Spiritual Disciplines

00:00 - James Spencer (Host) Start small. It really is, I think, a series of smaller steps that we can take, that we start to learn how to go about doing these disciplines in our lives. My encouragement would be find what works for you and try not to get so bottled into. Oh, I need to sit down and read my Bible X amount of minutes a day. You don't. 00:19 - Speaker 2 (None) Welcome to PREPPED, the podcast that equips you to live out God's story, not the world's story. Hosted by James Spencer, phd, each episode bridges the gap between academic insights and everyday life, preparing you to understand the Word of God and put it into practice. Whether you're diving into biblical studies, looking for ministry guidance or aiming to deepen your faith, PREPPED empowers you to think biblically and theologically in a world that encourages you not to Ready to get PREPPED. Subscribe now and transform the way you bring God's story into the world. 00:52 - James Spencer (Host) Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of PREPPED. I'm Dr James Spencer, and today we're going to be talking a little bit about spiritual disciplines. Now, when I think about the spiritual disciplines, I really want to sort of not talk about the individual spiritual disciplines necessarily. There's obviously a lot of them. There are books out there on the spiritual disciplines. You can look them up. You know, oftentimes we think about the basic ones Bible study, prayer, fasting, sabbath, all those kinds. There's also different ones like solitude. Journaling has been put forward as a spiritual discipline. There's a number of different ones that you can look up. I think what I want to focus on in this episode, though, is why are we practicing the spiritual disciplines? What do they actually do? How should we approach them? What's our real framework for understanding what it is that we're doing when we practice the spiritual disciplines? And so, in order to do that, I want to talk a little bit about Matthew 6. 01:55 Matthew 6 is probably one of those passages I go to an awful lot, because I just really love the picture of Jesus working with his disciples, really love the picture of Jesus working with his disciples, and he seems like he's walking about with them and he's looking out and he's seeing how these different people are practicing different disciplines. He talks about giving, he talks about fasting and he talks about prayer in Matthew 6. And in each case, what he's trying to do with his disciples is he's trying to give them a picture of what not to do, by pointing to the hypocrites and also to the Gentiles, but then he's also trying to help them understand what to do, and I just think it's a great reminder for us. That can be distorted. We can use them for our own purposes, to fulfill our own desires and to reinforce an understanding of what it means to live in the world that doesn't exactly strengthen and reinforce our loyalty to God. And so in Matthew 6, as we're looking at something like, let's say, giving he points to the hypocrites and says that they give in order to be seen by other people. Giving, in other words, for some reason, whatever that reason might be and we can envision a number of different reasons they're giving in order to enhance their reputation within the community. 03:31 Their generosity is designed to accrue back to them some level of social standing that was essentially worth what they were giving. It's almost transactional, as they're giving their money away or giving whatever it is that they're giving away as they're practicing generosity, they are paying for the increase in reputation that they're going to get from being generous. They're paying for the perception of spiritual maturity and of authority that this gives them, and they're willing to pay this price because what they're getting back is valuable to them, and Jesus talks about them receiving their reward. They've already received their reward for this generosity, and he encouraged his disciples to you know, give without the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing. Now, I don't think what he's saying to the disciples is hey, you know, if anybody ever finds out you're giving, you're disqualified from getting anything from your father in heaven, and I don't think that's what this means. 04:48 I think what Jesus is doing is he's trying to exaggerate the lengths to which disciples should go in order to make sure that they are not giving in order to impress the people around them. I think the whole idea here is that these other folks, the hypocrites, are using generosity to enhance their standing in the community, and so this discipline we could call it of giving right, this spiritual discipline of giving, is actually oriented to the world rather than oriented to God. There's an assumption that they understand how the world actually works. And so you know, if the culture thinks that generosity is a valuable thing, why wouldn't I be generous and why wouldn't I let people know that I'm being generous so that I can gain in this world through just the simple practice of giving certain monies away? And that's a playing into the world system. And what Jesus is encouraging his disciples to do is he's trying to say no, the spiritual discipline is to orient you to God, it's to orient you to eternity, and so you can't do it in order to accrue this social standing within the world. That's not a good reason for it. I don't think what he's saying is hey, always sneak around and make sure whenever you put your money in the offering, nobody sees it. I don't think that's it, but I do think that he doesn't want them going up and going. Okay, here's my. You know six denarii that I'm going to put in the bucket everybody. Six denarii. I should get six denarii worth of social standing for this. Thank you, that's what he doesn't want them doing, that either. 