Rowboat or Sailboat...?

Some years ago, the Lord spoke Galatians 3:1-3 clearly to me as a watchword and loving warning when I was helping to begin a new ministry in prayer within a "Christian organization". ("Organized Christian ministry" is a topic in and of itself that I have changed my thinking on radically, but for the purposes of this short blog post, I won't touch that and simply say that the Lord humbly speaks and meets us where we are and somehow leads us in spite of our misunderstandings of His ways for which I am very, very grateful! Having said that, I now see why it matters to align our mindsets with His way of doing His work so am also grateful that He keeps leading me into fuller understanding of His ways.)

The Holy Spirit's faithful reminder to me of this word through the following years in this particular "ministry", served us well. In fact, it was a large part of what gave us clarity to continually change the way we did things and gave me clarity when the day came that I sensed I was to step away entirely from it.

The Message expresses this portion of Galatians 3 as follows:
"Let me put this question to you: How did your new life begin? Was it by working your heads off to please God? Or was it by responding to God's message to you? Are you going to continue this craziness? For only crazy people would think they could complete by their own efforts what was begun by God. If you weren't smart enough or strong enough to begin it, how do you suppose you could perfect it? Did you go through this whole painful learning process for nothing?"

I was blessed this week to read a blog post that applies this idea to the spiritual disciplines and wanted to share it with you in case it brings some life and liberty to your walk with God:

"One of the things that I’m discovering about spiritual disciplines is that I often take that which is relational in its very nature and turn it into something mechanical. Sometimes I find myself thinking: If I carve out time to engage in lectio divina, then God will reveal Christ to me in a way that almost feels tangible. The problem with this approach is it assumes an A + B = C sort of spirituality. If I read the Bible and pray, the formula will yield intimacy with the Spirit of Christ. So, all week long as I fail to create space for my personal holiness mechanism, I begin to use words that contaminate any spiritual vocabulary. The words – fail, success, must, accomplish, achieve, or should – usually demonstrate that one’s faith journey has moved from relational to mechanical approaches to God. When we get to this point we’re basically taking a “should” on our lives as kingdom people."  (Kurt Willems)

Further down in his short post Kurt recommends that we see our walk with God more like being in a sailboat, discerning and catching the ever-changing direction of God's wind and going with Him, rather than as a rowboat in which we are trying to get somewhere or make something happen through hard effort. I agree. In our fallenness, we humans are strongly bent towards mechanizing that which begins organically, and I'm convinced that only the power of the resurrected life of Jesus can enable us to continue in the same spirit as we began (be that in our personal journey with God or in our collective walk and ministry).

It's a great little article that I recommend if this topic is pertinent to you now: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thepangeablog/2012/07/23/should-spiritual-lives/.