Last summer I started to feel chest pains. Then I made a serious mistake. I went to the Mayo Clinic website (don’t ever do that). “Tingling in the arms,” hmm, yes. “Pressure on the chest,” maybe. Pretty soon I was convinced I was dying. Apparently there is a term for this—cyberchondria.
I went to the doctor, and he ran a battery of tests—cholesterol screening, EKG, even a cardiac scan. When I went back the next week to get the results, he asked me, “Are you stressed?” Now, I’m a pastor of a growing church and the father of three young children—that can be stressful. But if you’re a pastor and your doctor asks you, “Are you stressed?” you’re in a bit of a bind. “Me? Stressed? No, I’ve got peace like a river, Doc.” Actually I think I mumbled, “I don’t think so.”
He said gently, “Well, sometimes your body trumps what your mind is telling you. As far as these tests show us, you are a picture of health. But your body is telling you that you need to rest more, eat better, and exercise.”
I looked on the wall at his credentials: “Johns Hopkins MD.” I’d been worried for weeks, tested for days, and this was his diagnosis. “You’re telling me that I need to rest more, eat better, and exercise?” I asked, repeating him verbatim. “And then I’ll feel better?” So, I thanked my doctor and paid him for telling me something I already knew before I’d ever gone to see him.
But if I knew it already, why wasn’t I doing these things? Maybe I didn’t understand what I thought I knew. Maybe I wasn’t convinced that these basic disciplines were essential to my daily health. Maybe I needed to suffer the consequences of ignoring them before I felt compelled to pay attention to them.
When I was a little kid, Dunkin’ Donuts had a television commercial featuring a man who wakes up while it’s still dark and mutters to his wife, “Time to make the donuts.” He shuffles into his uniform and heads, zombielike, to the donut shop. But it was clear he was not excited and would rather keep sleeping. That’s how many of us look at the practices of abiding in Christ. Time to make the donuts … but we’d really prefer to hit the snooze button.
Over the years, I have heard (and now given) many sermons on the importance of prayer and Bible reading, but I’ve noticed these seem to pass in one ear and out the other. We know we ought to (Yes, yes, I know—rest more, eat better, and exercise), but most of us find it difficult to sustain the daily habit.
In the last chapter, we looked generally at the journey of life with God: the posture of abiding and the basic movements (believe and repent, repent and believe). The specific means, or practices, of abiding in Christ that we’re about to look at are like the bread and water for our journey. They keep us going; they feed and nourish us.
If you’ve ever been on a long hike, then you know that if you wait until you feel thirsty to drink water, you are in trouble. You’ll already be on the verge of dehydration and possible exhaustion. In the same way, if you pray only when you feel a desperate need, you’re probably suffering from a sort of soul dehydration and possible spiritual exhaustion. And yet, if you don’t put these means of abiding in their place—as nourishment—they can become merely boxes to check, duties to perform, one more thing to do on an already-long list.
As we said in the last chapter, life with God is like sailing. You can’t move yourself. You are completely dependent on a power outside of you. You need the wind, and the wind blows where it will. You can’t control it. But you can catch it. And to catch the wind, you must draw the sail. To draw the sail, certain skills must be learned and put into practice. But these skills will benefit you only if you’ve decided to go on the journey in the first place. So let’s assume that you want communion with God. How then do you draw the sail?
For more than two thousand years, spiritual guides from vastly different traditions have emphasized the importance of spiritual exercises for spiritual health. 1 These exercises have been called various names, such as “spiritual disciplines” or “means of grace.” In the last few decades, there has been a surge of interest in this subject. One of the writers spearheading this renewal has been Richard Foster, who defines spiritual disciplines this way: “God has given us the disciplines of the spiritual life as a means of receiving his grace. The disciplines allow us to place ourselves before God so that he can transform us.” 2
We are going to be looking at a handful of these disciplines, but it’s important to underscore that these means, by themselves, do not change us. God is the one who changes us. These means put us in the place where God can work within us. They are ordinary means God has provided for us to experience his extraordinary grace. They are means of drawing the sail.
Some of us might feel suspicious about spiritual disciplines, seeing them as rote or mechanical or empty. And they can be. But union with Christ changes how we understand these means of grace. It makes you see them in ways you never have. When union with Christ becomes the lens through which we view these means, they are transformed from mechanical duties into living opportunities to come into the presence of the living Christ.
