms. You get a bunch of people talking about what lament is, how you do it, why we can relate to it and then read a few psalms to actually get informed after we had already had a lot of discussion. The weakness here is that you have people throw around opinions for 20 minutes before you even read a Lament psalm together. I realized it would be a lot more effective to let a few Lament psalms sink in and then talk about what happened. So we would read a Lament psalm say 2-3 times over and over again, let it sink in and then talk about what we heard and relate it to our lives. Then we would try another psalm and do it again. This became the approach for the class and it seemed to work really well. Maybe that will be helpful to someone out there who is trying to figure out what approach they want to take to reading and/or teaching the psalms.

Who Do You Find in the Psalms?

I have been teaching the psalms over the last two months with our 20s & 30s class. After the first three weeks I noticed something that had never occurred to me before. It hit me that a lot of the ways people approach the psalms have a lot to do with finding ourselves in the text. We have psalms for all seasons: lament when times are tough and praise psalms for when times are good. Walter Brueggemann took this approach in his books The Message of the Psalms & The Spirituality of the Psalms when he divided the psalms into three categories: Psalms of Orientation (all is well), Disorientation (things are tough) and Psalms of New Orientation (things were tough but now things are back right again). He noticed that the psalms seemed to go through these moves pretty regularly. I have to say that I love that way of dividing the psalms. I am not being critical of it and I think it is a good tool for studying the psalms. The weakness of this approach is that it has us trying to find ourselves in the psalms again. That isn’t a hugely bad thing. I think God wants us to find ourselves in the text, relate to it, let it speak to us, etc.

However, there is more to find in the psalms than ourselves. If we go there and just find ourselves and nothing more than we are to be pitied because we have no hope. Our hope comes from the Lord. He is who we find in the psalms over and above ourselves. The psalmist is not looking to find himself in these psalms. In all types of psalms the psalmists are looking for God. They already know where they are and if things are good or bad. If the psalms are only a mirror of our own condition with no offer of hope or change to be brought about from God on high then we are in trouble! In any and all circumstances of life, God is to be sought out, either to cry out for help or to praise with music and song. So I have adjusted my approach to not try to solely find myself in the psalms (while that can be helpful) but to first and foremost find God there and let Him work on me.

Ezra’s Prayer and Being A Community of Weeping, Confessing, and Prayer

I was reading through Ezra and I was really touched by chapters 9 & 10. God’s people have returned from captivity. They have been given permission to rebuild the temple of God. There is just one big glaring problem that Ezra notices. He sees that God’s people have intermarried with the pagans who have inhabited their land and have had children with them. It brings Ezra to tears because he knows God’s stance on that. God had warned them not to do that, not because there is anything inherently wrong with intermarriage between races but because God knew that the pagan nations would lead his people astray. This was a spiritual issues, not a racial one. When God’s people get all tied up in the world it is easy for us to start being the world and stop being the people of God. That is a serious matter. It is so serious that when Ezra sees it is happening, he is in great distress. He cries. He tears his clothes. He even pulled hair from his head and beard in anguish (Ezra 9:3). This is painful…it is painfully physically, emotionally and spiritually. Do we hurt like that in times like those?

What happens next is striking. Ezra prays to God and asks for God’s forgiveness (9:6ff). While he is praying he makes such a scene that a crowd gathers around him and joins in. “While Ezra was praying and confessing, weeping and throwing himself down before the house of God, a large crowd of Israelites – men, women and children – gathered around him. They too wept bitterly.” (10:1). Then those in the crowd start confessing their sins too. They see what Ezra is doing, find out why he is doing it and they start doing it too. Amazing. Do you know how the book of Ezra ends? It ends in confession. It ends with a list of names of those who had intermarried with the pagans.

Have we lost something here? Have we lost a certain tenderness of heart that we don’t always get bent out of shape when the church starts looking like the world and even identifying more with the world than they do Christ and his church? There is a lot of weeping, praying, and confessing that needs to be done here. Maybe when the church sees that they will get on board much like the people of Ezra’s day did. And there is a lot of confessing that needs to be done if we are going to get on the road to healing. You can’t do that for anyone else…you can only start with your own issues and go from there.