06:37 And so as he looks at the hypocrites and critiques that practice, then he's telling the disciples look, you need to do this in a way that is unto the Lord. It needs to be something that's done so that you're not benefiting here for doing it and your benefit will be in heaven. He does something very similar with prayer and, ultimately, with fasting. With regard to the hypocrites, the Gentiles, however, when they pray, he says something a little bit different. So Jesus encourages them not to pray like the Gentiles, who sort of pile up all these different words and think that the length of their prayers is going to somehow be effective. I think part of what he's dealing with there is he's recognizing that the Gentiles don't really know who their gods are, and because they don't really understand who their gods are, their gods haven't given them a word to explain who they are to them. 07:36 Many times we talk about capriciousness. It's particularly within the ancient Near Eastern God set, but also, I would say, in the Greco-Roman pantheon. What you have are essentially not gods. You have human constructions of divine beings and you have humans trying to guess what it is that the gods want. And so in one instance, you might come in and offer a sacrifice and something good happens to you and you say, well, that's fantastic, maybe I'll do that again. And the next time you do it, that sacrifice doesn't seem to work. Something bad happens to you, and so you say, well, what does the God want exactly? And so maybe next time, what you do is you say, well, I'm going to give this sacrifice because it worked the first time, but I'm also going to give this, I'm also going to offer up these prayers, and then maybe something good will happen. 08:27 And eventually you start just piling up practices, and in this case, in the prayers, you end up piling up words, because you're not exactly sure what the gods want to hear and you're not exactly sure what it is that they know. And so Jesus is encouraging his disciples not to do that, and part of the reason he's discouraging them not to do that is because he wants to make sure that they proceed with prayer knowing that God knows what they need, that their Father in heaven knows what they need. And so there's no reason for them to continue to just pile up all these words in prayer as if God doesn't already know. Just pile up all these words in prayer as if God doesn't already know. So the practice of prayer, then, is conditioned on number one, the disciples' knowledge of God, namely that God knows what they need and is capable of providing it. But also then two, in just recognizing that there's no need to sort of pile up all these words because God knows what they need. And so this gives rise then to the question you know, teach us to pray, lord, and he gives them the Lord's prayer. 09:30 And I think that both of these instances, where Jesus is critiquing the hypocrites and then critiquing the Gentiles, what we find is two things. Number one, there is this sort of playing into the human world and human system, and I think that's a really crucial aspect when we understand how we're not supposed to practice these disciplines. We're not practicing these disciplines for our benefit. There's a sense in which, you know, the spiritual disciplines are somewhat problematic because they work. Spiritual disciplines are somewhat problematic because they work. For instance, there was a book written, I think, maybe 12, 15 years ago now it's been a long time since I've read it, but I believe it was called Margins and it was a sort of a secular account of Sabbath. Now, the author was arguing that setting margins, taking breaks, you know, making sure that you had time in your life to just reflect and rest, was really crucial. 10:31 A lot of times we hear about Sabbath, that Sabbath is necessary because our bodies need rest, but none of that's untrue, right. Sabbath works. It does give us a break it it. You know, having time in our days where we can reflect on things isn't a bad thing, it's, it's. It works, um, but that's not what really sabbath is it that doesn't orient us to god, that orients us back to ourselves. Now Sabbath is serving us, and I think that, even though you know man was not made for the Sabbath but Sabbath made for man, sabbath is still not supposed to serve us in that perspective. 