Grace and Growth

Fuller Day Thirteen: Looking Back

I think this has been the most significant spiritual retreat I can remember. What has happened so far?

· I have had the opportunity to gather with 30 colleagues from all over the world – Canada, Australia, Ethiopia, Germany, Taiwan, and all over America, all across the Protestant evangelical family of churches and traditions. We have pastors, church planters, seminary profs, denominational overseers and worship leaders among our group. Our fellowship has been honest and open and very encouraging.

· We have had two full weeks of time – which has given me time to think deeply about issues of discipleship and the theological foundation underneath. We have had time to probe the deepest questions and challenges of personal and pastoral spirituality. We have had time to seek the face of God in a fresh way under the guidance of a remarkable man.

· We have been sitting with a master. Dallas Willard – with the very able assistance of Jim Smith and Jan Johnson, are a team of depth, experience, knowledge and wisdom about the Christian spiritual life.

· We have been pushed to be more deeply biblical about our faith and ministries. We have probed passage after passage of scripture, Old and New Testaments, looking frequently at the original language, often at the theological context. In particular the Biblical theme of the Kingdom of God has been a worldview shift for almost all of us, certainly for me.

· We have had time to probe our own spirituality with great honesty. Its strengths and weaknesses. We have looked with open eyes at our lives and ministries. God has met us there.

· We have had the great favor of this retreat center, giving us a time apart from the demands and pressures of spiritual life. Surrounded by images and statues of the Passion of Jesus championed by those who built and host this Retreat Center, we study and think and pray in a place built for it.

· I have had the hills of the San Gabriels, rising 4000 feet, the foothills of the Sierra Madres (I think!). I have spent about two hours each day climbing these hills, sometimes moving fast, but much more often moving in a leisurely pace, looking, thinking, praying, listening, breathing. The hills are alive with the voice of the Kingdom, as Jesus taught. I have recovered in them a measure of strength and health that I am so grateful for.

· We have had the chance to put into practice what we are learning. A day of silence and many more meals in silence this week; multiple times of solitude in the hills; immersion in large tracks of scripture and the study of the “Masters”; memorization of Colossians 3 and soaking in the Sermon on the Mount and 2 Cor 1-6; prayer in season and out; celebration!!!; good spiritual direction from people who know how to do it; the discipline of our desires… It is a long list.

 

Fuller Day Twelve: Prayer II

"In prayer there is often resistance (Luke 11.7) – the judge who won’t get up - Why is this so? People can’t be shifted around easily because God respects human freedom. It takes time to move them. So stay with it.  Be ‘shameless in prayer.’ Ask, seek, knock.

CS Lewis, ‘Work and Prayer’ from ‘God in the Dock’. Read it! “Two powers of creative influence in the world are given to us, prayer and work.” This is why the Apostles said, “We will turn this responsibility over to them and will give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word.” Acts 6.3-4

"The hardest things of all to pray for are conversions. Because they involve human freedom. And people. And human networks. God will honor human freedom. He created it.  Compared to conversions, dealing with demons is easy ("Do not rejoice that the demons are subjest to you, but rejoice in this, that your names are written in the Book of Life")  So stay with your prayer.

"We should not try and minister without prayer for the things we are doing. Specificity is crucial. Focus on what you want to ask God to do. Push your thought towards its wholeness. Hold it under God and see it whole. You must be specific about what you want. Enlist others in the prayer cause on a regular basis. The main prayers in your church should be carried by others. God has people ready to go in this, often older saints. Stick to it, don’t quit.

"Why is prayer so hard for pastors? Churches and pastors have expectations for task competency.  We think the only way things get done is by the direct activity of the pastor. So our busyness becomes an indication of our effectiveness. And we cannot stop for prayer. We do not think of prayer as a way of accomplishing objectives. We don’t understand the theology of prayer, its reality or its power.

"If you have a request, just bring it to God. No performance, any more than if you were ordering a hamburger. Eliminate ceremony from your prayers, even when you are praying in ceremony. Just talk to God in a natural way. You should always stay with your requests until God gives you something better to do."

 

 

Fuller Day Twelve: Prayer I

Here's a photo of me with Dallas Willard.

