A few years ago, our family took a vacation near Lake Michigan. The beachfront had these small two-person sailboats you could rent. How hard could it be? I wondered. I put the boat in the water and fiddled with the ropes and sail. Twenty minutes later, the boat and I were still only a few feet from shore, and I hoped anyone watching would assume my red face was just sunburned. At last, the teenager at the rental stand took pity and gave me an impromptu sailing lesson.
It did get me thinking about what makes a sailboat move. Is it the skill of the sailor? Certainly skill makes a difference, as I learned that day. But no matter how knowledgeable or determined the sailor might be, he needs something else, something he has no control over: the wind. If there is no wind, his boat will not move.
At the same time, the wind can be blowing fiercely without your boat moving, or at least not moving in the direction you’d prefer. You can be stuck, your sail haplessly flapping. Or you can be tossed to and fro by the waves. You can even capsize (which I did later that day, in the middle of the bay).
For you to move, and move in the right direction, certain skills need to be learned and put into practice. Moreover, you’ll not be able to enjoy the experience of sailing until those skills have become so internalized that you’re not even thinking about them. You’ve practiced them so much they’ve become second nature. Then you’re not thinking about sailing—you’re sailing!
Though sailing might be unfamiliar to many of us, it’s a good metaphor for our life with God. No matter how determined we might be, we can’t change our hearts at the deepest level nor move ourselves forward. No amount of knowledge or grit will avail. We are always dependent on a power outside of ourselves. We need the wind. Without the wind, there is no movement. And as Jesus reminds us, “the wind blows where it wishes” (John 3:8).
Yet at the same time, we are not passive observers. We can’t control the wind, but we can catch it. And in order to catch the wind, you have to draw the sail. And in order to draw the sail, certain God-given, time-honored skills need to be learned and put into practice. Otherwise, even if the wind is blowing fiercely, you can be stuck or tossed by the waves (Eph. 4:14) or even “suffer shipwreck” (see 1 Tim. 1:19 NIV).
Right from the start, I need to address a possible objection that might be troubling you. Perhaps you’re saying, “I thought our salvation is all of grace and completely dependent on God. But you’re making it sound like I have to do something.”
Sometimes a desire to express what is true about the grace of God—that there’s nothing you can do to make God love you more or love you less—leads to the false assumption that there is nothing then left for you to do. Your life with God is all of grace. Period. And God’s grace invites, even requires, your participation. “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.” 1 The Bible calls us to rest in Christ (Matt. 11:28) and, at the same time, to “strive to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:11).
An old Oxford preacher captured this tension when he called us to “labour to be brought near.” 2 You can hear both sides: “labor” is an active command and gives us something to do; “to be brought near” is a passive stance and sounds like the responsibility is God’s. Yes.
We don’t often hear the complexity today of “labor to be brought near,” but you’ll find it assumed historically by the most stalwart defenders of grace. John Calvin said, “Let us therefore labor more to feel Christ living in us.” 3 John Owen added, “Labor, therefore, to fill your hearts with the cross of Christ.” 4 And Jonathan Edwards exhorted, “We should labour to be continually growing in divine love.” 5
For some, this call to “labor” still sounds suspicious. But might this suspicion reveal something telling about us? Perhaps we’re expecting the presence of Christ to be with us each morning the same way the dew is on the morning grass: we just wake up, and there it is.
But if we passively wait for an experience of Christ’s presence to fall afresh on us each morning and it doesn’t, or if we don’t feel his presence, then we will complain of periods of being “dry.” We might be tempted to blame this dryness on someone else—our church, our friends, even on God himself. But perhaps the reason is because we are not laboring to be brought near. 6 Granted, there could be other reasons why we might feel “dry,” many of which are completely out of our control. Seasons of burnout and exhaustion will happen and will require resting with God or a new routine of seeking his face. Nevertheless, we must always keep pressing on to know him (Hos. 6:3).
The Bible captures the dynamic of this dual reality in one remarkable sentence in Philippians 2:12–13. The sentence begins, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” which again sounds like we are responsible. But the verse continues, “For it is God who works in you,” which sounds like God is responsible and we depend on him.
Exactly.
Not only do the voices of history convey this shared responsibility in our spiritual progress, but Jesus describes it too. His word for this dynamic is “abide,” which even in English captures the sense. On the one hand, the word suggests resting and staying, like a child leaning into his mother’s embrace. It’s a posture of reliance for care and even survival, like branches depend on a vine, which is exactly the context in which Jesus uses the word. “Abide in me … As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me” (John 15:4). This is a relationship of utter dependency. As Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (v. 5).
