Although I’ve not outlined them or said anything much about them at all, I want now to stress that spiritual disciplines are important. Prayer, fasting, Bible reading and study, worship etc. are all important, but only in so far as they enable you and I to imitate, to follow, Christ. If all you are doing by reading through your Bible in a year, a month or even a fortnight, is ticking a box on some spiritual achievement chart, then welcome to the world of the evangelical Pharisee! You may have a great reputation for being a walking concordance, but it’s really no use at all unless your life is changed at its deepest level because of it. Jesus is after all in the business of transforming lives and to be a fully committed follower of Jesus is to live a transformed life. Christians should be conspicuously different as I suggested earlier.
Probably the most helpful verses in the gospels on this matter are ones I saved until now. They are of course some well known verses and in fact they wonderfully summarise the best understanding of both old and new testaments on relating to and following God. Jesus quoted these words, but then so did others when faced with a similar question. In fact, as I’m sure you know they are often referred to as the great commandment because they were a well known summary of the OT commands. They are these words:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind… and love your neighbour as yourself.
In other words: Love God with everything you are and love others in the way you’d want to be loved.
Once again, being a wholehearted follower of Jesus is not a matter of religious practice but a matter of a heart fully yielded to him and a life totally given over to him. As John Wimber used to say: I’m just small change in God's pocket for him to use however he pleases. In the end a fully devoted life is based on a covenant relationship that is Christ-centred and that bears kingdom fruit.
In order to live that kind of life we need to:
- Renew our focus on the person of Jesus and his mission for the church
- Renew an attitude of servant-hood amongst the people of God
- Renew our focus on the corporate and private prayer life of the church
Well, that's the end of this for the time being. There's probably a book in this somewhere, but I'm not sure I'd be the right person to write it and anyway, someone might already have done it. In many ways this is me thinking out loud about an issues that unsettles me as much as it inspires me. How ever you are seeking to put following into practice may God richly bless you.
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