Spiritual Disciplines ~ Solitude

There was a young man who was relatively new in his work, but from the very beginning, things had been going well, very well. He was successful in everything he did and it wasn’t long before he had a tremendous following and everyone just wanted a piece of him. They wanted his time, his support, his help, his expertise and his attention. During his meteoric rise to fame his family had gotten a little disillusion and frustrated with him and so to add to the chaos of his already busy life instead of being a support, they were now publically criticizing him, but they were alone. As with any successful venture, this man’s success brought opposition. Along with the crowds came critics. Then one day as this young man’s life was going full steam ahead, he got the news that his best friend and a mentor in his work had been killed and even when he tried to get away to simply be by himself for a moment or two to grieve, the demands of his work didn’t let up. Like the paparazzi following Lindsey Lohan, his attempt to find a solitary place to deal with his loss and maybe reflect on his life didn’t work, the people followed him and his partners followed him and so the work of Jesus continued.

You see, Jesus’ life was busy and noisy and at times full of confusion and activity – but at least he understood that in the midst of all that chaos, he needed times of solitude.

In Matthew 14 we find Jesus at this very difficult place in his life. His teaching and miracles had so amazed the crowds that people were following him everywhere. People came to hear Jesus preach because he taught like no one else, he taught as one who had authority, but they also came to see that authority lived out in the power of his miracles. People came to be healed, they came to be cleansed, they came to find life and when they came they were not disappointed. Jesus opened the eyes of the blind and he drove out demons. Jesus cleansed people of leprosy and cleansed them of sin. He silenced a storm and silenced the religious elite of his day. People loved him and they followed him everywhere, and his life was full and busy and noisy, and it all came at a price.

Jesus family turned against him at one point in his ministry. Jesus’ mother and brothers came to him hoping to talk some sense into him because they felt like he had lost his mind. Not only was there some push back from his family, there was real opposition toward his proclamation of repentance and the new life that comes in the kingdom of God. The opposition to Jesus’ message was seen when John the Baptist, who in many ways was the forerunner of Jesus and who preached the same message that Jesus did, had been arrested for speaking out and standing firm in his convictions and while John was in prison he was killed. When news of this reached Jesus it says “he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place.” (Matthew 14:13a)

Just look at that sentence, withdrew, privately, solitary place. Matthew is pretty clear here, Jesus is looking to spend some time alone. He needs some solitude maybe to just grieve the loss of John who was not only the one who baptized him, but remember John was his cousin and in some ways a partner in ministry. Jesus is looking for some solitude because he knows that he needs it, but the pace of his life at that moment was so fast that solitude was going to be hard to find – does that sound familiar?

Even when we know that we need times of quiet and times of rest, the pace of our lives can be so fast that solitude can be hard to find. Jesus makes the decision to withdraw privately to a solitary place but the demands of his life and the expectations of the people follow him. Literally the people follow him. When they hear that Jesus is heading off by boat to be alone they actually run along the shore so that when Jesus lands on the other shore the crowds are already there. (Matthew 14:13b) Again, does this sound at all familiar? We know we need some down time so we plan a few days off or maybe just a few hours away only to find out that the demands of work or family suddenly have to take precedence.

I don’t know about you, but when I read that even Jesus had a hard time finding time to be still, I find comfort and encouragement in that. Jesus knows what we are going through when our lives are full. He knows the out of control pace we try and live at, he knows the demands we face and he knows that there are times we just have to keep working – Jesus knows this because he lived it.

Although he needs some time alone right now, when Jesus sees the people in need he reaches out to help them (Matthew 14:14). Not only does Jesus heal the sick but because it is late and they are in a remote place instead of telling them all to go home, which is what the disciples wanted Jesus to do, he tells his disciples to feed the thousands of people who have followed him, and when Jesus asks his disciples to do this, instead of being supportive and helpful, they push back. (Matthew 14:17) So once again Jesus, the one who needs the rest and the solitude, goes to work, he takes the lead and directs the people to sit down and then he blesses the 5 loaves and 2 fish and proceeds to feed more than 5,000 people, maybe as many as 10,000.

When the meal is over and evening has come Jesus finally makes everyone leave. He makes the disciplines leave and he dismisses the crowd because he knows that he really does need some time alone. Jesus knows that to strengthen himself for the work God had for him he was going to have to practice this spiritual discipline of solitude. In the midst of all the demands and pressures and confusion of his life, Jesus knew he needed time to be alone – or maybe a better way to say that is he knew he needed time alone with God. The spiritual disciplines we are looking at need to be taken seriously because we see them lived out in the life of Jesus, and if Jesus, who is God in the flesh and so had all the fullness of God’s strength and power in him at every moment, if Jesus needed simplicity and solitude, these spiritual disciplines, then so do we.

We need times of solitude if we want to find strength and peace and power in the midst of our busy lives. What Jesus shows us throughout his life is that when we are tired, we need times of rest. When we are weary we need times of refreshment. When we have decisions to make we need quiet times to hear God’s voice. When we are full of questions or doubts or fear – we need time alone with God to hear his words of grace and peace and love.

It’s interesting to look at the times that Jesus went off to be alone with God. At the beginning of his ministry Jesus seeks out a solitary place where he can hear God give direction to his mission and ministry. Not long after Jesus has been teaching and preaching and performing all kinds of miracles it says that crowds were intense and they just wanted Jesus to heal them all and it’s at this moment that Jesus has to make a decision – was he going to be a miracle worker or a preacher? Was he going to meet people’s physical needs or spiritual needs? With those questions in his heart and mind – Jesus goes off by himself to pray, to be alone with God. We find Jesus seeking out solitary places when he needed guidance and direction for his life. If we are looking for guidance and direction for our lives we need to practice this discipline and find some time alone to hear the voice of God and to get a sense of God’s guiding and leading.