11:16 And so what I would say is that the spiritual disciplines, as they orient us back toward the worldly system that we've been taken out of by faith in Christ, that we sort of exist in this moment where we understand what's coming, we understand that God is going to make a new heavens and a new earth, that these spiritual disciplines should be orienting us toward that, as opposed to orienting us toward the benefits that we may accrue right now. It isn't that I think that you know, if we practice Sabbath in a way that is oriented toward eternity, that we're not also going to accrue the benefits of Sabbath in general. What I am suggesting is that we should not be practicing the spiritual disciplines simply to cope with our anxieties or to make our lives quote unquote better. That's, I think, the wrong framing for the spiritual disciplines, at least the wrong, yeah, big framing for the spiritual disciplines. I think it could be part of what we do, you know. It can be, it can be part of the benefit we receive, but I think, if that's the benefit we are seeking, we're probably practicing the spiritual disciplines in a way that needs to be a bit reformed. And so what do I? What do I think? Well, that's, that's part one. Part two is in this passage where we're looking at what Jesus is teaching us as his disciples. We just need to recognize how easy it can be for us to distort these practices, a way for us to practice these in a wrong way, and so we need to attend and make sure that we're understanding that these practices are being used in a way that is in line with the knowledge that we have of the Lord already. So how do I think about the spiritual disciplines? What do I think they do? I alluded to this in a previous episode, but when I think about the spiritual disciplines, the framework that I generally approach them with is this the spiritual disciplines are there to help us become more and more aware of God's presence in our lives. They're training us to reorient our attention, which is something I'll address in a later podcast. They're training us to reorder our loves. They're training us to respond to God. All of these, all those three topics I'll address in a few later podcasts here, but that's what they're training us to do. I'll give this example. 14:02 I, you know, when I was younger, I used to have a heavy bag and I'd go in, I'd hit that heavy bag and one time I was working out at a gym, a boxing gym, and I was hitting the heavy bag and somebody asked me if I wanted to spar. It's the only time I've really sparred in my life and you know, I just said yes, I'm like I might as well try it. So I put on the headgear. I'm like I might as well try it. So I put on the headgear, I put the mouthpiece in. You know, I've got the gloves and I hop in the ring and you know, when you're hitting a heavy bag, there's a fairly consistent swing to that heavy bag, you know. You know when you hit it, you know which way it's going to swing and which way it's going to swing back. You have a general sense of the speed. It's not really trying to hit you back. So you know you're just getting a decent enough workout and you're getting to punch something. 14:48 And I always thought working out in a heavy bag was fun. But when I stepped into spar, what I realized was you know, there's so much that I didn't understand about how to go about sparring. Like I couldn't catch the little cues, like when somebody rolls their shoulder what punch is coming, or if they move their hips in a certain way, what they're going to do. My response time was completely off. Even if there was an opening for me to land a punch, it was very difficult for me to actually position myself and get ready to throw that punch. I just didn't have the timing right. I didn't see the cues that were going on. I couldn't understand how to actually move in the ring in a way that would allow me to be an effective sparring partner. I was basically just the heavy bag in the ring, and so there's a whole different experience I think that you get when you know, from hitting the heavy bag, which I could hit pretty hard, but it didn't matter. In the ring it really didn't matter because I wasn't going to get a punch in. The guy who I was sparring with just had way more experience than I did. You know, he put in the time, he put in the reps, and so he could see me positioning to throw a punch before I even really knew I was positioning to throw a punch. And so you know, and it's those reps, that time in the ring, that time sparring, that he put in and I didn't that were the difference between the punches he could land and the punches I couldn't. 16:18 And I really think about the spiritual disciplines in that way. The spiritual disciplines are the reps that we put in. They're what allow us to hop in the ring and understand how God's going to move. We now have a different sense about what's going on in our lives. We have a different understanding of God's presence in our lives. Because we put in these reps. These spiritual disciplines are us practicing the presence of God. When we hear that phrase, what it's really saying is we're practicing, recognizing how God moves in our lives, what God is doing in any given moment within our lives. That's what we're doing when we are practicing the spiritual disciplines. So when we sit down to read our Bibles, for instance Like I do a lot of Bible reading, study, reflection, prayer, and in part that's because I'm writing a couple articles for Christianitycom a month. 17:13 I write articles for UsefulToGodcom. They're posted there. I'm pretty consistently working on one book or another, and even if I'm not gonna publish something, it has always been helpful to me to write things down. So whether I'm typing that into the computer or writing it into a journal, I tend to think by writing and so getting things out of my head down on the paper. Whether I ever end up publishing them or not doesn't really matter. It's just my way of thinking through all these different things. And so I have a pretty effective discipline of reading and studying and writing and praying and reflecting through those things. 