Psalm 1 says that the one who meditates on God’s Word day and night will be blessed. And yet for many of us, feeling overtired and overscheduled already, reading the Bible can easily become one more thing we should be doing. “I just don’t get anything out of it,” we may lament. But union with Christ transforms how we read the Bible:
The reader of the Bible comes to the text not as a stranger to Christ—who is the central subject of all Scripture—but as one who is actually connected to Christ by the Holy Spirit, as one who is really in the real presence of the risen Lord in the prayerful reading of Scripture. Meditating on Scripture can and should be a real-time experience of communion with the living Christ. 3
Do you approach the Bible with the expectation that the same Spirit who inspired these words once, long ago, is the same Spirit who is in you now, speaking to you and illuminating these words for you? There is a reason the Bible is called “living and active” (Heb. 4:12), because the living Christ is actively speaking through these words to those who are willing to listen to his voice (John 10:27).
This doesn’t mean you always experience the feeling of God’s presence. You can’t control the wind! But it does mean you can always hoist the sail and come into his presence expecting to hear a word from him. The Bible’s word for this practice of reading with attentive expectation is meditation. Eugene Peterson says meditating on God’s Word is like what a dog does with a bone. 4 By prayer and through the Holy Spirit, you gnaw and chew on God’s Word until it metabolizes and gets into your bloodstream. You take it in, and you expect it to nourish you.
This means that reading the Bible is not primarily like opening a “toolbox” for navigating life’s problems (though it certainly does teach us about how to live). It is, rather, one of the essential means God has provided to communicate the wonder of his presence to us. Union with Christ is how the Bible comes alive. The Bible is no longer just words on a page, and the call to meditate on it is not simply a call of duty. This is bread for your journey. Jesus himself says, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4). An awareness of the living Christ dwelling in you is how the Bible becomes a burning bush out of which God speaks to you.
Mother Teresa once said that we learn to pray by praying. 5 But we’re so busy and prayer feels so inefficient. And we have so many questions. Does prayer make a difference? Won’t God do what God will do? Besides, who hasn’t been disappointed in prayer? We’ve prayed fervently for something—nothing excessive, not a Lamborghini—something good: a restored marriage, a loved one to be healed, but it hasn’t appeared to make a difference. Why keep praying?
Of all the questions surrounding prayer, I want us to focus on why God calls us to keep on praying and why persistence in prayer is essential to abiding in Christ. Jesus once told a parable “to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). Why should we have to keep asking God for what he already knows we need? Perhaps the question is, do we know what we need?
Jesus asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). This may not seem like a challenging question until you consider what writer Oscar Wilde once wrote: “When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.” 6 Can’t you look back and think of some prayers you are glad God answered no to? We often don’t know what is best for us.
Oswald Chambers once said, “The greatest enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but good choices which are not quite good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best.” 7 Because God is better than anything we could be asking for, better even than life itself (Ps. 63:3–4), the call to persist in prayer is not for God’s sake, but for ours—to train and purify our desires. Prayer is integral to abiding because the real point of prayer is not something but someone. 8
Just as union with Christ changes how we read the Bible, it also changes how we pray. “The LORD is near to all who call on him” (Ps. 145:18), but for us to know God is near—nearer to us than we can imagine—we must call out to him. Prayer is to union with Christ what conversation is to marriage; it’s how this union remains vital. If you never spoke to your spouse beyond “Good morning” and “Good night,” then you would undoubtedly be drifting apart. You would not be experiencing the fullness of your union.
What wonder is prayer! Not only can we speak to the Creator of the universe, not only does he hear and use our prayers to accomplish his will, but our Father also desires to hear from his children. He desires to hear from us so much more than we desire to speak with him. The call to persist in prayer doesn’t guarantee we will always get what we are praying for. But union with Christ does guarantee that God always hears our prayers. As Søren Kierkegaard put it, “This is our comfort because God answers every prayer, for either he gives what we pray for or something far better.” 9 Union with Christ reminds us that the real reward of prayer is not what we’re asking God for. The real reward of prayer is communion with God, made possible by our union with Christ (Heb. 4:16).