While Jesus sought times alone for guidance, I think this situation in Matthew 14 is different, I think here Jesus is seeking a solitary place because in the death of John he suddenly comes face to face with the reality of his own death. Remember, John preached the same message as Jesus, repent for the kingdom of God is near, and I think Jesus always knew the cross was coming, but does John’s death bring the cross into greater focus – was it suddenly much more real to Jesus and did this unsettle him in some way? As much as Jesus was fully God he was also fully human and so did the fear or doubt of Jesus future begin to creep into his heart and life? Did Jesus need time alone with God to find the strength he was going to need for the rest of his mission? Do we need times alone with God to simply find the strength and the courage we need to face the uncertainty of our own future? We don’t practice solitude just to hear God give us direction, we also need it to get strength and power and courage from God to simply live our lives.

So let’s consider how to practice this spiritual discipline of solitude, it doesn’t necessarily mean going away on a spiritual retreat, but it does mean finding time to quiet our hearts and lives enough to be able to hear what Richard Foster calls the divine whisper. Solitude requires us to find time and create space so that we can hear the voice of God. So solitude doesn’t have to be a special place in the wilderness but I would say it needs to be a quiet place. Can we carve out times of silence in our lives so we can begin to hear the voice of God who I don’t think wants to shout at us, but maybe simply whisper to us? Spending time in silence is not an easy thing to do. It might be nice for the first few minutes, but staying in a quiet place alone with God can be difficult and so we might quickly begin to look for the distractions. I think this is one reason Jesus literally tried to get away from the people because it was the people, the crowds or his own disciples who were the distractions for him.

What are the distractions we face today? I might suggest that they are all the devices that fill our lives with noise. They are our cell phones, computers and TV’s, its facebook, twitter and texting. If we want to hear the voice of God we might need to literally unplug ourselves from the noise around us for an hour or 2 or 3. Can we unplug ourselves for a morning, or an evening or an entire day? If we want to hear God’s voice give direction to our lives, if we need to hear God’s words of love and grace and peace then we need to be able to hear God in the silence which means finding that time and creating that space for silence.

Unplugging may not be enough; we might need to physically go to a place that takes us away from the demands of our lives. It may be a park or the mountains or the beach, but it might also be a coffee shop in the afternoon, a quiet corner of the library, or even this sanctuary when it is not in use. One of our desires in creating the courtyard was to create a place for moments of solitude. There are picnic tables behind the church that can provide a quiet place of solitude. It might be important for us to find a place of solitude away from our homes where we every time we look around we won’t see all the things that needs to be done.

It’s hard to find the time and the place for solitude – Jesus knows this, but he worked at it because he knew that solitude was important. Jesus knew he needed to hear his father say to him, “Be still. Take a deep breath. Think about my peace, my love, my forgiveness. I love you.”

It was those words which Jesus heard over and over again in times of solitude because it those words, that message, that Jesus shares with us. We need to practice this discipline of solitude because in the midst of the confusion and chaos and the choices of our lives we need to hear God say, “Be still. Take a deep breath. Think about my peace, my love, my forgiveness. I love you.”

If that’s the message you need to hear today, then practice this discipline of solitude and find that time and place to be alone with God.

Spiritual Disciplines ~ Simplicity

All during this season of Lent we are exploring spiritual disciplines or practices that can help bring order and balance to our lives which in turn can help strengthen our faith and deepen our relationship with God. As we talk about making changes in our lives there are really only 4 options we have, we can:


• Do more of the things that we already do.
• Do less of the things we already do.
• Start doing new things.
• Stop doing things altogether.

If you think about it, these are the only options we have when we want to make changes in our lives: we can do more, do less, do new things or stop doing things all together. Most of the time when we think about making changes to improve our lives we tend to think about doing more of certain things or adding new practices and routines. For ex,, last week we talked about the spiritual discipline of study and one of the next steps we talked about was taking time everyday to read a chapter from the gospel of Mark. For all of us, this would be doing more of something we already do, or doing something new, and most of the time we talk about improving our lives this is what we talk about, but today I want to challenge that idea and talk about improving our lives by doing less or stop doing things altogether.

I think we would all agree that the world has become and continues to become an increasingly complex place. The amount of information accessible to us continues to increase exponentially. We have the ability to interact with the entire world, technology is advancing faster than we can keep up with and the result of all this complexity is that we actually hunger for simplicity. People respond well to the simple and if you want evidence of this look at the company Apple, maker of the iphone and ipad.. When you look at the Apple iphone / itouch or ipad what you see is a very simple machine. They have one image on the back, an apple, and one big button the front that turns it on, that’s all. It’s simple and the popularity of these machines tell us that people want what’s simple.

Google understands the power of simplicity. If you want to search for something on the internet Google makes it simple. When you go to their home page to search - this is what you find, a simple almost blank page for you to type in your search word or phrase and Google is the #1 search engine in the world. It’s simple and people today want what is simple. As the world becomes more complex, we hunger for simplicity and this is nothing new. Jesus knew people wanted and needed simplicity. Again, the spiritual discipline of simplicity is something we need to pay attention to and embrace in our lives because we learn it from Jesus.