On the other hand, abiding is an action. Here is something you must choose to do. Jesus commands us, “Abide in me.” He commands us to rest in him. Like a dog commanded to stay, we must exert ourselves not to become distracted or move away from our Master. And Jesus makes it clear that the amount of fruit that comes out of our lives will be a direct result of how much (John 15:5) or how little (v. 6) we heed his commandments. In fact, he goes on to say, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love” (v. 10).
That’s why the sailing metaphor is instructive. Life with God is not like a motorboat, where we are in control of the power and direction. But neither is it like a raft, where we just sit back and are carried along. It’s like sailing. While we can’t control the most important thing—the wind that makes us move—that doesn’t mean there is nothing left for us to do. We have to draw the sail to catch the wind. We must labor to be brought near.
How do we do that? How do we draw the sail to catch the wind of God’s empowering presence so we can move ahead in joy and confidence?
Over the last four chapters, the prevailing metaphor we’ve used to describe your life in union with Christ is a journey. You are on a journey, a quest. You have been given a new identity, a new horizon, a new purpose for each step along the way; and you have a sympathetic and powerful guide who is with you (that’s chapters 7–10 in one sentence!).
In the next chapter we will look specifically at some of the ordinary means God has provided for us to draw the sail to catch the wind of the Holy Spirit, to move forward on this journey. But before we get ahead of ourselves and talk about the specific motions of “drawing the sail,” we need to address the question that must come first: Do you want to go on this journey in the first place?
If you don’t intend to get in the boat, even the best sailing lessons will be pointless.
Several years ago, I trained for a marathon over a period of months. I planned to run the race with a friend who lived far away. I would wake up early in the mornings to run—at first three to four miles but gradually more. Some mornings, I dreaded it. Other mornings, I woke up before my alarm in eager anticipation. Almost always, I was glad that I’d done it when the run was over. But what got me out of bed and into my running shoes morning after morning was the horizon, the goal of finishing that 26.2-mile race and knowing that my buddy was counting on me. All the sacrifices would be worth it for that end.
On our journey, this is where we too must start: Do you want to run this race? Do you want communion with God? This is the great end to which all of our lessons and practice are but the means. This is the quest:
You have said, “Seek my face.”
My heart says to you,
“Your face, LORD, do I seek.” (Ps. 27:8)
Unless God is the end that you desire, unless he is the one you seek, these calls to “draw the sail” will come across as simply boxes to check, duties to perform, or more items to add to your already long to-do list. You may think you’re not moving forward with God because you don’t want it enough. But perhaps it’s because God is not your true God. He is not really the one your heart is after. You may profess faith in God but be attempting to use him as a means to your own ends, obeying him in order to get what your heart is really seeking. Whatever your heart seeks most—that is your real god.
Until you face this question—Is God the one your heart most seeks?—then these calls to “labor” will feel, well, laborious.
It’s not a one-time decision. The journey of choosing God will be a daily fight, a clash of wills, an inner conflict that will play out over and over, in a thousand little ways. Writer David Brooks says this road to character is “the most important thing,” about you: “whether you are willing to engage in this struggle.” 7 Do you see this inner confrontation to be the central drama of your life? Are you willing to engage in this daily struggle?
At times you’ll be tempted to despair or to give up. You’ll grow weary and disheartened. Don’t be surprised by that (Ps. 6:6). That is exactly why you need to answer this most important question first—do you want to go on this journey?
If you do, remember what this book is all about: Christ is with you. He’s your “running buddy,” as it were. He leads you, comforts you along the way, and assures you you’ll make it all the way home. He’s also your horizon. He is not only our guide; he’s our prize (1 Cor. 9:24). And one day “we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
Is Jesus your horizon? Is this your prayer: “I want to know Christ” (Phil. 3:10 NIV)? Or can you at least pray, with St. Teresa of Avila, “Oh God, I don’t love you, I don’t even want to love you, but I want to want to love you”? If Christ is not what you want, then it won’t matter how clear these sailing lessons are.
But if you do want to abide in him, then let’s go!
One of the most common metaphors for life with God in the Bible is not sailing, but walking (e.g., Eph. 5:15; Col. 2:6). It seems rather simple, even trite, after the grand high call to know Christ. After all, nothing is more pedestrian than walking. Even a toddler can do it; but it makes an instructive point. Life lived in communion with God is not meant to be rare or extraordinary. It’s not the reward of some secret knowledge. The Bible doesn’t say, “Grasp the secret of the Spirit”; it says, “Keep in step with the Spirit” (Gal. 5:25). Walking. Keep in step.