Another discipline by which we may draw the sail is the practice of gathering weekly in community to worship God (Heb. 10:24–25). In the Garden of Eden, God rested on the seventh day, not because he was tired, but to model for us the rhythm he has built into the fabric of creation: one day in seven to rest and remember who God is and who we are. The Sabbath is a gift God gives his people to commune with him in weekly worship together, “that by his example he might woo humanity to its needed rest.” 10
Union with Christ changes how we worship. We can now come to worship aware that Christ is present in us, that Christ is our high priest who is leading us into his Father’s presence (Heb. 8:1–2), and that Christ is speaking through all the elements of the worship service, from beginning to end. This allows us to come into worship expecting to hear from God, as opposed to evaluating the music or the quality of the sermon. 11 You come to church, and instead of passively observing, you can actively ask, “God, what do you want to do in me now? What do you want me to hear? How do you want my life to look different as a result of being here?”
On some days, you may come to worship full of doubts and fears, not really trusting that God is good or that you are loved. But when you hear the voice of the person next to you singing of God’s goodness and care, not to mention a room full of voices, it strengthens your faith beyond what you can understand.
In addition, because God knows our faith is weak, he has given us pictures to remind us of the gospel—the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Sacraments are visible signs of an invisible reality. 12 And it is so sad, tragic even, that these signs of the church’s unity (Eph. 4:5; 1 Cor. 11:20) have more often than not been occasions for division.
One of the reasons we’ve said that union with Christ has been eclipsed in our understanding today is because we live in a disenchanted world where the sense of God is vanishing from the earth. In no part of the church’s worship is this disenchantment more evident than in our view of the sacraments.
Many Protestants, perhaps out of fear of appearing too “Catholic,” have moved away from seeing the sacraments as means of grace. But throughout the New Testament, baptism is described as a sign of our union with Christ (Col. 2:12; Rom. 6:4; Gal. 3:27). What is most important about baptism is not how (immersion or sprinkling?) or whom (children or adults?) but what. Baptism is a sign of our entrance into union with Christ. 13 It may look forward in hope or back in celebration, but anytime you see someone being baptized—if you are a Christian—it is a visible reminder of what is most true about your life. “Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3 NIV).
Likewise, the Lord’s Supper is a sign of our ongoing union with Christ. In observing the Lord’s Supper, we remember (“Do this in remembrance of me”) in gratitude (Eucharist, as the Lord’s Supper is sometimes called, means “giving thanks”), but these are perhaps secondary to what is more important. In taking the Lord’s Supper, we commune with the living Christ and his body (1 Cor. 11:27). It is no accident that the observance of the Lord’s Supper is most often called communion.
“The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Cor. 10:16). The Bible is saying that the Lord’s Supper doesn’t merely remind us of a gift. It is a gift. And that gift is nothing less than Christ himself. As Christ says, “This is my body, which is given for you” (Luke 22:19). What the signs of bread and wine (or juice) represent, they also present—the real spiritual presence of Christ. 14
The Lord’s Supper is a means of grace whereby Christ feeds our faith, nourishes our souls, and gladdens our hearts. He strengthens our union with him beyond what we can comprehend.
Nothing remains but to break forth in wonder at this mystery … it is a secret too lofty for either my mind to comprehend or my words to declare. And to speak more plainly, I rather experience it than understand it. 15
By injecting these gifts with deeper meaning and enchantment, union with Christ gives us something that is sorely needed today—a deeper appreciation of the place of the sacraments in worship. The mindset of union with Christ can revitalize your expectations and experience of gathering in community to worship.
How can we abide in Christ if we don’t abide in what the Bible calls “the body of Christ” (see 1 Cor. 12:24)? Union with Christ means being united not only to Christ but also to all others who are in him, and so abiding in him can’t be separated from abiding in Christian community, as difficult as that can be at times. (The Christian community has been memorably compared to Noah’s ark—the stench on the inside would be unbearable were it not for the alternative outside.)
But the Christian life was never meant to be lived alone. Even in paradise, when Adam had perfect communion with God, it was the Lord, not Adam, who said it was not good for Adam to be alone (Gen. 2:18). We were made for community. How could it be otherwise when we are created in the image of a God who is himself a community of three persons?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes one reason we need to abide in community:
The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure. 16
We are so prone to doubt the promises of the gospel; they are so grand and our faith is so weak, and the sins in our hearts rise up to condemn us. We need a community in which to confess our sins to one another (James 5:16) and to hear the gospel spoken over our lives by others. As we gather together, we meet one another as bearers of salvation. We need people we can call on when we are in great need or just feeling out of sorts. On this journey, as on any great quest, we need others to travel with us, so we can help one another, spur one another on, and carry one another’s burdens.