Well, today things came together about prayer that opened a door for me. Those who know me well know that I have too long found prayer difficult. Actually, what I have found difficult is the regular practice of intercessory prayer. I often pray in my mind during the course of a day. And I have loved times of personal prayer with people in ministry. But regular, scheduled times of personal prayer have been difficult for me. So I was looking forward – even praying about today as we started into the Discipline of Prayer.

I would like to post a few times on prayer, so for this one I will just throw out a few of DW’s comments on prayer…

Prayer

Here is DW’s definition, worth careful thought: “To stay in action with God by asking and waiting. Prayer is talking to God about what we are now doing together.”

“You have to learn to pray; you watch Jesus and ask for his help (Luke 11). He gives them some words to say, but each of them is a doorway into a room.

“When you pray, you address Someone. You look at them and speak to them, confident that they are near and that they will hear.

Prayer is request. It is fundamentally asking. The request is a great power of the Kingdom. It starts with large asks, and then comes to personal asks. Give us what we need for today. And the energy to complete your tasks for this day. You are standing on forgiveness ground and asking. “Don’t put us through trouble.”  So ‘do not be anxious… but in everything present your requests to God…” (Phil 4.6) “give him no rest…” (Isa 62.6-7)

“Pray without ceasing” Well, we know how to worry without ceasing! When we are in love we can “think of him/her without ceasing.” It is the same mechanism.

Prayer is action. It is a Kingdom power.  A useful analogy to prayer is power steering. If you don’t turn the wheel, the wheel won’t turn. But if you do, with a little force and consistency, the whole car turns.

 

Fuller Day Twelve: Study, Worship and Celebration

We had a shorter day today – hurray! Finished by 3 PM, and no evening session. I felt much better this morning after taking last night off as well. I got our for another walk this afternoon, climbing up into the hills all the way to the Foundations (50 minutes or so) and then felt strong enough to jog back down. I have not jogged that long in years, ever since beginning to bike 3 years ago. But my lungs and back felt good, and my knees gave me no problem. That was marked improvement over just the past two weeks. This was my 11th climb. I have been losing weight, gaining strength, and my back has felt better. All the way up and down I was working on memorizing Colossians 3.1-17. I have about half of it down.

 

After dinner I am back at Beantown (photo left), writing and blogging and thinking, and waiting for 5 friends who are walking over to get some ice cream next door.

 

Yesterday and today we have launched into the…Disciplines of Engagement

What are they? They are disciplines designed to reconnect us with the kingdom of the heavens. Briefly I want to note three (Study, Worship and Celebration), and make more comments in a later post about out discussion of Prayer, which was astounding.

Study

"To bring an objective order of truth into your mind and your life."  Like all the disciplines, study enables you to do something that you can’t otherwise do. We talked about the importance of study of Christ, of the Bible, of nature, history, and individuals…

"One who will not learn how to handle the Bible for himself is not an evangelical Christian." Bonhoeffer

We have had special sessions in the use of the Bible in imaginative study, memorization and meditation (all of us here already have spent years in exegetical study of Scripture). We were especially encouraged to study, along with the Bible, the masters of the spiritual life: Kempis, Law, Wesley, Theresa of Avila and others of that quality. “These, under the Bible, constitute the basic knowledge of life in God. Master them.”  “I would not pastor a church without a bible memory program.”  DW

“You have to use reason well in study. You use it to understand what is true.  Then it will enable you to act. Otherwise you just wander around in the minefield of human opinions, gathering what you will. Ideas govern human life.”  DW

Worship and Celebration

Worship is "Ascribing worth to God."  “Worship should be regular in times (discipline/habit) but woven into the regular fabric of our lives from moment to moment, in the heart and flowing out. Issues of style are secondary to the issue of worship. When we make style primary, it becomes a matter of “our kingdom.”

“Often we have worship problems that look like ‘eating disorders’. We go long stretches without worship, come to worship with clear expectations of ‘our style’ and an ‘over the top’ experience. We become worship critics week after week (‘How did the service go?’, etc.), a sure sign we are running our own kingdom. It is a ‘consumerist approach’ to the faith. We are there as consumers of religious goods and services, and will go where the goods and services best ‘meet our needs’. This is different than being there as an apprentice of Jesus and a worshipper of God. 