In Jesus day there were 613 laws that the Jewish people had to follow. Now originally God gave just 10 commandments, but then in telling the people how to follow those 10 commandments, hundreds of other laws were written. But the rabbi’s couldn’t keep it to 613 laws, they had to explain in great detail how to follow those 613 laws so they created hundreds of more laws to help the people follow those 613 and we find those laws in a book called the Mishna. So by the time of Jesus, those original 10 commandments had become a vast network of laws that every good Jewish person had to not only know but follow. Things had not only become complex they had become out of control and this is the scene when one of the teachers of the law, someone who would have known all 613 laws plus all the added laws, comes up to Jesus and asks him which of all of these laws is the most important, Mathew 22:37-40.

So Jesus takes the law and instead of making it more complex, he works to make things simple. Jesus says forget the thousands of laws on the books, forget the 613 laws and in some way forget the 10 and focus on the 2. Jesus didn’t call his followers to a complicated faith of intricate laws, but to a simple way of love. Look at Matthew 11:28-30.

Now the yoke of a rabbi that Jesus is talking about here was the teaching that they gave to their followers to obey and while many rabbis were calling their people to follow more and more complicated laws in order to be faithful to God, Jesus called his followers to simplicity. His yoke was easy, there weren’t a lot of laws to know and follow, there was really just one – love. If you loved God and if loved your neighbor then you would fulfill all the laws and grow stronger in your relationship with the living God.

Jesus not only taught about simplicity but he felt so passionately about people living simple lives of faith that we see him go to great lengths to call people to simplicity. One day when Jesus entered the Temple, specifically when he entered into the court of the gentiles which was to be a place of prayer, he saw a very busy and complex marketplace where people were exchanging currency and selling doves so that others could make their offerings to God. Not only was there business going on in this place of prayer, but the Temple had also become a short-cut through the city of Jerusalem, so as Jesus looks around he sees all kinds of people carrying merchandise through the Temple to get where they wanted to go. What Jesus saw in the Temple that day was clutter, a web of activity in a place of prayer and all that business and busyness kept people’s attention and focus away from God. When Jesus drives everyone out of the Temple he is making a pretty bold statement that we need to simplify our lives so that we can get our focus back on God, and this is why we need to take seriously the spiritual discipline of simplicity – we need to simplify our lives so we can get our focus back on God.

This really is the whole point of simplicity; it’s about getting the right priorities and keeping the right focus. When we have too much activity going on in our lives it’s hard to keep our eyes on God and when we have a lot of stuff, literally a lot of possessions and belongings that we have to worry about and take care of, it’s hard to keep our hearts on God. I think this is what Jesus was concerned about when he entered the Temple. He saw people more interested in their businesses and their possessions and their activity instead of their relationship with God. I wonder how Jesus feels about all of our busyness and all of the clutter in our lives. I wonder what Jesus would cleanse from our hearts and what he would drive out of our schedules if he were to enter into the temple of our lives today. I also wonder what God would want to cleanse from us as a church if he entered here today. We are a busy church and sometimes I worry about all of our activity – I wonder at times if all of our activity keeps us from simple devotion to God. Does all our activity – as good and important as it all is – does all our activity keep us from prayer and worship? These spiritual disciplines aren’t just for our personal lives, they have something to say to us as a church and we need to make these disciplines part of our life together if we want to be the church God is calling us to be.

So we need to take seriously the discipline of simplicity because simplicity helps us get our focus on God, but what specifically are we talking about when we talk about living a simple life. Well, we are not talking about returning to 1950’s Mayberry, and we aren’t talking about letting go of all of our responsibilities and activities and getting rid of all our belongings, simplicity shouldn’t start by looking at all that is going on outside of us, it needs to start by looking inside and working to get the right focus and perspective.

A few weeks ago we were looking at Jesus Sermon on the Mount and in that sermon Jesus said, seek first the kingdom of God and this is where the spiritual discipline of simplicity needs to begin. We need to start by putting God back into the center of our lives because if God is not the center then we will try to fill that void with either activity or belongings. In his book, Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster says, because we lack a divine center our need for security leads us into an insane attachment to things. When God isn’t the center of our lives we are going to fill our lives with bigger, better, faster and newer things in order to feel happy or secure, or else we are going to spin ourselves out of control with activity to help us feel important or significant. When God isn’t the center of lives we will fill our homes with more stuff, our schedules with more activity, our heads with more information and our hearts with more entertainment and it all leads nowhere. When we work to simplify our lives and homes and schedules, however, space is created for us to experience a deeper relationship with God.

So what will simplicity look like in our lives? Like all disciplines, how we live them out will be different. For some of us the problem might be our schedules and so simplicity might mean saying no to some things - so that we have time for God. There were many times Jesus said no to some very good things like healing and helping people so that he could stay focused on God’s plan. Saying no can be a good thing but only if we will then use our time the way God is calling us to. It is difficult to say no when the demands of our jobs or family are so strong, which is why we need to ask God for wisdom and guidance which may only come through the study of God’s word. You see, these disciplines are all interconnected.

For some people, simplicity may mean evaluating our schedules, but others it may call us to take a good hard look at our possessions. We live in a world where everyday we are bombarded with messages that tell us that for a better life we need more things, or new things and so it is easy for us to accumulate a lot of stuff without thinking about how all these things not only take up space in our homes, but in our hearts as well. In Matthew 6:24 Jesus said you can’t serve both God and money, but the word for money goes well beyond cash, it’s the word mammon which means wealth, not only money but possessions, belongings and even a desire for more. When we accumulate more and more in this world we run the risk of having all our possessions begin to possess us which causes us to lose our focus on God, but if we can simplify our lives, literally get rid of some of our things or work to accumulate less, then maybe we can begin to get our focus back on God, so here are three steps we can take to simplify our lives when it comes to our possessions.

