How I Have Stayed Committed to My Devotional Life

(One of my praying places in Monroe)

One of my former seminary students wrote me and said: "You may not remember me, but I took your spiritual formation class and fell off the wagon in my daily prayer and meditation. Are there any words of wisdom on how you have been able to maintain your daily commitment?"

I responded:

Here's how I think I've been able to maintain my commitment.

Forty years ago I was feeling tired and burned out in ministry. A friend gave me a copy of Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline. Through this book the Holy Spirit moved me to carve out time to get alone with God and talk with Him and listen. 

I began to take alone-times with God. As I did this, to my  delight, God began revealing himself to me. This made me want to meet with God more.

A desire, like a fire, was kindled in my heart. I chose to tend it, to keep it burning.

I began to see God changing my heart. Most of this was slow growth. I experienced Christ growing in me. I began keeping a journal as a record of all God was doing with me (which now totals about 4000 pages of journal entries).

God's ministry through me began to look and feel different. I liked what I saw happening, and wanted more. 

As the months and years passed by, a "holy habit" was formed in me. A living, neural pathway was created by God, through which the waters of grace and love and power were flowing. I didn't stop meeting with God, To this day. I meet with God regularly because God meets with me.

Supposedly there was a sign on the Alaskan highway where the pavement turned to dirt. It read: "Choose your rut carefully. You’ll be in it for the next hundred miles." This is the rut I have chosen. I live in this groove, swim in this neural highway, which is the river that flows from the throne of God.

Choose this day whom you will serve. (Joshua 24:15) And the next day. And the next...

***
My three books are:

Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God

Leading the Presence-Driven Church

Encounters with the Holy Spirit (co-edited with Janice Trigg)

I'm currently writing:

Transformation: How God Changes the Human Heart

Then, the Lord willing, 

Technology and Spiritual Formation

Linda and I then intend to write our book on Relationships.

God Loves to Work Through Nobodies

(Munson Park, Monroe's Custer Airport)

Years ago Linda, Dan, and Josh went with me to Singapore, where I taught at a Chinese seminary for 20 days. Good friends connected us with David and Sue Pickard of Overseas Missionary Fellowship. David was the director of OMF, which used to be China Inland Mission, founded by Hudson Taylor. 

David and Sue had us over for dinner. It was Josh's birthday and they had prepared a meal and had a cake for Josh. After the celebration, David showed us Hudson Taylor's Bible. That was an awesome moment! Taylor was taken out of his comfort zone and used of God even though he was out of his depths. How was this possible? Taylor said: 

“God chose me because I was weak enough. God does not do his work by large committees. He trains somebody to be quiet enough, and little enough, and then uses him.” 

I love how Oswald Chambers expresses this truth: 

“God can achieve his purpose either through the absence of human power and resources, or the abandonment of reliance on them. All through history God has chosen and used nobodies, because their unusual dependence on him made possible the unique display of his power and grace. He chose and used somebodies only when they renounced dependence on their natural abilities and resources.”

I am to stay quiet and small. I must become a nobody so that Christ can become Somebody in me.

Identity (#8) - Who You Are, and Who You Are Not

Detroit

In my spiritual formation classes for pastors and Christian leaders I begin by sending the students out to pray for an hour, using Psalm 23 as their meditative focus. My instruction to them is: when God speaks to you, write it down.

Upon returning from their hour with God, I have found many have heard God tell them, "I love you." Some have not heard those words in a long time.

Henri Nouwen wrote that he was "firmly convinced that the decisive moment of Jesus's public life was his baptism, when he heard the divine affirmation, "You are my Beloved on whom my favor rests." (Spiritual Direction, 28) When God tells someone "You are my beloved," or "I love you," the most intimate truth about that person is revealed. 

God loves you: this is the ultimate truth about you. 

Nouwen says "the ultimate spiritual temptation is to doubt this fundamental truth about ourselves and trust in alternative identities." (28)

Who are you? Nouwen counsels us not to define ourselves by the following alternative identities.

1. Do not define yourself as: "I am what I do." He writes: "When I do good things and have a little success in life, I feel good about myself. But when I fail, I start getting depressed." (Ib.) To define yourself by what you do is to live on a spiritual and emotional roller coaster that is a function of your accomplishments.