This turns out to be one of the most challenging aspects of the Christian life—the simple repetitiveness of it. Left, right, left, right. Again and again, over and over. All the way. Every day. Like a long walk uphill.
Christina Rossetti has a poem that opens:
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end. 8
We might prefer to fly. We may wonder if there are any shortcuts. And there are some, but once you find out what they are—humiliation and suffering—you’ll probably prefer to walk.
The first step in life with God is always the step of faith. The most famous definition of faith is the Bible’s: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see” (Heb. 11:1 NET). What do we hope for? Isn’t it this? We hope that God really is as great and good as he says he is. Or as King David says in Psalm 56:9, “This I know, that God is for me.” Being able to say, come what may, this I know, that God is for me—this is the life of faith.
How can we have a sure and certain confidence that God is for us given all that we can see? T. F. Torrance, the great twentieth-century English theologian, tells of his service as an army chaplain during World War II. In the heat of battle one day, he came across a young soldier at the point of death:
As I knelt down and bent over him, he said, “Padre, is God really like Jesus?” I assured him that he was—the only God that there is, the God who had come to us in Jesus, shown his face to us, and poured out his love to us as our Saviour. As I prayed and commended him to the Lord Jesus, he passed away. 9
I appreciate this story because it acknowledges the cruelty of life. Pain and death, injustice, suffering, and war—these exist and they hurt us. They tear at us. And yet, we have alongside us “a man of sorrows, … acquainted with grief” (Isa. 53:3), who meets us in precisely this place of pain to assure us that—in spite of everything—this God is for us.
In our walk with God, faith always comes first because unless you are sure that you are safe with God and certain that God is not disappointed in you, you will never seek his face. “For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him” (Heb. 11:6).
Before we labor to be brought near to him, we must first rest in his favor toward us. This is the step of faith. It is both how we begin (Acts 16:31) and how we move forward in our life with God (Gal. 3:1–5). There is nothing more liberating or life giving than knowing that God has pronounced you innocent—legally innocent—now that you are united to Jesus Christ. This is a once-for-all and irrevocable announcement. It’s as real and eternal as the Word of God itself. And it’s precisely because that platform of acceptance and favor is so stable that you can live in holiness and in the freedom of the Spirit (see chapter 9).
So we always begin in faith. And following just behind faith, as surely as the right foot follows the left, is repentance.
Repentance is not a popular word today, but as we’ve seen over these chapters, when Christ calls us to himself, he is calling us into the abundant life (see chapters 8–9). Repentance is not simply feeling sorry for what we’ve done or confessing where we’ve failed. Nor is it simply resolving to do better. Rather, repentance is turning back to God in all of life. If sin is running from God to get control of our lives, then repentance is turning back to God and yielding control to him.
In that clash of wills—Jesus or you?—repentance is letting God’s quiet voice become louder, larger, and stronger in your life. And because we are turning back to the one who has already accepted and forgiven us, repentance is not only marked by weeping and mourning, but it is also marked by relief and joy. We do mourn (Matt. 5:4) because we hate to grieve him who loves us best (Eph. 4:30). But we also rejoice as we realize that the primary one we have offended (Ps. 51:4) is the very one who has moved toward us and embraced us (Luke 15:20). Here is a sorrow that leads to rejoicing and leaves no regret (2 Cor. 7:10). Turning back to God is turning back to life!
These two steps of faith and repentance are the basic movement of the Christian life. They are not only how we begin life in Christ (Mark 1:15); they are also the mindset, the disposition, with which we live the entire Christian life. This is how you keep in step with God’s Spirit: faith and repentance. Believe and obey. These are the left, right, left, right of our walk with God. You never outgrow or get beyond this.
Let me give you a few images as kindling for your imagination.
Like Pedals on a Bicycle
One of my favorite images for the Christian life is a bicycle. A bicycle must have two functioning tires to move forward. The front tire is grace. Grace always leads. The back tire is demand. Demand always follows grace (Exod. 20:1–3). But both are needed for the Christian life to move forward (see chapter 3). To extend the analogy, belief and repentance are like pedals for this bicycle. You must keep pressing on both. Yes, occasionally the road will head downhill and you can coast, but if you ignore either tire or attempt to push only one of your pedals, you’ll get in a ditch. Attend to both tires, and keep pedaling.