When we buy things we need to ask ourselves if we buying them for need and usefulness or for style and status? If we buy something because it is stylish and we think it will elevate our status then we are going to have to keep on buying things because styles change and in order to keep up with the Jones we have to keep buying newer and better things. So when we buy something we need to ask ourselves if we really need it and if it will useful in helping keep our lives simple.

A second question to ask is if we can enjoy things without owning them. I must confess that this something that I need to work on. When I want to read a book my first thought is to go to Amazon.com and buy it, I seem to forget that there is this place called a library where I can check out and read a book without having to own it. You will be glad to know I just got a library card so I can work on this. Not only do we need to work on enjoying things we don’t need to own, but we also need to be willing to share what we have with others so they can enjoy it without owning it themselves. Which leads us to this third question…

Can we give things away? Richard Foster says if we find ourselves becoming attached to our belongings, we might find it liberating to simply give them away. For a number of years before my grandmother died she didn’t buy any Christmas gifts for the family, she simply gave us things that she knew we wanted. I have to say that those gifts are the ones I cherish the most today. As we think about doing some spring cleaning, why not really clean out some clutter and begin to give things away. Give items to the FaithCentre so they can help others, or give away items to the Habitat restore or Centrepeace to help build and furnish homes for those in need. Give things away on freecycle.com to help people who don’t have the money to buy things they need, but work at giving things away and freeing up not just space in our homes, but space in our heart and life for God.

Simplicity may start by putting God at the center of our lives and then allowing God to give shaped to all of our choices, or it may start by making the choice to simplify our lives so that God can return to the center. Either way simplicity is a discipline that needs to become both an inward reality and an outward lifestyle. So I invite you this week to not add more to your schedule, don’t add more to your life, do less and give things away and create space and time to see and hear and experience the presence of God.

Spiritual Disciplines ~ Study

We don’t like to talk about it, but discipline is important. I’m not talking punishment; I’m talking about training and perseverance and finding new practices to help us grow in strength and ability. Every athlete will tell you that discipline is important. We have to train our bodies in a variety of ways to help us get stronger and we have to discipline our minds to stay focused. We will not grow physically stronger without discipline and we will not grow spiritually stronger without discipline. It is simply foolish for us to think that we can grow stronger in our faith by doing nothing. We can’t even keep doing the same things over and over again and expect to get stronger, sometime we have to try new ideas and incorporate new practices into our lives if we want to grow. Spiritual growth takes time and energy and effort and it means making some changes to try and ordering our lives in new ways so that growth will take place.


The season of Lent is to be a time of spiritual growth and so for the next 6 weeks we are going to look at some spiritual disciplines or practices that we can use to help us grow deeper and stronger in our faith. Now some of these disciplines you may already be using in you life, some you may not, but I’m going to step out on a limb here and make this guarantee, if we will apply these disciplines to our lives over the course of the next 6 weeks, our faith will grow. Now the reason I can make this guarantee is because it is God who gives us these disciplines and Jesus lived them out in his own life and so I am convinced that if we implement these disciplines our faith will grow.

As we look at these disciplines let me say up front that we cannot take them and turn them into laws. One of the problems we see in the Old Testament is that when God gave direction and guidance to help order people’s lives the people turned them into strict laws that weighed them down. We don’t need rigid laws to follow; we need tools and resources to help bring order and balance and growth to our lives. And really these disciples can’t be laws because as we will see, there is no one right way to apply them or live them out, there will hundreds of ways and hundreds of ideas on how to use these disciples and so what we need to do is find the personal and creative ways God is calling each one of us to use them in our own lives. This is why small groups can be so helpful; not only can the group help us understand these disciplines in more detail, but they can help us figure out what using these disciplines might look like in our daily lives. The small group can also be a place of support and encouragement which will be needed as we begin to live them out because making changes and sticking to them is not easy.

The discipline we are going to look at today is study. In his book Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster says, the purpose of spiritual disciplines is the total transformation of the person, spiritual disciplines aim at replacing old destructive habits of thought with new life giving habits. Nowhere is this purpose more clearly seen that in the discipline of study. What he is saying is that if we want to experience transformation in our lives it will start with a transformation of our minds.

Look at Romans 12:9-21, this is the kind of transformation we are talking about. What we see here is that a life marked by love, honor, service, joy, hope, patience, prayer, generosity, hospitality, peace and unity is possible, but where does it come from? How do we get this kind of life? What Paul tells us is that in part this kind of life comes through study, through the renewing of our minds. Look back at Romans 12:1-2. So a stronger faith and a life that reflects the life of Jesus comes through the renewal of our mind and this comes through study. Look at what Jesus says in John 8:31-32.

Notice here that it is by staying in the word of God that we learn the truth and it is the truth that sets us free. It’s not worship that sets us free, it’s not service that sets us free, it’s not sacrifice that set’s us free, it’s not prayer that sets us free – it is the truth and we gain truth as we study. Now this is not to say that worship, service, sacrifice and prayer are not important in the transformation of our lives, they are, but they don’t set us free the way that the truth does and again we learn the truth in large part through study.