Unidimensional Prophets Need Not Apply – Don’t Criticize the Church Without Offering Solutions

In the Old Testament God would often raise up prophets in order to communicate God’s will to the people. Sometimes people think of prophets as people who tell the future. They did do that but more often than not prophets communicated two things: the people’s need to repent/change in various areas of their life and society & the positive alternative God had in mind for his people. Read Isaiah 1 for a good example of this (notice the turn in 1:16)

While I don’t think we have people today who are telling the future through direct means of inspiration like they had in the Old and New Testaments, I do believe we still have those prophetic voices among us. What troubles me though is it seems the prophetic voice that is present today is unidimensional. There are a ton of voices calling for change but are missing the rest of the message…communicating what the positive alternative God has for his people. In other words, we hear all kinds of sharp criticism of the church but few people are offering solutions.

Bottom line…if you are going to be a voice calling for change please come with some solutions in hand and don’t just shout angrily from the internet mountaintop at anyone who happens to be passing by. It just doesn’t fit very well with the M.O. of God’s prophets in scripture and can turn into something that is more unhealthy than the things they are railing against in the first place. There are too many guys who know how to poke holes and too few who know how to solve anything. Let’s have more of the second and fewer of the first.

Addendum:
From my comment to Christine below that lays out more of my train of thought on why complaining isn’t enough,

Here is my problem with it – we all know what the problems are. They have been discussed ad nauseum. It is no mystery. There have been hundreds of blog posts on it, books written laying out what the issues are. Fewer people have been pioneering on the front lines trying to turn the ship and then take part in the conversation of offering solutions. Too often even the solutions that are offered are by people who haven’t even tried them out in their own context. It is easier to snipe at problems from afar than it is to get in the trenches and bring about actual change. So I don’t really need more people pointing me toward the discussion that might or might not bring about solutions. If I hear criticism from someone I want that to be followed up with “and here is what we are doing about it.” If something is really that troublesome that someone would publicly write about it, isn’t it reasonable to think they would have been moved to action already?

Writing Material So Others Can Use It – 10 Suggestions

I am always in pursuit of new Bible curriculum to post in the Small Group Lessons and Bible Class Archive here on the blog. I have approached quite a few people trying to get them to submit something. Most people don’t write lessons so that they can be used by others. Some of you guys probably even just scratch everything down on a notepad and go and do an excellent job that way. Others write it in a way that it only makes sense to them. No one else can just pick it up and go. That is natural. It is important to write your lessons (if you do that sort of thing) in a way that you can teach it to the best of your ability.

It is important to consider the good that can come from formatting your lessons and their flow in a way that others can pick it up and use it as well. I no longer write a lesson for it to get taught once. I write them with other teachers in mind because I don’t want it to get used one time. One reason I do that is because I have to. Some of the lessons I write are for our small groups so I am forced to write it in a way they can all teach it with ease. In addition to that though, it is important to me that if I am going to spend all that time studying that my class is not the only one to benefit from it. It is like multiplication…you write it once and it gets used hundreds or in some cases even thousands of times. That is good stewardship. I don’t say that in any judgment of those who do otherwise whatsoever.

Here are some thing to consider when writing lessons so others can use them:

1. Give suggested answers on tough questions. Nothing worse than teaching a lesson and get silence and not know the answer yourself because you are teaching someone else’s material. Give them a few suggestions under the tough questions in bullet points.
2. Likewise, give definitions for words that are more difficult so that people aren’t missing the point because they don’t understand what is being said. What is more someone may ask what the word means and the teacher is equipped to answer.
3. Use bold headings when you start a new topic/subtopic in your lesson. If the lesson makes a turn, make it obvious to the teacher.
4. Bold all scriptures so they stand out. If I want something to be read out loud I will put Read John 3:16-19
5. Italicize discussion questions. This makes them stand out so that the teacher easily recognizes they are reading a question. Your intonation is different with a question and it gets kind of weird if the teacher starts of reading it as a statement rather than a question.
6. End with application questions. I will typically put the heading Application at the end followed by a few questions for the group to discuss. It is vitally important that every lesson have clear application.
7. If there is an exercise you want them to do I either use that instead of an application section or in addition to it.
8. Put relevant prayer needs that are specific to the lesson at the end if needed or if it fits well
9. If you are writing it for people you know, encourage them to see it as a guide, not a concrete outline. They know their class best and can make the lesson fit better than anyone else. Give them freedom to adjust the lesson as they see fit.
10. Send the lessons to me so I can share them with the world here on this blog