Devotion

Have you ever wanted to change something in your life? Maybe you went through a season of learning a new skill to open doors for a new career. Perhaps you decided one day it was time to start eating healthier or exercising more. Most of us have come to a place in our lives where we desire to make a change. Yet we quickly learned, or are still learning, that a desire to make a change is not the same thing as actually making a change. We can have all the desire and motivation in the world to get in shape, learn a new skill, or find a new job, but until we spend time taking tangible steps to practice, learn, and engage the skills necessary to accomplish these desires, we will stay stagnant and fall short of accomplishing what we hope for. 

This is also true in our spiritual lives. I can have a desire to grow closer to God or to understand Scripture more deeply, but until I take steps that are within my own responsibility, not much will change. Thankfully for the disciple, God has already created a path for us to grow in our spiritual lives and we see how Jesus himself engaged these practices and modeled them for us. 

This week, we are exploring the third pillar of the Discipleship Pathway: A Personal Relationship with God.” I grew up in a faith tradition that understood the way to engage our personal relationship with God is through the spiritual disciplines. While the Holy Spirit initiates and draws us into a relationship with God, the active part we play as disciples is engaging these disciplined Jesus modeled throughout the New Testament Gospels, including: 

Prayer - Jesus had a rhythm of pulling away to pray and connect with his Father (Luke 5:16, Mark 1:35, Matthew 14:23)

Scripture reading - Jesus knew the Old Testament Scriptures thoroughly. He quotes them throughout the Gospels and uses them to respond to the temptations of the enemy in the desert. (Matthew 4:1-10, 5; Luke 4:18-19)

Fasting - Jesus fasted for 40 days in the desert. (Matthew 4:1-10, 6:16-18)

Serving - Jesus came to serve, not to be served. (Matthew 20:28, Mark 10:45)

These examples laid a solid foundation for my own discipleship and helped shape the tangible practices I would engage on my spiritual path. However, my understanding of the disciplines went through an expansion when I graduated college and my dad gave me the book Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. I spent the summer working through what Foster organized as three categories of disciplines: 

The Inward Disciplines: Meditation, Prayer, Fasting, Study
The Outward Disciplines: Simplicity, Solitude, Submission, Service
The Corporate Disciplines: Confession, Worship, Guidance, Celebration

I look back on that summer and see how God was deepening my walk with him as I engaged these disciplines on a daily basis. Fast forward a few years to when I was serving at Crossings. In one of our ministry training classes, Dr. Cliff Sanders—a pastor on staff and the founder of the School of Wesleyan studies—expanded my understanding of spiritual practices once again. Sanders suggested, according to the Wesleyan perspective, that we should not look at spiritual practices as disciplines to check off a list. Instead, we should see these spiritual practices as “means of grace.” 

For most of my life, I understood grace in the context of pardon—that God’s grace offers the forgiveness of sins. But in Scripture, grace is not only presented as PARDON but also as EMPOWERMENT (2 Timothy 2:1, 2 Corinthians 12:9, Romans 6:14, Hebrews 13:9). The spiritual practices, or disciplines, are the means of grace, or the avenues, where God imbues the power of the Holy Spirit within his disciples. 

So, when we engage spiritual practices, we are not just engaging disciplines and rhythms that bring about growth and change within us. We are also engaging the very power of God, through the Holy Spirit, who empowers us to live the way God has called his followers to live here on earth. This new perspective helped me bridge the gap between complete spiritual practices as basic tasks, to opportunities to be empowered by God’s grace and equipped to face whatever challenges the day ahead may bring. Perhaps you are brand new to the spiritual practices, or you have struggled to understand if they really matter for the Christian. Either way, I pray this week God expands your understanding of and engagement with the spiritual practices and that they become even more central in your day-to-day life.

PRAYER

Heavenly Father, continue to expand our understanding of what it means to be a disciple and how being a disciple shapes the practices we choose to engage in on a daily basis. May we not be satisfied simply with new habits, but may we yearn for the empowerment only your grace can offer us. Amen.

Todd Poe
Pastor, Discipleship

Resources:

Watch School of Wesleyan Studies: Understanding Grace by Cliff Sanders. 

Read The Means of Grace by Andrew Thompson.

Read Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster. 

Read The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives by Dallas Willard.  

Explore other devotions like this one any time at crossings.church/devotions .