Like Breathing
Faith and repentance must also become like breathing to you. You breathe in the promises of God (God is good; God loves me; God is with me). You breathe out the lies of trying to abide in those other vines (God is holding out on me; I know how my life will work best; I can get the life I want through __________ [insert anything other than God]). Christ says, “I am the true vine … abide in me” (John 15:1, 4). Breathe in; breathe out. 10 No one thinks about breathing, of course. It’s autonomic. But it is also repetitive, continuous, and absolutely essential to life. And to breathe faith and repentance, to abide in Christ, you must start by being very conscious of it. Oswald Chambers says this about abiding:
In the initial stages it is a continual effort until it becomes so much the law of life that you abide in Him unconsciously. 11
This is the goal—that by a lifestyle of belief and repentance, by breathing in and breathing out, you’ve rehearsed this so often that you’re able to do it “without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17).
Like a Pendulum
To use one more illustration, the dynamic of repenting and believing works like a pendulum. The further it goes in one direction; the further it can go in the other. The more you believe the gospel (God is good; he has united himself to me; I am accepted as I am; he is worth it), the more you will repent (my sin runs even deeper than I thought, but I don’t want to stay as I am; I want to trust him; I want to live for him who loved me and gave himself for me). The more you obey God, the more you will believe God. And the more you believe God, the more you will want to obey him. Back and forth it goes, swinging higher and higher, like a pendulum.
Picasso once said, “All children are artists.” There is a desire to create in the heart of each child that the grown-up world usually squeezes out. In the same way, abiding is an art, and there is a desire to commune with God in the heart of each person that sin squeezes out.
The Bible says we must “become like children” to enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 18:3). Like any art, abiding can at first be delighted in without any training, like a small child dabbling with finger paints or bouncing her hands on piano keys. But for this art to be developed and enjoyed so that it continues to give life to you and others, it has to be practiced, long and hard, with the eventual reward that it becomes second nature. Like sailing or learning a new language or learning to play the piano—after you practice it long enough, you arrive at the place where you no longer have to think about the mechanics of it; you get to just do it.
My downstairs neighbor (and good friend) is a world-class, Juilliard-trained pianist. As the music he plays floats up through the floorboards of my living room, I know that he’s not thinking about the notes he wants to play. He is free just to sit down and make beautiful music on the piano. But getting to this point of freedom took hundreds of hours of practice; it required patience and time and discipline. And he will never get beyond the need for discipline—as accomplished and skilled as my friend is, he still practices almost every day.
Abiding, as with any art, requires practice and discipline to reach that point of freedom and enjoyment. And like any artist, you’ll need to keep on practicing—repeatedly and habitually—or you’ll get rusty.
It’s been said the Christian life is like playing with a yo-yo while walking upstairs. There are a lot of ups and downs, but the overall direction is up. What matters most is not how far along we are but what direction we are facing. How do we keep pressing on and moving up? How do we keep going in the right direction?
To start, we need to be aware of an unexpected danger on our journey.
Much has been written about the importance of a morning routine. The first few choices you make each morning have great power to set the direction of the whole rest of your day. Our next chapter will look at some of the specific practices we can choose to set in motion; but for now, let’s emphasize that abiding in Christ takes preparation. First Peter says to prepare “your minds for action” (1:13). In other words, the most important thing you do each day may happen before you do anything.
Every morning I wake up and find my heart has reverted to its default position: I need to prove myself today, handle things, make a name for myself. Part of “preparing my mind for action” is choosing instead to reorient myself toward God and his mercies, which are new every morning; to remember God relates to me by his grace, not by my performance.
That is, I must start each day with my union with Christ. I must breathe in faith—I am in Christ and Christ is in me. God is good, God is in charge, and God loves me. Above all, what will make this day a good day will be abiding in Christ today, listening to his voice, keeping in step with his Spirit, walking in faith and repentance.
But I can’t assume the posture of abiding unless I am sober minded (1 Thess. 5:6), knowing that I must labor to be brought near and that this labor begins again each day.
We must labor to keep our union with Christ in front of us day after day or we will drift. To return to the sailboat analogy with which we began this chapter—what does it take for a boat to drift away? Nothing. If it is not anchored or tied down, it will drift away. “Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away” (Heb. 2:1). As the hymn says:
O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be;
Let that grace now, like a fetter, bind my wand’ring heart to thee.
Prone to wander—Lord, I feel it—prone to leave the God I love:
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above. 12
The unflagging, unfailing grace of God is always blowing. And every day, it is our union with Christ—the reality that we are bound to him—that is our anchor, keeping us from drifting away, and our engine, the wind in our sails that propels us forward. Each day we wake up and we begin again. “Always we begin again.” 13 So today, let us “labor to be brought near,” confident that our labor is not in vain. Now for some sailing lessons.