In particular, we need spiritual friends. 17 We need friends to help us to see our blind spots. On our own, it can be easy to deceive ourselves. “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:13). Almost the entire New Testament was written to groups of people—the “you” in your Bible in English might more accurately be translated as “y’all.” We need community, to “exhort one another every day,” to abide in Christ.
You might be thinking, I’ve heard all this before. Read the Bible. Pray. Worship. Stay in community. And I’ve tried it. But it didn’t work. They don’t work.
It is imperative to stress once again that these means of abiding are just that—means. If you don’t see these means of abiding as ways of experiencing the freedom that is yours in Christ (Gal. 5:1) but rather as encumbrances on your life, then they will be just that—heavy yokes around your neck instead of ways to take on Christ’s easy yoke (Matt. 11:29).
When the horizon of communion with God is lost, you can be doing all the right things for all the wrong reasons. You can be drawing the sail routinely and still be stuck. If you don’t keep this great end before you, then you are bound to get discouraged and grow weary in these practices.
To extend the sailing metaphor we’ve drawn through these two chapters, consider the nautical term doldrums. The doldrums are an area near the equator where the water is especially warm and so the wind can die down suddenly, leaving a ship stranded for an extended period of time. The word has carried over into common usage to mean a period of listlessness, depression, or stagnation. Just as experienced sailors know to expect the doldrums, so those who want to grow in God’s grace must know to expect the doldrums.
The doldrums are an important, even necessary, part of learning to abide. They protect us from the dangerous temptation of enthroning our experience of Christ over the real Christ. See, if you always got a high, or a spiritual surge, every time you drew the sail, it would be easy to shift into pursuing your own immediate gratification instead of pursuing Christ. It might become less about the horizon and more about another spiritual jolt. In the name of seeking God, you’d be using God to help you maintain a sense of control over your own life.
But precisely because it is the real God you are seeking, by definition this means you must give up your right to control him. You can’t control the wind! You are utterly dependent on a power outside of you. Jesus says, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). It’s a terrifying truth, but in order for it to become life giving to us, we have to be made aware, sometimes painfully so, that we can’t coerce or control God by our own frantic maneuvering.
Think about how silly and pointless and exhausting it would be for someone to stand up in his sailboat and blow with all of his might onto a limp, hanging sail. How sad. But isn’t that how many of us approach these means of grace—if we just try hard enough, we’ll be bound to move? No wonder we get so easily flustered.
The doldrums train you to place your trust in God and not in your own frantic blowing. There will be, even must be, times when you draw the sail and nothing happens. You are doing everything “right.” You are reading the living Word, but it does not seem alive. You are praying to the living God, but it seems like no one’s listening. You are worshipping, but it just sounds like noise. You’re doing all you know how to do, yet you are stuck.
The doldrums are there to remind you that it is the real God you are seeking. You must wait on him because he is God. He is not in our service. We are in his. Waiting on him means … waiting on him. How else would we learn to wait? Waiting on God is critical to knowing God (Ps. 130:5–6) because it teaches us that we are not God.
In terms of a biblical picture, we can be like a tree planted by streams of living water, meditating day and night, and still be in a season with no visible fruit. Psalm 1 describes this tree, which “yields its fruit in its season” (v. 3), implying that there are other seasons when there is no fruit.
Every tree has seasons of winter, when it looks as though nothing is happening. It may almost look dead. But far below the surface where no one can see, the roots are forcing their way down deeper so that the tree can bear more fruit when spring comes again.
This means the most important periods of your communion with God will almost necessarily be those when you are “not getting anything out of it.” The doldrums. The most important seasons of growth will often be the ones you feel the least growth. The doldrums. They are training you to put your trust in the wind. Waiting for the wind, and being out of control, forces us to let go of our cherished idol of instant gratification. “For God alone my soul waits in silence” (Ps. 62:1).
When you remember that these means are precisely that—means to an end; when you remember that you are not looking for an experience (which may or may not come) but communing with God, who is always there; when you remember that there will be doldrums, then you can be assured that the most important times of meditation and prayer, worship, and community may in fact be the times you enjoy them the least. Take heart.