Celebration is worship, with a particular note in it. We are personally rejoicing in what he has done for me and for mine."Pay attention to the great biblical passages of celebration: The Song of Miriam (Exo 15) – celebrating Kingdom inversion, David dancing, Deborah in Judges 5. Jesus’ first miracle was in aid of a celebration. Appointed feast times in Israel. We need feast days. Only solitude and silence rival the resistance people have to celebration. We need more celebration. Celebration is the antidote to despair."

We need times when we simply enjoy God’s favor to us in the world. (Deu 14.22ff; Ecc 5.18-20; 2.24; 3.12ff) “You shall eat the tithe of your grain, your new wine, your oil and the first born of your flock so that you may learn to fear the Lord always” Live too far away? God says change your tithe in for money and spend it for whatsoever you heart desires!  Ha!!! Because he is so good, so wonderful, so precious. Celebrate God!

"Pleasure is a very bad master but a very good servant."

Fuller Day Ten: Secrecy and Sacrifice

Secrecy

"The practice of not letting your good deeds be known." Matt 6.1-18

“What is at issue here is doing religious things to impress people. Remember that you act before a Trinitarian audience. It teaches us to be content without human approval, and that our business with God is not filtered through others.

“You can become addicted to approval. Envy and jealousy – both forms of anger – dissipate when we stand before an audience of one. Can you keep your course without human approval?

“This discipline helps us to stop competition. “Let each consider others better than ourselves.” Because we know that we could do better in our own lives… it should not be hard to want others to do better and celebrate when they do. When we get relief from the need for approval, we are able to release this. We must live well, having only God’s approval and no one else’s.

Sacrifice
“To surrender that which is necessary, e.g. our money or food, or to accept with joy the loss of what is necessary, to practice the sufficiency of God."

“This discipline is more the receiving of losses that are imposed upon us in faith and joy than the act of choosing loss. In smaller things it can be actively practiced and should be, preparing us for moments when the moment is imposed upon us.

Job said, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him..”

Some of the biblical incidents of sacrifice…

•  Even to the laying down of our lives. Joh 15.13-14

•  To learn peace and joy in the midst of disaster Psa 138.7-8

•  Loss of property  Heb 10.34

•  The widow and Elijah  1 Ki 17.12-13

“We have to live and believe and practice this long before the moment of testing comes. Or we will explode in anger and lawsuits and self-destruct.”

 

 

Fuller Day Ten: Chastity

Chastity

“To refrain from sexual acts, thought and desires, as a way of accustoming oneself to freedom from domination from sex."

Job 31.7-11; Mat 5.27-28; 19.3-12; 1 Thess 4.1-7

We had long discussions about sexuality, about the interrelationship of thoughts, inclinations and actions, about the crisis in sexuality sweeping the culture and the churches, and about the power of God to deliver people from sexual temptation and addiction. Some notes:

“You have to understand the dynamics of desire. Porn almost always involves degradation. It destroys women. Why do we “need” this? We have to believe that there is something better than this, and it is available in the kingdom. It is genuine love and honor. Genuine will to the good of another person.  Love is not ‘desire’. Desire does not usually consider the good of the object of desire.

“You cannot standoff sexual desire directly. You will get stuck on it. It will obsess you. The principle of indirection (redirecting our energies elsewhere) is critical. Joy and love in life generally are to be cultivated as a bulwark against domination by sexual experiences.   

“The discipline of chastity is refraining from sexual thought, feeling and action. You need to practice turning away from them sufficiently so that they do not dominate you. So that you no longer get angry or sick if you do not get what you want. We have to turn to other and better things. This is where love comes in. “Love God and do what you will” Augustine. If I love God I will see a man or a woman in a different way. I won’t want to use them.

“Temptation always announces itself before it arrives.  So we act then. There are certain cues that alert you to the possibility of lusting. You then use those cues to love instead of lust. Temptations always come to us in a process. They do not jump us like a shot out of a pistol. Respond early with love. But the fact is we love temptation and titillation. Give serious thought to why this is so in your life.  When people fall into lust or fornication, they have been on the conveyer belt for some time. Jump off early.