17:52 That has really helped me, I think, understand God and theology more deeply. It's given me touch points to understand how to. It's given me touch points to understand how to respond in any given moment. It's certainly helped me develop a, a framework and an understanding for how I think I need to attend to god and to really understand um how to, how to live under the authority of Christ. I don't do that perfectly, but I do think that those that practice has really helped me in a lot of ways. 18:31 I would say also, you know I don't take a lot of Sabbath time, but I could see that there are, there have been times in my life where I've needed to take more time in Sabbath. And you know, as I sort of look across my life, I would argue that you know, a lot of the things that I've messed up on have been because I wasn't attending closely enough to the presence of God and I was leaning far too much on my own understanding. So, in other words, we could think of it as the way that I learned to interact in the world wasn't informed by the spiritual disciplines and so I wasn't really fueled by those disciplines. I wasn't shaped by those disciplines. I was just doing what I thought I could do in the moment, and that's kind of an exhausting activity. 19:22 But as I started adding these different disciplines into my life and at various times and in various ways, I think what I've come to realize is that I can be calmer, I can be more rested, I can have less anxiety, and those are all good things. But at the end of the day those are sort of side effects. They're not the aim. I think what I've learned the aim really needs to be? Is it really needs to be? How do I attend to God's presence in the moment, how do I respond faithfully to him, how do I demonstrate my unqualified loyalty to the Lord in any given situation? And what does it really mean for me to follow him, obey him, even when obedience doesn't make sense? And I think those are all themes that I'm gonna return to in the next several podcasts. 20:17 But as we think about spiritual disciplines, my encouragement to you all would be that, as you're figuring out what spiritual discipline you are going to sort of implement whether that's, you know, prayer, bible reading, sabbath solitude, fasting, you know any, whatever spiritual discipline you're thinking of implementing my encouragement would be that you just frame it in that way that you understand that what you're doing is you're trying to orient yourself to God. You're trying to develop a different sort of posture that allows you to see how God is moving, see where God is moving and see what God is doing in your life. And these spiritual disciplines are the reps that we put in right so that we can begin to understand and see how God is moving in our lives. It's a way for us to reorient away from the world, away from our own competency, set away from our own strengths, and toward a position where we are dependent on the Lord, not independent of him, and so that's how I think the spiritual disciplines really function. Now let me just make a couple of comments on how I think we can build spiritual disciplines in our lives. I have found that there's a way of really overcomplicating this. 21:44 You know, my background is in personal training. I was a personal trainer for a number of different years probably five years, I think, while I was going through my MDiv and I continue to work out on my own, and one of the things I've learned lately is that if you want to build strength, you don't actually need a lot of volume. If you want to build strength, you don't actually need a lot of volume. I've been, you know, building strength and various lifts for the last I don't know, several months, and I'm only doing, you know, let's say, five reps per workout, really heavy reps. You know I do three sets between one and three reps, and that's really helped me build strength on various lifts, on bench press, on deadlift, on squats, you name it. My point is is that it doesn't take a lot. It takes very few sets in any given week for you to build strength on these various lifts, and that's been encouraging for me. I'm getting older and my joints don't take a beating the way they used to and, honestly, I just have other responsibilities and things, and so it's kind of nice to be in and out of the gym relatively quickly and still know that I'm doing something that's good for my body, that's going to progress me towards some goals that I have. That's really helpful. 23:05 The analogy, I think, applies to what we do in spiritual disciplines. Now, ultimately, I'm not arguing that there's a sort of a minimum dose spiritual discipline that we can get by with. That's not what I want to suggest. But what I do find is that whenever people try to set a goal to do something, they often overshoot what they can actually accomplish in the beginning actually accomplish in the beginning. And so if you were to sit down and say I'm going to devote an hour and a half a day to Bible study and prayer, maybe you should start with something smaller. If you're going from zero to an hour and a half, I can almost guarantee that's going to be really difficult for you to do. You know, my counsel would be go from zero to 20 minutes. 