So what are we talking about when we talk about study? Study is more than the collection of facts and information. The kind of study we are talking about is directing our minds regularly and repeatedly toward certain truths about God. Look at Philippians 4:8-9. Not only are we to think about these things, but we are to keep doing them. So study isn’t just reading and gaining knowledge, the truth of what we study needs to be applied to our hearts and lives. We can’t study the truth of God and keep it at arms length, that’s like hearing the word of God and not acting on it, which we heard Jesus say last week is like building our house on the sand.

So when we study we are directing our minds and lives to the truth of God and this requires 4 steps, Repetition, Concentration, Comprehension and Reflection. Foster says repetition is important because it helps channel our mind in a specific direction which helps ingrain habits of thought which in turn leads to specific behavior. In other words repeated messages shape our thoughts, which in turn gives shape to our attitudes and actions. To see the power of repetition all we need to do is look at the word of advertising. The goal of advertising is to shape our thoughts so we will act in certain ways (buy certain products) and the way advertisers do this is by sending us repeated messages. Repetition is a powerful tool; advertisers know this, educators know this, parents know this and the reality is we all learned this truth from God. It is God who called his people to remember and it is God who told his people to put His word everywhere so they would not only see it, but remember it and then do it. The people of Israel were to write the law of God on the door frames of their houses so as they went out of their homes into the world they would remember to live out the word of God. They also were to bind God’s word on their foreheads so they would be sure to take it with them everywhere they went, and Jewish parents were to told to recite God’s word to their children. God shows us that repetition is needed if we are going to learn God’s truth. So we need repetition, daily study of God’s word is important if God’s word is going to shape our hearts and minds and lives.

But we can’t just read; we also have to concentrate and comprehend what we are reading. Concentration requires us to center our hearts and lives on what we are studying which requires us to silence other voices. One of the things we will find with several of the spiritual disciplines we are going to look at is they require times of focus and times of silence. We live in a noisy and busy world where it often becomes difficult to concentrate on anything, let alone the voice of God, but if we want to hear God’s voice above all the noise then we are going to have to silence some of the other voices because I’m not sure God is interested in shouting at us. God wants to speak to us in a still small voice but we will never hear that voice until we settle our hearts and learn how to concentrate on God’s word and hearing God’s voice.

Not only do we need to concentrate but we need to comprehend as well, we need to understand what we are studying and while this makes perfect sense, I’m not sure how well we apply this to our faith. So many people tell me that they don’t read the Bible because they have a difficult time understanding what it says. It is not the easiest book to understand for many reasons, but that just means we have to work a little harder to comprehend it. This is where studying in small groups can be really helpful. We can learn about the Bible from one another. I have learned more about the truth of God’s word from listening to others talk about the Bible than I have ever learned by just sitting down and reading it on my own. We need the insight and experiences and faith of others to help us comprehend and that can come in small groups, but it can also come from reading commentaries and reference books about the Bible. No matter how we do it, if we want to comprehend what we are studying we have to invest some time, energy and effort to make that happen.

The last step that Foster talks about is reflection; and reflection isn’t just thinking about what we have studied, it’s taking the information we have learned and making it our own. Reflection is the process of allowing God’s truth to give shape to our heart and habits and behaviors.

So we study through repetition, concentration, comprehension and reflection, which means that the next question becomes what do we study? The obvious answer, of course, is that to grow in our faith we need to study the Bible. In recent studies of spiritual growth, the #1 catalyst for growth at every stage of life and faith is the reading and reflection on the word of God. Whether you are a new believer or have been a follower of Jesus your entire life, if you want to grow in your faith the single best thing you can do is study the word of God. This should not be a surprise because God himself said, 2 Timothy 3:16. All scripture is useful for training in righteousness, it helps bring discipline which brings growth so the best thing we can do is study God’s word. Daily reading and reflecting on God’s word will do more to shape our lives than anything else and we can do this daily on our own, we can do it weekly in small groups, we can do it a variety of ways, but we just need to do it.

Each Sunday we are providing a series of Bible references related to the spiritual discipline of the week so we can read God’s word every day. There are small groups to join in order to study God’s word with others and we are making those small group studies available so if you can’t make a small group you can at least do the study on your own, but I can’t stress enough how important it is for us to get out our Bibles and read.

But there are other things that are good to study. There are books on spiritual growth, like Foster’s Celebration of Discipline and there are books on the Bible and books on Church history and biographies of Christian leaders and all kinds of books that can help you grow in your faith. In the Narthex we have pulled over 60 good books from our library that you can check out today and read through this Lenten season. Please take a minute or two to find a book or stop in this week and spend some time in the church library and find something that will challenge your faith.

We can study more than books, however; we can also study the world around us. Remember Jesus said, consider the lilies and look at the birds of the air. Part of what Jesus is saying here is that we can study the created order and learn about God from what we see around us. We can learn from the birds how to trust God. We can learn from the flowers and trees how to wait for God and how to draw our nourishment from God. Through his use of parables, Jesus was the master at using the created order as an example of God’s truth at work in the world and if we concentrate on what we see around us we can learn this truth of God. So study doesn’t just mean reading books, it also means observing God’s creation, and learning from others, and being open to the movement of God all around us.

While there are many good things to study, let me say again that the single best thing we can study to strength our faith is the Bible. In fact, because the word of God plays such a primary role in our faith development, the study of God’s word might be the most important of all the spiritual disciplines we will look at, which is why we are looking at it at the beginning of the Lenten season. The best thing we can do for the next 40 days would be to read God’s word. In fact, one of the next steps for us might be to simply read and reflect on one chapter of a Mark and Luke’s gospel for the next 6 weeks. If we do that, read just one chapter a day – it will take us to Good Friday, and what a wonderful way to journey through Lent, by literally following in the footsteps of Jesus, not once, but twice – through two gospels.