“The best discipline for sexual temptation is a happy marriage.  Genuine happiness in a marriage is a Kingdom power. But you still have to be wise.  Invest in relationships that they may be good and strong.

“It is important to turn away from sex in marriage for a season so that we can deal with each other on some other basis than sex, discover that you are more than a sexual being.

There is tremendous sexual significance in the face and eyes. They are the doorways to intimacy. They are the invitation. “Looks” have many significances. In many marriages, this dies. You have to have times when you look deeply into someone’s soul and treasure their face. “The lord make his face to shine upon you… lift up his countenance upon you…” = look right at you.

The practice of the other disciplines is primary in handling sexual temptation. If you ignore all the rest of the desires and just deal with sexual temptation, you will have a hard go of it.

 

Fuller Day Nine: Fasting and Simplicity

The weekend was slow and restful. Lots of time for thinking, visiting around the area, calls home, and local worship. Lots of time to walk the grounds and look at the statues and gardens.  I got up the mountain again on Sunday with a friend from Canada, Sid.  Sunday night I had a talk with Dallas, told him of my hopes to put together a prototype support structure for clergy that would feature honest fellowship, warm and supportive relationships, a focus on our faith, our families and our ministries, the disciplines and a  Kingdom of Godworldview. We had been talking about the widespread lack of support structures for Christian leaders. He put his hand on my arm and stopped me and looked me clearly in the eye and said, “God is speaking to you in this.”

I awoke Monday morning and felt refreshed and ready for the second week. We spent most of the day Monday and Tuesday on the last of the Disciplines of Abstinence: fasting, simplicity, chastity, sacrifice and secrecy.

Tonight (Tuesday) I have taken the night off and come over to a small town - Sierra Madre.  I stumbled into a coffee bar (Beantown) that has wireless internet and holed up here to catch up on my posts - and to get some time away.  About 30 minutes ago a mandolin player took a corner stage and is giving a concert to a crowd. The crowd is about 30 people, young and old and in between, playing scrabble, eating dessert, listening, chatting.  A wonderful gift this evening.

More comments from my notes…

Fasting

“To refrain in significant degree from food, and perhaps all pleasant drink.”  It needs to proceed to the point until we have a genuine experience of deprivation. Because we often find our happiness, our sufficiency, and pride in food. Much of our sense of well being is tied to eating. But deprivation is not the point of fasting. Fasting is the affirmation and experience of the resources of another world, God’s Kingdom. (Deut 8.1-6; Matt 4.4; John 4.32-34) When you learn to fast, you draw on the immediate supply and power of God. Fasting is used by God to shape his people, teaching them to depend upon him from day to day. He provides the food.

Simplicity

"To refrain from indulgence of appearance, or sensuality or security." Often dealt with in terms of sobriety or temperance. When we don’t practice this we fall victim to living by our feelings. These train us to be comfortable without stimulation or gratification of our desires.

Prov 21.17; 23.4; 25.28; 1 Tim 5.6; 6.7-11, 17-19; 2 Tim 3.4

Poverty is neither a discipline or a virtue, though it may be used well. Remember to not be shabby, stingy, small, mean. Especially in family life and in raising kids. Kids are often told that frugality is godly, and are not given tools to negotiate their culture. Sometimes you should get them the best and say, “This is God, too.” God is not poor. Jesus was not poor: he raised funds, supported a ministry and a ministry team. And Jesus had enough to employ a full time embezzler as his treasurer.

 

Fuller Day Six: On the Backside of the Mountain

The second of the disciplines of abstinence is the Discipline of Silence. Here are some more of my notes…

Silence has two forms; it is two disciplines under one title.

Quietness. To be in quiet, to eliminate sound.  Experience perfect silence or only ‘natural’ noise – wind in the trees, water running, heart beating, breathing. Human created sound penetrates into our body more than any other sense. Natural sounds don’t seem to effect us in this same way.

To refrain from speaking. Study Proverbs on talking and not talking. Silence allows you to stop managing the world and especially your appearance in the world. You stop trying to impress people. You let things stand without setting them right.