2. Do not define yourself as: "I am what other people say about me." "What people say about you has great power. When people speak well of you, you can walk around quite freely. But when somebody starts saying negative things about you, you might start feeling sad. When someone talks against you, it can cut deep into your heart. Why let what others say about you - good or ill - determine what you are?" (Ib., 29)

3. Do not define yourself as: "I am what I have." Don't let your things and your stuff determine your identity. Nouwen writes: "As soon as I lose any of it, if a family member dies, if my health goes, or if I lose my property, then I can slip into inner darkness." (Ib.)

Too much energy goes into defining ourselves by deciding "I am what I do," "I am what others say about me," or "I am what I have." Nouwen writes: "This whole zig-zag approach is wrong." You are not, fundamentally, what you do, what other people say about you, or what you have. You are loved by God.

Today, God speaks to the deep waters of your heart and says, "You are my beloved son or daughter, and on you my favor rests." To hear that voice and trust in it is to reject the three alternative ways of self-definition and enter into freedom and joy.

Identity (#7) - Followers of Jesus Have Been Given an Identity

When Linda and I were in Columbus we entered a store and saw this sign on the wall.



A person's identity is either given, hence to be discovered and grown into, or self-created, like an avatar in a video game. If someone fails to believe in a God who is their Creator, they will be left on their own to invent themselves. The implications of what you believe here will determine the life you live.

James Houston says:

“What we face in the world today is a self-achieved identity. As Christians, we believe in a given identity, not an achieved one. The Christian is found in Christ. The self-achieved identity is very fragile because we have to sustain it. Nobody else is going to sustain it for me when I have built it up myself. The result of this is a tendency toward narcissism, because there is a depleted sense of self. This is not what God ordained that we should have for an identity.”

(In Jamin Goggin and Kyle Strobel, The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb, p. 41)

Identity (#6) - In Solitude God Peels Off the Mask

My spiritual life is a dialectical movement between solitude and community, solitude and community, solitude and community... Solitude with God, koinonia, alone with God, together with the Jesus-community...  I need both.

Ontologically, solitude comes first. Solitude is, as Nouwen has said, the "furnace of spiritual transformation." In solitude God purges my soul. This is good. 

I experience this, I know this, as a good thing. 

Without time alone with God "community" (koinonia) becomes a costume party. 

In solitude the mask gets peeled away to reveal the true self. Spend much time in solitude with God and the masks will get removed by the Holy Spirit. "You" will then go to the party, interact with people, in authentic ways. 

This is all about true freedom, who God has made you to be, who you truly are in Christ.

Thomas Merton has written:

"The truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you: it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul. And this abyss of interior solitude is a hunger that will never be satisfied with any created thing. The only way to find solitude is by hunger and thirst and sorrow and poverty and desire. The man who has found solitude is empty, as if he had been emptied by death." (New Seeds of Contemplation, pp. 80-81)

Learn these things and live:

• Redemptive solitude is a condition of the heart.
• In solitude God morphs the human heart.
• All persons have a hunger within that cannot be satisfied by created things. That includes you.
• Stop questing after created things.
• Hunger and thirst for the real thing. In this way consider yourself impoverished and needy.
• What you and I need is God.
• Therefore, meet often with God.
• He loves you. So, in his presence, you won't need the mask.

Identity (#5) - Our Masks Are Not Our Reality

Ann Arbor store

What level of wisdom could come from a person dedicated to dwelling in God's presence, from someone not captured by the idols of technology and media? We see wisdom in Thomas Merton. Merton never watched television! What could he have to tell us? 

Merton exudes prophetic words of ontological realities. One ever-relevant Merton-theme is the stripping away of the false self, accomplished by God, in God's presence. He writes: 

"If we take our vulnerable shell to be our true identity, if we think our mask is our true face, we will protect it with fabrications even at the cost of violating our own truth. This seems to be the collective endeavor of society: the more busily men dedicate themselves to it, the more certainly it becomes a collective illusion, until in the end we have the enormous, obsessive, uncontrollable dynamic of fabrications designed to protect mere fictitious identities - "selves," that is to say, regarded as objects. Selves that can stand back and see themselves having fun (an illusion which reassures them that they are real)." (Merton, Raids On the Unspeakable, 15)

Merton published Raids in 1965. That's fifty-four  years ago. He discerned the creeping shallowness of American culture. Were he alive today he would see the same, only multiplied, magnified, and glorified. 