Abiding in Christ doesn’t come naturally for us. We have to learn how to do it. We have said that abiding is an art, and like any art, abiding requires practice and discipline. Like any artist, you have to keep on practicing—continually, repeatedly, habitually—or you’ll get rusty. Quickly.
When he was a young man, Jonathan Edwards made a list of seventy resolutions that he committed to read over at least once a week. My favorite is number twenty-five: “Resolved, to examine carefully what that one thing in me is which causes me in the least to doubt the love of God.” 18
Above his list of resolutions, Edwards wrote the words, “Being sensible that I am unable to do any thing without God’s help, I do humbly entreat him, by his grace, to enable me to keep these Resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to his will.” 19 There’s the art of abiding—he is unable to do this without God, yet he is humbly asking God to enable him to do it.
Edwards knew he had to keep these resolutions in front of him every week. You might think, I’m not Jonathan Edwards! And that is precisely the point. If a man of his towering intellect and spiritual sensitivity needed a disciplined habit to remind himself of the truths of the gospel, how much more then do we?
Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth-century French mathematician and scientist. He was a genius (as a child, he discovered all the theorems of Euclid before he’d ever even heard of Euclid!), and some of his mathematical theorems are still studied today. Then when he was thirty-one, something life-altering happened to him. And we know this because eight years later, when he died an untimely death, a worn parchment was found sown into his coat. Written on it was the following testimony:
The year of Grace 1654. Monday, 23 November
From about half past ten in the evening until about half past midnight.
FIRE! “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,”
not of philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ …
My God and your God …
The world forgotten, and everything except God …
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy … the fountain of living waters …
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
Let me never be cut off from him! 20
Pascal kept this parchment on his person for eight years, moving it from coat to coat, so that it was literally next to his heart wherever he went. Pascal knew that while God would never forget him (Isa. 49:15), he was prone to forget God. So he sewed a reminder into his life, a daily tutorial to keep his union with Christ before him. And if Pascal, a genius, needed a reminder sewn into his coat, then how much more do we need to sew reminders into our lives?
I had a friend named Will. He went into the hospital one day with what he thought was a sinus infection. Less than a year later, he was dead at the age of thirty-three from a rare form of cancer. Over that year, we spoke often. He kept a rock in his pocket wherever he went. He said it was to remind him, when he got discouraged or afraid, that just as the edges of that rock had to be worn smooth, so the rough edges of his heart needed to be sanded down.
I tell you these stories not so you’ll make resolutions or sew a piece of paper in your jacket or keep a rock in your pocket. The point is that each of these three found a way to make pursuing God a habit. They found a way to keep the promises of God “on your heart … when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deut. 6:6–7). The point is to “take care lest you forget the LORD” (v. 12). Find a way that works for you. However you choose to do it, like Pascal we must find ways to sew reminders into our lives—daily and habitually—of our union with Christ.
We’ve emphasized over the course of this book that union with Christ means that you are united to the Savior in a living relationship. And like any relationship that you want to develop, you must invest time and choose to do certain things that magnify the priority of that relationship. That’s how any relationship grows.
If the examples above haven’t convinced you, consider that even Jesus set aside time to commune with God (Luke 4:42; 5:16; 6:12), and he was God’s own son. How much more important, then, is it for us to set aside time—repeatedly and habitually—to cultivate the art of abiding?
Learning this art will require new habits. Don’t be turned off by this or think this preparation somehow cancels out the spiritual vitality of the gospel. Don’t get seduced into thinking, If I have to try this hard, it must not be authentic.
Anthony Trollope, the great nineteenth-century writer, who managed to be a prolific novelist (writing forty-seven novels) while also revolutionizing the British postal system, observed, “A small task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” 21 Trollope was saying that over the long run, the unglamorous habit of repetition sparks creativity and adds to productivity. “Inspiration is for amateurs,” photographer and painter Chuck Close said, “the rest of us just show up and get to work.” 22
The myth of just sitting and waiting to be hit by inspiration, artistic or spiritual, is just that—a myth. Real artists, spiritual or otherwise, just show up and get to work.
There are no gospel prodigies. There’s no one-and-done way to keep your union with Christ in front of you. You must draw the sail, repeatedly and habitually. Or you won’t move.