We all make many mistakes, but those who control their tongues can also control themselves in every other way.   James 3:1-12

 

‘Silence completes solitude’  Nouwen. It is not ‘nothing’. It is substantive. It is ‘like the wind of eternity blowing in your face.’  (DW)

Silence and waiting go together. Isa 40.31; Psa 25.3,5,21; 37.7,34; 62.5; 69.3 

Silence breaks the need to say, ‘I’ve got to say something’ to establish ourselves, to manage the situation. Silence allows us to let God change our hearts and then we speak more appropriately. “Swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” – they are connected. Silence will help us gain congruence between who we are and what we say.  

A related discipline is that of ‘not having the last word.’

 

"Don’t use foul or abusive language. Let everything you say be good and helpful, so that your words will be an encouragement to those who hear them". Eph 4:29 (NLT)

 

As we started our 24 hours of silence, I went up the mountains for four and a half hours. I managed to get to the top, with stops for rest and bible reading and looking around frequently.

 

It was wonderful to listen to the mountains. All these photos here and on hte last post were from the climb today.  The Sierra Madres are alive with flowers; it was like walking through a large herb forest!  Around every other corner a lizard would scurry away and the scents of the leaves would drift by.  It took me about an hour of climbing before the sounds in the hills were louder than the sounds rising from the city. But in the end the birds singing, the wind blowing, the lizards scurrying, the mountain stream running, the waterfalls across the valley found their voice and I found my ears! They were all carefree in the care of their Father God, as Jesus noted in Matt 6. They whisper the sounds of the Kingdom.

Dinner tonight was silent. And it was different. The silence quickly and completely lifted the background anxiety I always feel when I am sitting with strangers or people I do not know well. It was calm, and gracious (everyone had quick and warm smiles for each other) and peaceful. That was a surprise.

Fuller, Day Five: Silence and Solitude

Yesterday and today we have launched into the Spiritual Disciplines. Recovering the transformational power of the disciplines has been a major focus of Dallas Willard’s lifetime work. We spent a lot of time clearing away theological concerns, such as the relationship between the human effort and grace, the relationship between salvation and personal transformation, and the dynamics of human change. Willard is convinced that the historic wisdom of believers in the matter of sanctification is critical to recover if evangelicals are going to believe and live the full biblical gospel.

Today we start with the “Disciplines of Abstinence”, those disciplines designed to free us from spiritually harmful entanglements. Peter puts it like this:

Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.  1 Pe 2:11 

 

Here is the question: When the Bible tells us to “abstain from sinful desires”, how do you do that? The Disciplines of Abstinence are an answer. The following are some of my notes from these past two days…

The first is Solitude, "Electing to step free from human relationships for a lengthy period of time, in isolation or anonymity, to make room for occupation of our lives by God." (DW) Solitude is the primary spiritual discipline.

Jesus had the habit of solitude: Matt 4.1-2; Mark 1.13; Luke 4.42; 5.16; 6.12; 9.38, etc.

The benefits of solitude include: We find that we can live without others and they without us. The world does not rest on our shoulders. We have time to focus on God, and to clear the storm of life and mind for decision and planning. Place is made for the practice of the other disciplines, e.g. fasting and study, which cannot usually be learned except in solitude. 

Solitude is not just being alone by yourself, not just claiming ‘my space’. It is being alone with God. In solitude, you are able to ‘drop your masks” and be who you simply, honestly are. When you do that, you discover that you have a soul. As that happens, God will come to you as you settle into solitude. Because God doesn’t love our masks; he loves us, the real us. So He comes to us powerfully.  Solitude will cure loneliness.

It will also heal community, because as you re-enter community you come a man at peace with yourself and God, no longer able to be devoured by the expectations and demands of other, but able to love and serve. And it will cure busyness, esp. the kind that is there to hide the vacuum of personal identity crisis. As you discover yourself in solitude, discover that you are not just a meeting point for all the demands that come to you. “I die to created things and then I discover God.” Merton, p.161

 

What do you do in solitude? Do anything that brings you joy. “I like to look at ducks, because there is no reason I can see why God made them.” (DW) As long as it is not work. “Let the clock wind all the way down.” “Let the fly wheel run down.”

