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.