23:51 You know something smaller, and maybe then do you know sort of a different practice where I used to do this when I was a personal trainer, I'd write down a verse whatever verse I happened to have that I happened to be studying that day, I'd write it down on a note card and I'd just keep it in my pocket so that anytime during my personal training sessions I could just pull it out real quick, read the verse again, refresh my memory, and it was sort of a constant reminder in my pocket that this was what I was thinking about today. This was God's word that was speaking to me in the moment. This is what I was trying to understand. It was a really helpful practice and it's also very simple, and so if you can figure out ways to do that, that would be my encouragement. Start small. It really is, I think, a series of smaller steps that we can take that we start to learn how to go about doing these disciplines in our lives, and so whatever it is that you need to do in order to get started, that really is helpful to you. 24:50 For instance, when I was starting to develop the discipline of prayer, I've never been a particularly good prayer, I mean, you know, there's some of those Christians who are just really good at praying feels very natural to them. It was never natural to me, and so what I ended up doing was just sort of leaning into my strengths and saying well, I like to write, and so why don't I write down my prayers? And then I'll, when I go back to pray, I'll read through prayers that I've already written. Now I ultimately added things to those and it wasn't, you know, sort of a rote exercise, but it did help give me a little bit of structure. What I found when I prayed. I tend to sort of veer off in a number of different directions, and having something written down, that structure, just helped me focus on what I was doing. It helped me have a more coherent conversation with God than sort of just letting my mind wander all over the place, where I ended up doing more thinking than praying. 25:50 So my encouragement would be find what works for you and try not to get so bottled into oh, I need to sit down and read my Bible X amount of minutes a day. You don't. Ultimately, I think you can much stronger sense of enjoying worship when I go to church and worship in singing, I think you know I've gotten better at that over the years, but I still don't enjoy that in the way that many people do, that they could go to a full worship service where all it is is singing and that that wouldn't bother them. I still have sort of a limit to how long I can practice that discipline and I realized that's something I should work on. But my point here is that not all of us are going to be built for these disciplines. That doesn't mean we shouldn't ever practice them. It means that we need to understand those limits and then start figuring out ways to sort of bridge past those, and it just doesn't take much. 27:08 So start small, really be cognizant about where you're having, you know, hitch points right, where your disciplines start to go off the road, and then think of some easy ways for you to you know, keep these things in front of you throughout the day, because really what you're trying to do is you're trying to build up a sense of God's presence in your life, and doing that doesn't come with a recipe. You just have to figure out how to do that on your own, and hopefully some of these stories and tips that I've given you will help you understand, maybe, how to do that. So that's one of my brief take on spiritual disciplines. I'd encourage you to go and check out different books and things on spiritual disciplines. I've got some writings on prayer that you could check out and obviously I do an awful lot on Bible reading and interpretation, so you can find some of that at usefultogodcom. But I would encourage you. There's a great deal of literature out there on spiritual disciplines, even just online, and if you want to check into very specific spiritual disciplines, I think it's good to understand the range of disciplines that are out there. So I just encourage you to think through how you want to build the disciplines into your life and remember that these disciplines can your life and remember that these disciplines can be distorted. So keep that aim in mind that you are trying to cultivate a presence of God in your life as you're doing these disciplines. 28:44 Hey, thanks for joining me on this episode of PREPPED. If this episode encouraged you, share it with someone else. Leave a review, hopefully positive, on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you listen to these kind of things. Check out our YouTube channel, subscribe there, subscribe to the podcast. It really does help us out and I will see you in our next episode, where we're going to be talking a little bit about the myth of balance and the myth of prioritization, and that's going to set us up then to talk about reordering our loves, reorienting our attention and responding to God in every situation. So until we meet again, take care, start thinking about how you want to practice the spiritual disciplines and I'll join. I'll see you back on the next episode of PREPPED. 29:33 - Speaker 2 (None) Thanks for tuning into PREPPED. Thanks for tuning in to PREPPED. If today's episode helped you view the world through a God-centered lens, be sure to hit subscribe so you're always prepared for what comes next. Don't forget to rate and review us on your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more believers eager to live out God's story. Share this episode with a friend, family member or loved one, and together let's keep challenging the world's story. Share this episode with a friend, family member or loved one, and together let's keep challenging the world's narratives. Until next time, stay grounded, stay inspired and continue living out God's plan. See you soon on our next episode of PREPPED.