 

As I write, we are in a 24 hour period of silence. I spent the first 4 hours up in the hills. The photos here are some of the places of solitude I found. It was wonderful. I was not lonely – although I got so far up that I didn’t see anyone on the trail for over 3 hours! But there was a constant, gentle sense of God’s presence.

Fuller, Day Three: Worldview Shift

One of the challenges in reading and working with Dallas (as he insists we call him) is that his worldview for the Christian faith is surprisingly, bracingly different. His worldview is the Kingdom of God, which was Jesus’ primary teaching theme.

Evangelicals do not talk about the Kingdom of God; as a theological theme it was embraced by the theological left earlier last century as a headline for the liberal social agenda. So… we don’t teach it, or think about it. Dallas believes that this has left a fatal gap in our worldview, and that we must recapture the theme if we are to be faithful to what Jesus himself taught – and he does not think the biblical theme is what the liberals taught. He does not believe it is possible to live a Christ-like life unless we understand and believe Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God. All of his teachings on the spiritual disciplines are rooted in this Kingdom worldview.
So, we spent most of the first three days in discussion about the Kingdom. We are turning through countless passages of scripture, New and Old Testaments. Every one of us has been going through significant theological adjustments - you should hear us! I found myself trying to write down key definitions that he uses. Here are a few…

Definitions:

Disciple = apprentice, someone who lives with and studies and applies the teachings of a master, and becomes like the master on the inside so that he acts like him on the outside.

Kingdom of God.  God’s Kingdom is from everlasting to everlasting. His Kingdom is his gracious and effective reign, where his will is embraced and accomplished, where his power is at hand.  It was the major topic of Jesus’ teaching. God is present to everyone everywhere so that all you have to do is call on the name of the Lord Jesus to experience his power and his presence. You can just come on right in. You really can. What was new in Jesus’ teaching was not the Kingdom, but the accessibility of the Kingdom.

Your Kingdom You were made for a kingdom; you were made for dominion (Gen 1.26). Your Kingdom is the range of your effective will, what you have say over. It is integral to your personhood and the image of God in us. This is why issues of control and power and authority are so instinctive to every human life. Our spiritual growth in Jesus makes us more and more trustworthy to rule and reign in His Kingdom. God’s intent for each of us is where we would grow to the point where he can empower us to do what we want. This is training for reigning, and it is a major theme of our discipleship.  It has to do with God's purposes for us in every calling, every vocation, every job.  Disciples are forward looking, faithful over small things, trusted in everything. Steward of God in everything, a trusted friend of Jesus, reigning under him over the entire cosmos (Rev 22.5)

Salvation = Not just the forgiveness of our sins in Christ, but also being caught up in the life that Jesus is now living on earth. Forever.

Faith = confidence in Jesus for everything; for today and eternity, for every failure and every need and every dream, for life at work and life at home. For everything.

Human Identity = You are a never ceasing spiritual being, with an eternal destiny in Gods great universe. Spiritual in substance. Never-ceasing in duration. Creative governance in destiny.

Ministry = “We minister the reign of God, God in action: the reality, truth, power of God’s person and Kingdom. We do this by doing what Jesus did as he did it, in reliance upon his presence with us. We minister from community: the people of God, through time and at a place and time. We minister out of our own experience of God, his word and his Kingdom. We minister in the midst of, and with, angels, the hosts of God, and in conflict with Satan and his subordinates, who work against us because they oppose God.”

Dallas Willard’s paraphrase of the Great Commission:

“I have been given say over everything in heaven and earth, so go and make apprentices to me of people of every kind. Submerge them in the reality of the Trinitarian God, and lead them into doing everything I have told you to do. Now look, I am with you every minute, until the job is completely done.”

Matt 28.18-20 paraphrase

I am spending about an hour and a half each day up in the hills, climbing, walking, praying, looking, listening.  Last night I climbed up to a place call "Foundations", about 4/5 of the way to the crest, ate a packed dinner, read scripture, prayed.  The flowers are beautiful and strange.  The hills are silent and alive. God is speaking to me in the classes and fellowship, but whispering to me in the hills.