All the evidence shows that if we want to have a stronger, deeper more vital faith the best thing we can do and the most powerful thing we can do is simply study, study the word of God, study the world God made, learn from God’s people, but just study.

Spiritual Disciplines ~ Confession

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the Lenten season and as we heard, Lent has traditionally been a time for sinners to be reconciled to God and the church, but through the years it has also become just a focused time for us to reflect upon our faith and work a little bit more intentionally to bring our lives in line with God’s will. Our hope this year is to learn about and use some spiritual practices to discipline our lives so that we will be able to hear and follow God more faithfully. Our hope is to not just learn about these spiritual disciplines, but work together to apply them to our lives. We heard from Jesus on Sunday that it’s not enough to just hear the word of God, it’s not enough to just study and learn about life and faith; we have to live it out.


So Lent begins with Ash Wednesday and this ritual of placing ashes on the forehead can be traced back into the Old Testament. When the people of God were convicted of their sin, when they knew they had been disobedient to God, they would mourn their sin by sitting in sackcloth and ashes. Look at Daniel 9:3-6, not only do we see them sitting in sackcloth and ashes, but they confessed their sin to God through prayer. So ashes became a sign of confession and sorrow and today they remind us that we are sinners who on our own are nothing without God and they remain for us a sign of confession and repentance. Since ashes are a sign of confession and repentance, today is a good day for us to look at the spiritual discipline of confession.

Confession is not just presenting a list of our known failures and sin to God. Confession begins with a time of self examination and reflection. We need to ask God to shine his light into our hearts and lives to show us those areas that need to be cleansed, healed, forgiven and changed. Self examination and reflection are important because while we can all list certain sins in our lives, the truth is that we need to look deeper. We need to ask God to point out the areas in our heart and life that he is not pleased with, areas that we may not even be aware of and those areas where we simply live in denial. We also need to dig a little deeper and ask God to show us why we may struggle so much with certain sins and what the root causes of those sins might be. So confession isn’t just sitting down and making a list of what we know is wrong with us, its starts by being willing to ask God to point out all our attitudes and actions that are not in line with His will.

Taking time for this kind of spiritual introspection isn’t easy. It’s hard to ask God to show us areas of our life that we may not want to acknowledge and sometimes it’s hard to just sit quietly and wait for God to reveal to us words, actions and attitudes that we would rather not admit to, but we need to take this time. We can’t change our hearts and lives until we know what needs to be changed. We can’t just admit in general terms that we are sinners and then expect the reality of that sin to change we need to be clear about what our sins are which means setting aside time for reflection and prayer.

Not only does confession require time for reflection, it also needs to include sorrow. Are we truly sorry for our sin? Does the reality of our sin bother us? Does it cause to grieve? Do we understand how serious our sin is and how much God hates our sin? Now let’s be clear that God does not hate us, but he does hate our sin. This past Sunday night we began our confirmation classes and one of the youth gave us this question, does God hate us when we sin? As I read that question I wanted to shout out, NO. God does not hate us, God will never hate us. God loves us. God loves us deeply and unconditionally and eternally, but God does hate our sin and the reason God hates our sin is because it is our sin that pulls us away from God and the life he wants for us.

Think back to Adam and Even and when sin first entered into the picture. The first thing sin did was separate Adam and Eve from God. They ran from God and hid, their sin separated them from God and sin continues to separate us from God and God doesn’t want that separation, God wants relationship. So God hates our sin because it separates us from him, but God also hates how sin distorts our lives and relationships with one another. Again, think about Adam and Eve, after sin entered the story they were ashamed of how they looked so they made clothes - sin destroyed their self image. And then they started blaming each other for their problems so we see that it is sin that destroyed our relationship with one another. When God looks at this situation he hates how sin destroys us and our relationships, and he hates how our sin separates us from him. God hates sin and we need to hate sin and the consequences of sin. This isn’t self hatred; we don’t hate ourselves, we simply hate those things that work to destroy us and pull us away from God.

When we begin to see our sin the way God does, it will cause us to grieve and then hopefully turn away from it, and turning away from our sin is also a part of confession. True confession can’t just be acknowledging all those things that are wrong in our heart and life and then going right back to them, there needs to be a conviction and a determination to live a new life and this is what we call repentance. To repent means to turn and that’s what we are talking about here, turning away from sin and this is probably the most difficult aspect of confession because many times we don’t want to turn away from sin. If we are honest with ourselves, there are times we don’t want to turn away from our sin and it’s during these times that we need to just acknowledge this and ask God to change our heart so that we will have the desire to turn away from sin. At times our prayers of confession might just need to be, God give me the desire to turn away from my sin, give me the desire to live a holy life because right now I don’t have that. If that is where we are right now, its ok, that kind of prayer might be the first step in confession and it might be the first step in a deeper, stronger more disciplined life of faith.

So confession is an examination of our conscience. It’s taking the time to reflect on our hearts and lives and looking at ourselves with the eyes of God. It is trying to see sin the way God does which will lead us to genuine sorrow and the desire to turn from our sin, or repent. Once we get to this place the question is, is there a right way to actually confess our sin? Do we confess our sins to God or should we confess our sins to one another? The truth is that there is no one right way to confess sin. While we do not need to confess our sins to anyone but God, the Bible makes clear that confessing our sins to one another can be helpful. In John 20:23 Jesus says If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven. This verse assumes that people were confessing their sins to one another, which leads us to ask why there might be value in confessing to one another, what benefit could there be?

One reason we might want to confess our sins to someone else is because if we only confess our sins privately to God we run the risk of not taking our sin seriously or not taking God’s forgiveness seriously. When we confess our sins to another person, we are confronted with them in a powerful way because we have to verbalize them and when we finally say something out loud it becomes real to us and something tangible that we have to deal with. When we simply keep our sin to ourselves and just confess to God it can become easy to ignore or sin and just move on, but confessing to someone else helps us deal with the reality of our wrong attitudes or actions.

Alone with God in prayer it can also become easy for us to doubt God’s grace and love and forgiveness. In the silence of our own hearts and lives we might think that our sins are so bad that God could never forgive them, or when it comes to certain sins which we wrestle with over and over and over again we may begin to wonder if God even wants to forgive us, but just as talking with others can help us take our sin seriously, talking with others can also help us take God’s forgiveness seriously. We might need to hear someone say, you are forgiven. We might need to hear someone say to us, God forgives you. Hearing those words can be powerful and there are times we need that human voice offering us love and grace. Imagine how powerful it must have been for people to hear Jesus say, your sins are forgiven. Hearing those words can be just as powerful today, and there are those times we actually need to hear them if we are going to accept God’s grace and move on to a stronger life and faith.

So confessing to one another can be a good thing, but if we choose to confess to others, we need to be careful about those we seek out. We need to choose people who are spiritually mature and sensitive to God and to us. While anyone can hear a confession and offer forgiveness in Jesus name, we need to seek out people who can keep confidence and this is something we need to be aware of if people come to us seeking to confess. If people confess to us, we need to make sure that we do not repeat what they tell us. Nothing breaks down trust and faith and community like gossip so we need to be wise in those people we choose to confess to and we need to be careful when people confess to us. While we don’t have to confess to any other person, there is value in sharing with one another and it can become a powerful tool in helping us accept God’s grace and moving forward in a more disciplined life and faith.

So confession is not just making a list of our sins and presenting it to God, it involves reflection, meditation and getting our hearts in line with God. Confession means we take our sin and the effects of our sin seriously and tonight we will have several different opportunities to confess our sin. This entire time of worship is to be a period of self examination and reflection. We will confess our sin to God through prayer, the reading and reflection of scripture, the singing of hymns, the moments of silence, the sacrament of communion and the imposition of ashes. As we confess our sin to God both individually and together, let’s stop pretending that we are more than we are, or better than we are and let’s stop making excuses for our sin and learn to confess to God our sin and our deep need for God’s grace, mercy and love.

A wise man builds his house upon a rock...

At the end of Jesus Sermon on the Mount he talks about two men who have a lot in common. The first thing they share is a dream; they each want to build a house. Now I think it is safe to say that Jesus is not talking here about building a physical structure in which to live life, he’s talking about building the life they want to live. The common dream these men have is of living a life that is not only strong and secure but is full of meaning and purpose. They are looking for a life that is filled with God’s presence and power and a joy they can experience no matter what comes their way, so they share a dream.


The second thing these men have in common is that they have both heard the teaching of Jesus. You might say they have been to church in their lives; they have read their Bibles, attended Sunday School and been part of small groups. They both agree that the word of God is important for their lives so they have taken the time to read it and study it. They have listened to God. And the third thing they have in common is that they each know that they will face storms in life. They will face the same struggles and trials and pains that come in life to everyone, and they are both looking for shelter and protection during those storm.

What Jesus has just described here is all of the people who had just heard his sermon on the mountain. Each person gathered around him that day was there because they were looking for a life filled with God’s presence and power. They wanted something more. They were hungry for God and for something good that was going to last. They also understood the importance of God’s word, that’s why they were there. They had given up their afternoon to listen to Jesus teach because they knew his word was important. They turned to the word of God, trusted in the word of God and listened to the word of God. And they were also people who had faced storms in life and because they knew trails and pain was simply a part of life, they were looking to Jesus for shelter and safety for the storms that come. Each person who listened to Jesus that day could see themselves as one of these two builders… and so can we.

Like these two builders, each one of us shares a dream for living a life that is full of meaning and purpose and the power of God, you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t looking for that, and each one of us sees value in the word of God, again we wouldn’t be here if we didn’t see something significant in the scriptures. We wouldn’t be here gathered around the word if we didn’t believe this word had some value. And each one of us has also faced some storms in life and we know that more storms are coming. Because we know that life has its struggles, we are also looking for something to provide shelter and comfort when the rain and wind comes. Like all the listeners of Jesus that day, we are looking for God’s help to make it through life. So we have a lot in common with these two men, we share the same dreams, we share the same values and we are looking for the same hope and help.

Now while these two men shared much in common, there is one fundamental difference in their lives that makes all the difference because it has to do with the foundation on which they build. One man heard the word of God but he didn’t act on it, he didn’t live it out. This man continued to rely upon his own strength and wisdom and he either did what he wanted to do or he did what seemed right to him, or what seemed easy at the time, but he didn’t live out the word of God and so ultimately there wasn’t much of a foundation to his life. To use Jesus’ metaphor, he built his house on the sand and if you have ever been to the beach, you know that sand both washes and blows away easily and whatever you place on top of it will eventually be swept away.

The other man, however, not only heard the word of God, he lived it out and when he did he found that the teaching of Jesus was solid and it lasted and it helped him during the good times and the difficult times. What he found was that when he put into practice the teaching of Jesus – his life was strong and secure no matter what was going on around him. His life was full of meaning and purpose and joy regardless of the circumstances because his house was built upon a rock that wasn’t going anywhere.

What Jesus says to all of those gathered on the mountain that day, and what he says to all of us today, is that like these two men – we have a choice to make. We have all heard the teaching of Jesus, we have heard God tell us to love our enemy, to pray for those who persecute us and to not worry but worship and trust God, the question really is, what will we do with this? What will we do with this teaching of Jesus? What will we do with this Sermon on the Mount? Will we ignore it and continue to live life on our own, or will we take seriously God’s word and work to live it out in our lives? What choice will we make? If we choose to listen to God’s word but not live it out, the foundation of our lives is as strong and secure as shifting sand and when the difficult days come, we will not find any strength or help. If we work to apply this word to our lives, however, if we will put the word of God into practice, then we will find a firm foundation on which to stand when things are going well, and when they aren’t. I almost hate to say this, but it really is that simple. The important thing isn’t to listen to God, it’s not to read and study God’s word, it’s to live it out today and everyday.

So we need build on the foundation of living out God’s word, but let’s be clear that this foundation takes time and effort. If you think about it, if you want to build a house on a solid foundation you have to dig down until you hit the solid bedrock below the surface and this takes time and energy and effort, and if we are going to be serious about putting the word of God into practice it is also going to take time and energy and effort. In our Men’s Bible study we are studying the book of Acts and as we read about the early church trying to figure out the will of God we realized that it took them a lot of time and energy and effort. This week we read about how the church fasted and prayed before they sent out Paul and Barnabas as missionaries. They didn’t just do what seemed right, they spent time in prayer, they fasted as a church, they talked and prayed and then put into practice the word of God which said, go make disciples in Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. They acted on the word of God, but only after they dug deep to figure out what it meant.

Living out the word of God and putting into practice the teaching of Jesus isn’t going to come quickly or easily, it will take time and effort, but just as building a strong foundation for a house is worthwhile, the time and energy and effort we put into our lives of faith will be worthwhile. As we enter into this Lenten season we have an opportunity to invest some time and effort into our faith. We are going to be studying 9 spiritual disciplines that if we are going to be serious about applying to our lives will take time and effort. It’s not easy to follow the teaching and example of Jesus, but it is worthwhile because the more we follow Jesus, the more we live out the word of God, the stronger our faith is and that stronger faith will help us in times of need, but the choice is ours. Will we invest the time? Will we expend the energy to not just listen to Jesus, but figure out how to live out what he teaches us and learn to follow his example?

If we want to build our life and faith on the foundation of living out the word of Jesus then I want to suggest three steps we can take this week to help us do this. The first step is to stop making excuses about why we don’t follow the teaching of Jesus. While there are all kinds of reasons why we may not follow the teaching of Jesus, it’s time for us to lay all these excuses aside and simply ask God to forgive us. This Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent and the beginning of our study on spiritual disciplines and the first discipline we are going to study is the discipline of confession. We need to be honest with God and confess to him and to one another that at times we just don’t take seriously the God’s word. We need to confess to God our sin, our failure to live out the word of God and then ask God to help us stop making excuses and start living with faith. I would invite you to set aside some time on Wednesday to confess to God our sin and use the beginning of the Lenten Season as a new beginning of leaving excuses behind as we start executing the word of God in our day to day lives.

As we start trying to live out the word of God let’s also set some reasonable expectations. The truth is there is a lot in the Bible to live out and there is no way we can live it all out on day one. There is no way we can live out the entire word of God on day one so let’s set a more reasonable expectation and maybe just re-read the sermon on the mount this week and pick out one or two teachings that we will work to apply to our lives. And maybe we shouldn’t start with love your enemy, one of the more difficult teachings; maybe we should start with the call to pray. In Matthew 6:9-13 Jesus gives us the Lord ’s Prayer, maybe we can begin to live out the teaching of Jesus by simply praying this prayer every day for the next 6 weeks. And let me be clear that praying the Lord ’s Prayer doesn’t mean just reciting the words we learned as children, it means praying the prayer. Re-write the prayer, put it in your own words, and think about what it really means to ask God for daily bread and to forgive those who sin against us. Think about what it means to call God holy and then live that out. Re-read the Sermon on the Mount and highlight the teachings God is calling you to live out today.

And the last thing I would encourage us to think about is this, most builders don’t lay out the foundation for their house by themselves, they get some help. God does not want us to live out our faith on our own; he calls us to live out our faith in community with others. From the very beginning God has always provided us with help. Adam got a help-mate in Eve. Abraham traveled with his family. Moses had Aaron, David had Jonathon, Jesus called the disciples, Peter had James and John, Paul had Barnabas and then Timothy. God never intended his people to go it alone and he doesn’t want us to go it alone either. We can not establish a solid foundation for our lives on our own – we need the help and support and love of others, so we need to seek out the help of others. You can join a small group during Lent, but if a small group isn’t where God is calling you, then invite a trusted friend to walk with you and hold you accountable in love and faith as together you live out the word of God – just don’t go it alone.

A wise person, Jesus says, isn’t someone who attends worship, it’s not someone who reads the word of God and listens to the teaching of Jesus, it is someone who takes that word and lives it out day by day. May this be our goal as we enter into the season of Lent, may we be the ones who build our lives on the foundation of following the teaching of Jesus.