The American social milieu profits on sustaining hypocrisy. A "hypocrite" (Greek ὑποκρίτης) is: an "actor," a "mask-wearer." We are a world of false personas who don't merely hide behind culturally constructed masks but who believe our masks are our reality. Halloween, our preferred holy day, has become every day.

Linda's Birthday!

I thank God for giving me Linda, my beautiful life partner. 

I find her beautiful on the outside and on the inside. 

Linda has an extensive ministry to many people. She is a source of wisdom for many. 

She is a compassionate God-seeker and prayer warrior. 

She saturates her soul in God's Word.

Linda has a fierce, loyal, unswerving faith in Jesus. 

She has many gifts, and uses them for the glory of God. 

She is a great support and strength to me. Linda is the only person on the planet who can make me laugh uncontrollably.

She loves her sons and daughters-in-law deeply. And, she loves her coming grandchild.

Linda prefers hot summer days over the polar vortex. 

She has music in her soul, and pours it over her students.

I often think, "I am married to her!" (For forty-six years this August 11!)

Thank you God, for giving Linda to me, and to so many others!

Joshua Harris & the Entertainment/Consumer Church

(Josh Harris's "mood photograph")

Sadly, Joshua Harris has left Christianity behind, and has also left his marriage behind. (As for me, years ago I kissed godlessness and non-commitment goodbye.)  

For an interesting take on this see Carl Trueman, "Kissing Christianity Goodbye." 

Trueman writes:

While Harris seems to be making a clean break with his past, the style of his apostasy announcement is oddly consistent with the evangelical Christianity he used to represent. He revealed he was leaving the faith with a social media post, which included a mood photograph of himself contemplating a beautiful lake. The earlier announcement of his divorce used the typical postmodern jargon of “journey” and “story.” And both posts were designed to play to the emotions rather than the mind. Life, it would seem, continues as performance art.

Trueman ties Harris's behaviors to the rise of the American Entertainment/Consumer Church.

It's an interesting read.

A "Word & Spirit" Move of God

(Redeemer sanctuary)

Craig Keener, in Spirit Hermeneutics: Reading Scripture in Light of Pentecost, ends his book with these words. 

"An early Pentecostal voice invites us to bring Word and Spirit together—a collaboration that I would envision as the best of evangelical exegesis of the text combined with the best of charismatic power to embrace and carry out its message. Smith Wigglesworth, one of the most prominent early Pentecostal healing evangelists, felt disappointed toward the end of his life that the Pentecostal revival had not directly ushered in the end of the age, as the earliest Pentecostals had hoped. He did not, however, relinquish hope for the future. He believed that in addition to the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit that brought a restoration of the gifts, there would someday come another revival emphasizing God’s Word. 

“When these two moves of the Spirit combine,” he prophesied, “we shall see the greatest move the Church of Jesus Christ has ever seen.” May it be so, Lord." (289)

Identity (#3) - Masks & Authenticity

I'm on the left

One of my seminary students, in their spiritual journal, wrote that God was speaking to them about their inauthenticity before others. They spend a lot of energy performing and acting before others, and not allowing others to see the "real them." 

A few days later, in another journal entry, God began speaking to them about their "fear of man"; i.e., the fear of what others think of them, or of what others might do to them. 

Fear of others is the root of mask-wearing inauthenticity. This is why people wear "masks," and don't let others inside of them.

The key to authentic existence is to bring one's fear of others before God and let God get his hands on this. The way God frees people of the fear of others is through his love of us, as our Father. This is what it means to say that God is perfect love, and perfect love casts out fear. (1 John 4:18)

As the truth of how much and why God loves us becomes less theory and more experienced reality, authentic existence begins.

As we discover the freedom and acceptance of an unmasked relationship with God, the mask comes off.

***
In this book I share how a praying life strips away inauthenticity - Praying: Reflections on 40 Years of Solitary Conversations with God.

See also Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity.