Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Glad that you joined us on this second,
but in some ways first session as we go through this series of spiritual growth and how is it that
we live a life increasingly unhindered by some of the things that hold us back from our discipleship
and from growing, increasing in our faith and service.
Today we begin in what we feel is
probably the obvious place as we take a look at prayer and scripture,
really two hallmarks of the
Christian life and as long as people have endeavored to grow spiritually,
two of the primary
tools that the church has advocated that we use.
Yeah, in fact we named this here today Finding
Time because Clint, let’s just get right out in front of the conversation here.
Prayer and study is one of the things that I have experienced Christians to know that they both should and
want to do and feel a lot of guilt about and the reality is that guilt stems from this just,
if we’re going to be honest,
struggle that we have to find time to do it.
I mean we find time
for lots of other things in our life to finish the TV show that everybody’s talking about.
If you’re a reader maybe it’s to to read that book that just came out.
For many Christians,
finding the time to engage with scripture,
to engage in prayer,
is a burdensome task.
I would argue it’s difficult for Christians for reasons other than scheduling and we’ll get to that as
we go together here today but the the overarching sort of umbrella of this conversation is that when
we prioritize our time in a meaningful way,
when we make some value in priority decisions about
how we’re going to spend our time as it relates to our faith,
we’re going to find ourselves
really quickly deepening those values and priorities in ways that I think that most
of us couldn’t even anticipate until we’ve got to go through the process and so we’re gonna
talk about prayer, we’re gonna talk about scripture,
we’re gonna sort of assess how
we’re doing and what tools we might be able to pick up to help us in that regard.
But Clint,
I mean fundamentally that conversation starts with creating as people of faith the time
to engage with our faith and with our maker, our creator,
our savior in meaningful ways.
Yeah, Michael,
I think in in my personal life I think of it in terms of taking time,
not finding time because I do take time for the things that are priorities to me.
I do find that
time I make room in my schedule for those things and one of the struggles is that I think we don’t
know exactly what the point of prayer in scripture is.
We all kind of carry this idea that it’s
something we should do but we treat it as almost a task rather than a relational thing.
I remember reading years ago about a pastor who must have been fairly type A and he put in his calendar
everyday devotionals or scripture or prayer and then at some point in the midst of a struggle,
he changed that and he began to write in his calendar,
“Get to know Jesus better.” And just
that simple for him,
that recasting of the idea that prayer and scripture weren’t an end in
themselves but they were part of a bigger conversation,
a bigger relationship in which
he pursued faithfulness through relation with God rather than learning about God,
he was with God.
And I think that’s helpful for me,
at least that’s been a helpful way to think.
How is it that we can incorporate prayer and scripture not in the “right way” but in a helpful way?
Yeah, I think that’s really helpful,
Clint.
And as we move into this conversation,
we want to invite you to pick up today’s assessment.
We talked about this last week and if you missed
that introduction, I think there’s some framing there that would be really helpful.
So pause here,
pick that up and then come right back here and we’ll kick off this conversation.
But you’re going to find in the description of this podcast,
of this video, however you’re joining the
conversation today, you’re going to see linked there the assessment for today.
You will download that, just click that and it’s going to give you a PDF which is going to be really the backbone of
the first half of our conversation here today.
My encouragement for you would be if you can
to print this off,
if you’re in a setting where it works to have a piece of paper,
I would encourage you to do that right now.
And if you’re not,
if you’re working out or if you’re on the road right
now or something, I definitely would download that and keep a copy of this because it’s going to be
helpful for you to go through this on your own.
But this is going to be the backbone to the start
of our conversation.
So I would definitely encourage you to get that in front of you if you can.
Yeah, and the trick,
the challenge I guess with self-assessment is that it demands two things of us,
honesty and self-awareness.
We need to be willing to interact with these questions or
these forms and be honest about what really is true.
Not what do we wish was true,
not what might have been true, not how do we see ourselves,
but how can we try to objectively evaluate a real
answer to these questions.
And I would encourage you to sort of take some freedom in that these
are only going to be available to other people if you make them.
The only way this comes up with
anyone else is if you share the information.
And so allow yourself the freedom to answer honestly.
Not as value judgment,
don’t feel guilt about it.
This is just a snapshot of where each
of us is in the particular moment.
And let’s make that a realistic snapshot and let’s not put the
filters on it like we do on social media and clean it up and edit it.
Let’s take a real look at where
we are so that we can determine whether we want to stay there and if not what might be involved in
changing the picture, changing the evaluation.
And I know that that’s really difficult for people.
The idea of being honest,
of telling the truth,
the idea of having a good sense of self-awareness
and being able to accurately evaluate those answers can really be a struggle.
And so I just
want to encourage you that we are all friends here.
This is to move forward for all of us.
All of us are going to have to write some things down that we wish we didn’t have to.
We wish the answers were different.
But let’s commit to try and do that as honestly as possible so that this
gives us the best chance of a real evaluation and the best chance then of moving forward.
That’s really helpful, Clint.
Well, let’s maybe just jump right in here.
And I think our first
question, our first section here in this assessment is going to be asking you about how you would rate
your spiritual life over the last month and year.
And then I think it moves to this really sort of
important section so quickly,
how connected you feel to your faith,
to God and your community.
And that’s really, I think, helpfully framed by your previous comment that realistically as we
begin this process of assessment,
we need to connect it to the thing that matters.
The thing that matters is not necessarily how much time are you allocating to your prayer life and to
reading the scripture.
That’s the thing we’re going to get to.
It’s how connected are you.
And we know that as people who have real meaningful,
deep relationships with other people,
maybe that’s your best friend, maybe it’s your children,
maybe it’s a spouse,
we all know that those are kind of at
different points of our life,
different answers.
How much time are you spending may not be a
reflection of how close you are.
Closeness can sometimes still be there even in busy seasons.
Maybe it’s a work season or maybe it’s a caring for a family member season.
We can still remain
connected to one another even if maybe the schedule is not what we would hope it would be.
So here,
how connected do you feel to God?
How connected do you feel to your Christian community?
How do you feel as you are learning and growing in your faith?
These are important questions to
help us assess a very initial data point, Clint.
Yeah, and I think it’s important that we try to
be concrete there, Michael, because I’ve talked to a lot of people through the years who would say,
“I consider myself spiritual.” But when you follow up and ask them about that,
you find out that
spirituality for them means,
“I like to be outside.
I like to help at the soup kitchen.”
It’s a very vague,
it’s a very loose idea.
This word spirituality is a struggle in that we can
kind of make it what we want to make it.
So I could consider myself a very spiritual person
without really practicing anything that would indicate my own spirituality to others.
And so that’s where we try to be concrete here.
How connected,
how tied in do you feel to your faith right now?
How connected do you feel to God?
Are you able to have a sense that you are
in the place God wants you,
that you have a sense of what we call God’s will,
God’s desire for your
life is?
Do you feel affirmed?
Do you feel loved?
Do you feel challenged?
Do you have access to those
things through a spiritual lens and your church community?
Assuming you have a church community,
and clearly we’re biased that you should if you don’t,
but how connected are you to other Christians,
to a body of faith where people are wrestling with these things together and trying to grow together?
And so one is very good.
One is if you grade people,
teachers and such, one’s an A,
five is I’m struggling,
we would just challenge you.
Go through there and kind of
how connected am I feeling right now to these various,
in these various ways and what does it
tell me about the moment I’m in?
And that leads to,
I think Clint, a really, you know, maybe challenging next step in the conversation because we follow up with,
you know, how are you doing in terms of time,
in terms of your prayer life,
and then also in your scripture and engagement.
And,
you know, we put those in two questions because we sometimes conflate them.
We think of scripture
and prayer as being the same.
In fact,
some of us pray the Psalms and we’ll talk about tools at
the end of the conversation,
but that does blend scripture and prayer in a really beautiful way.
But they’re not necessarily connected.
And so we even ask you the question,
you know, how do you most often pray?
What does that look like?
Does that look like time set aside in the morning,
maybe by yourself?
Does that look like on the way to work,
you’re in the car and you set aside time,
you pray in the shower?
What does your prayer life look like?
And is it always talking to God?
Or is it sometimes listening?
Is there ever moments where you just take times of silence
for prayer to be more reflective?
There are many different ways to pray and there are many different
times in which those prayers are appropriate.
And so we really want you to give a little bit of
thought to how things are.
That helps us move towards how things you might want them to be.
Yeah.
And prayer is one of those wonderful tools in the spiritual life in the Christian faith that
has many evolutions, many ways to practice it.
There are short prayers that are spontaneous.
And in the moment,
those are the kind of prayers that we might share through the day as we think
about something or as we encounter a situation.
Maybe something good happens and we say thank
you, maybe it’s the Thanksgiving we give before a meal,
that moment of grace.
And then there are
more sustained and I would say more prayers that take more effort.
They’re kind of carving out of
part of our day and the idea of trying to deepen that prayer so that it’s not a short and it’s not
reflective, but it is more intentional.
And both have their place.
And I would say both are
completely within the realm of Christian faith.
My experience is most of us are better at the
former and not as good at the latter.
Most of us struggle not so much with the short occasional
prayer, but with kind of sustained and disciplined seasons of prayer.
The idea that we’ll take
five, 10,
20, 30 minutes a day and really focus on prayer.
And I think that for most of us is
the place where we’re going to feel challenged.
So be honest about that.
And then we want to
follow that up.
That’s the explanation of the second part of the question.
How do you typically
practice prayer?
What does that look like for you?
And maybe as you write that down,
you can think about which side of the fence or which one of those practices you tend to lean into
the most.
And it might be helpful in seeing if there is for any of us a kind of opportunity, maybe a deficiency,
maybe a chance to balance the scale a little bit.
Yeah. And Clint,
realistically,
some of that is a sheer awareness of the different kinds and
traditions of Christian prayer.
So definitely stay tuned to the end here because we may come
at the latter part of the conversation as we talk about some of the tools that might bring you back
up to some of these questions to say,
well, I didn’t even know that was an option or I didn’t
even know that there was a practice that I could incorporate into this part of our life.
And there’s a kind of circular life to these kinds of questions because on one hand,
we’ve got to be honest about where we stand.
On the other hand,
we all stand to learn something and that learning actually can
transform how we move.
And I think a great example that comes in this next question about the daily
reading of Scripture, how much time do we spend?
The reality is there are lots of ways to read Scripture,
whether that be actually physically reading it for yourself out of the book,
or whether that’s an audio Bible or whether that’s engaging with Scripture through Bible
studies like what we do daily here at the church.
I mean, there are many ways to engage with the
scriptural text and those fit different seasons and moments of life.
So when we ask you how much
time, we really mean to ask,
of all of your encounters with Scripture,
how much time are
you devoting to it?
And then we can really flush out opportunities in ways that you might be able
to increase that depending upon what season you’re in.
The good news is that we have never lived in
a time.
Literally humans have never lived in a time with so many options.
If you want to listen
to a Psalm every morning,
you can do that digitally.
You could do that on YouTube.
You could find resources that will email you daily Scripture readings.
You can do the classic out of a book
and you have multiple Bibles to choose from.
So if one feels like you’ve kind of done that and it’s familiar,
change the translation and you may hear completely different things.
And so there is a
wonderful variety available to us now,
which I think can be really helpful in getting us past
the points where it seems kind of routine.
You could do that while you walk.
You could do that
while you exercise.
There are lots of options.
This next section we move into,
we go back to
a little bit more of an open-ended answer.
So how would you describe your level of discipleship?
And the idea here is if you were going to categorize your spiritual life right now,
and I would say
maybe check all of these that apply.
But as you read through this list,
I go to church,
I try to incorporate my faith.
My faith is the center of who I am.
I’m not sure my faith isn’t particularly
strong.
Maybe we’ve missed one.
Maybe you want to write down your own answer to that.
But where would you say that you are in this moment?
And where would you perhaps identify yourself given these descriptions?
Yeah, so Clint, this is a really interesting moment in 21st century American
culture because there’s a real movement away from what has now been called organized religion
towards this idea of spirituality.
And I think as that shifts in the public consciousness,
one of the things that is unfortunately becoming more difficult for Christians to talk about, maybe even ironically,
is that ultimately our faith is not just about practices.
It should have never been just practices.
And so when we come to a question like this,
what we’re asking is how much of our
faith is conditioned and repeated and habit and how much of our faith is related to our identity,
our relationship,
our true connection to the hope and promise of the gospel.
And let me make this
really sort of concrete here.
I was on my way home yesterday and I was just sort of reflecting
and praying and sort of trying to engage with this idea that had come to me,
which was that, if I’m a child of God,
a son of God,
or if you’re a daughter of God,
that relationship
doesn’t need any more fleshing out,
right?
The reality is that is a true statement.
When you are the son of a person or the daughter of a person,
that is true.
You don’t need to show a card for
it to be true or you don’t have to make yourself feel like it’s true.
By very nature of the fact
that that person has taken you,
has claimed you, it is true.
And some Christians live their life
with their faith as sort of a trapping that lives on the side.
They go to church and maybe they have
doubts and they’re not sure,
but the reality is we’re called as Christians to live into the truth
of God’s promise, the reality that what God has said is true.
And as that becomes more true in
our reality, it becomes part of our identity,
then that clint as a way of shaping and transforming
our spiritual life.
And that’s really what we’re getting at here.
Right.
And there may be better
ways to describe it.
And as I said,
if something else comes to you,
by all means, write that down and reflect on it.
But in essence, if we were to take our spiritual temperature right now,
where would it be?
Are we doing well?
Are we feeling connected?
Are we at a place where
at work and at the store and in my family and at home,
my faith is something conscious that
is something that I’m consistently looking to apply in my decisions and in my relationships,
or is it more compartmentalized?
I go to church,
but then the rest of the time I kind of do my
own thing.
And how integrated is my faith now?
I think maybe that’s the impetus behind the
question.
How am I in the current moment in doing in terms of integrating my spiritual practices and
my spiritual life with the rest of my life?
Because we’ve often treated them as if they
were two separate things.
And I think at our best,
Christians have always said that our physical life
and our spiritual life are intended to be held together.
There’s a unity that’s intended there.
Yeah, and that really does lead to the next question where we’re really asking how we might
rate ourselves in terms of our understanding of the faith,
our knowledge of the Bible,
our comfort level with talking with others about the faith,
our identity as those who are practicing
the faith, the amount of time and energy we put into that relationship.
These are always of us
trying to sort of ask ourselves to what extent am I actively engaging in a thing that I want to
be a value and priority of mine?
It’s one thing to come to worship,
to sit and appear,
to go through the what we call liturgical practice of worshiping.
It’s another thing for us to take that home,
for that to become a part of what we do in our lives and in our families.
I think for me,
this is probably the most challenging section here because the reality is I seek to and want to be growing
in all these areas.
But if I’m going to have a candid assessment,
there’s some places in here
where I know there needs to be some work.
Agreed, Michael.
I think this is one where we will find
it the most tricky to be honest and to really kind of have an objective assessment.
I have a good working knowledge of the Bible.
Most Christians are going to be able to say,
“I know there’s an
Old Testament.
I know there’s a New Testament.
I kind of even know what that means.
I might know that there’s four gospels.
I could probably name some of the main characters.” But where does that
fall on the scale?
And we’re not arguing here that you should be PhDs in Scripture.
We’re saying that could you find those references if you needed them?
If you were drawn to a particular story or
a psalm, if you heard a quote that was popular,
would you kind of have a sense of where to look
for it?
And really the question behind the question is,
“How much do I integrate the Bible
into my life?
How much do I incorporate it into my thinking,
into my speaking, into my references, my frame of reference?” And so I think this is a place where it’s going to be—this might be a
place where you put the video on pause for a moment,
and you really wrestle with some of these
questions to try and be honest and take a real assessment of how you could answer them.
Yeah, so Clint, just to make this pretty practical here,
I’m personally not a huge sort of follower
of the different sports.
I know lots of people who are.
I’ve had some relationships with people who
are all in, whether it’s football or baseball or whatever,
and some of those conversations have
just astounded me because Clint,
some folks can tell you who the manager of the Yankees was in 1932,
and they can tell you who the starting pitcher of the Red Sox was, you know,
20 years ago, or they can tell you a kid who didn’t even make it to the major leagues,
and yet they were
in some farm team somewhere,
but they got injured.
So my point in saying this is,
we can be tempted
to use different scales for different places in our life.
And, you know, maybe you’re not a
sports person, but you’re a chef,
and you know the current thing that’s trending,
or you’re into fashion, and you know what that is,
or the current music,
or maybe you know every actor in every TV
show that you watch, whatever it is,
we find ways to know about the things that we care about.
Do we know the Bible in that same kind of way?
Do we know it intimately?
Does it matter to us,
because it’s effortless for us to integrate it?
As we come to answer questions like this,
it might be easy to say,
“Well, I think I know the Bible better than most people.”
That’s really not what we’re asking,
Clint. We’re not asking how does it compare to other people.
We’re asking how deep and natural and effortless is your understanding of the Bible,
to even that one question.
That really, I think, deepens it, makes it more challenging,
and I think most of us
are going to have to confess that Scripture and our faith,
our sharing of that faith,
it often lags behind the other things that we allow to take first place.
Yeah, I think it’s very interesting.
We don’t want to err on the side of not being generous
enough with ourselves, but I think we also want to not err on the side of maybe inflating our
answer.
We would ask you to try and have an honest internal conversation.
How comfortable am I talking about my faith?
We don’t necessarily mean evangelism.
This isn’t, “Hey, do you know where you go if you die tonight?” That kind of thing.
If someone is struggling in life,
how comfortable are we saying,
“In those times for me,
this has been important,” or,
“Is it okay if I’m going to be praying for you?
Would it be okay if I asked my church to pray for you?”
I think the challenge there is not whether we are “evangelists” in a sort of classic sense of the word,
but is our faith something that naturally flows into our relationship with others?
If we find a great restaurant,
we tell people, and then we have this other aspect of our life that in American society,
we’ve kind of decided we don’t talk about,
that faith is a “private matter.”
That’s not a biblical idea.
It’s certainly not a historical theological idea.
Now, how we do that matters,
and we can have lots of conversations about that.
But
if something is the most important thing in my life,
it’s very clear that hopefully that means
others would be able to recognize it.
We tend to know which of our neighbors are Vikings fans,
which are Packers fans.
We tend to know which ones are vegetarians and who grills burgers.
There ought to be a certain obviousness as we practice the faith to those around us,
and those are points of contact.
And again, I don’t want to turn this into a sermon,
but spend some time with
these, because I think these,
in some ways, I think this might be the most difficult part of
the sheet, Michael.
Yeah, I agree, Clint.
And that leads us really towards the end here,
the survey where we’re going to ask you to assess,
how much time do you spend on Netflix and watching TV and
listening to the radio?
There are a thousand myriad ways of getting entertainment in our lives right now.
And, you know,
the question is going to be, I mean, fundamentally,
how much time do you spend with those things?
And then we contrast that with how much time have we said that we’re spending on
these things that are farther up?
Prayer,
reading scripture.
And I will tell you,
if I’m honest, that ratio is a little off.
My ratio of time I spend watching a TV show far exceeds my ratio in
terms of the amount of time I spend doing these things that I know are important to me.
And that’s, I think, a helpful metric.
If we’re going to spend this much time doing these things that we enjoy,
and we find ourselves not spending,
you know, a substantial time, and not equal time,
but a substantial time engaging with the deeper things of faith,
then that’s a priority that needs to be reevaluated.
Yeah, and this is,
we’ve listed this, there are other things,
but the question is,
what competes the most for your time?
For most of us,
the biggest time suck in our life comes
with a screen.
It’s a phone, it’s a computer, it’s a television.
For others,
it would be work.
There are those, I think, who put their time into work,
which is kind of an acceptable addiction in our culture.
But their spiritual life suffers at the expense of work.
For others, it might be some other thing.
We have an assessment down the road a couple of weeks that will be more specific in
looking at the things that demand our time and attention.
But for most of us,
that is the kind
of downtime we spend with a screen in front of our face.
And it is, I think, for most of us,
Michael, I think your experience is not unique.
I think almost all of us would have to admit that that
ratio is pretty biased and not always in a helpful direction.
Well, this last question, Clay, I really like because I think it helps us as we come to the end of the assessment component.
It really helps us, I think,
recognize that we’re all moving in a direction spiritually,
that
here.
Yeah, so the idea here is that just like anything else,
there are sort of seasons to our spiritual life.
There are times where we find ourselves really engaged and it’s not a struggle.
Things come fairly easy.
God seems big.
God seems clear.
God seems involved.
And then there are
other moments what one of our ancestors in faith called the dark soul of the night,
the dark night of the soul, excuse me.
And in those seasons,
God is less obvious.
God is confusing.
Life is a struggle.
It has a heaviness to it,
sometimes a sadness with it.
And as we navigate those,
our spiritual lives are not going to stay steady.
That’s not a plateau.
It’s very much an ebb and
to our growth and to our experience of God.
So that’s the idea as we look at this last question.
Are you more or less involved than at some point in the past with your church community,
with worshiping life,
with prayer, with Bible study?
Was there a time in the memorable past,
recent or perhaps more distant,
where you were more plugged into those,
where you felt more connected?
Or is now that time?
Have you been in a period of growth and you feel like that your
graph, your trend has been upward?
And if so,
wonderful. And neither of those is better or
worse because we often learn the most.
In fact, some of the most important times in our spiritual
life are the most difficult.
So wherever we are,
the question is, is that where we’ve kind of
always been or has something changed?
Have we moved up or moved down?
And as you consider that,
I think it provides for us a helpful framework in terms of,
if I would say that things
were better at a past time,
what has changed?
Am I going to church less?
Am I praying less?
Have I changed locations?
Has a relationship changed in some way?
Have I lost a mentor?
Have I been through grief?
Lots of explanations.
But I think knowing whether your trend is
upward or downward is a helpful tool to evaluate your spiritual movement.
Yeah, so that really brings us,
Clint, to what is the turning point of the conversation.
Because fundamentally, what’s at play there is,
if life is full of spiritual seasons,
and if in some
seasons we are closer,
some seasons we may feel farther away,
then what that means is we’re always
making movement.
There’s always a sort of speed and a direction and an ability for us to make real
and meaningful movements in our life.
So the reality is,
if you want to get somewhere,
you need to both know where you presently are,
and you need to know where you’re trying to get to.
And that makes the first part of this conversation absolutely essential.
So here’s, I think, maybe what we would invite you to do.
Pause the video here,
pause the podcast here,
get this downloaded, get it printed,
spend some time with it,
give it some real reflection and thought,
and then come back.
Because here as we turn to the second part of the conversation,
now we start to say,
regardless of where you presently are on the map,
we now can really set our compass or we can set our direction
in the place we want to go.
And there are many ways to get there.
It’s not about the exact way
that we make that journey.
It’s rather that we really can make a difference in our time spent,
that it’s not just finding it,
it’s setting the time.
And so I think that’s really where we turn
the second part of this conversation,
Clint. And I think just a word as we move to that
conversation, Michael, that hopefully is helpful,
is this is not something where perfectionism helps.
This is not,
the idea here is not that we become spiritual giants.
The idea is that we grow.
And one of the struggles I find as I’ve worked in a church and talked to Christians,
and in my own life,
is this idea that it’s kind of all or nothing.
You know, that I sat with the scripture
and I read a psalm and it didn’t speak to me.
Yes,
that’s going to happen.
Or I tried to pray,
I made time to pray,
but I had this thing,
I was distracted.
Yes,
that is going to happen.
You do not start anything good at it.
There is a growth,
there is a process, there is progress
to be made.
And so the freedom I want to offer,
that we want to offer on the front end,
is,
this may sound strange for pastors,
don’t overdo it.
You don’t need to go from,
I pray once a week,
to I pray five hours a day.
You don’t need to say,
I haven’t read scripture
in six months, I’m going to read the whole thing this week.
You stay out of Leviticus,
it’s not going to help you.
When you read something and you don’t feel connected to it, that’s okay.
It’s not an every time,
home run kind of situation.
We, like anything else, are going to have ups and downs.
And sometimes you’re going to read something and it’s going
to feel like it has your name on it, like Dear Clint,
dot, dot, dot.
And other times you’re going to say,
“Gosh, I don’t know, maybe I missed that.” That is perfectly acceptable.
And I find, Michael, that that idea of perfectionism,
that idea of attainment,
that idea of overdoing it,
really disrupts and sort of sabotages a lot of people’s
very, very intentional and very genuine attempts to grow spiritually.
So I’m not going to make this autobiographical,
Clint, but I’ll say that is 100% my temptation,
is to overdo everything.
In fact, I would be 100% up there with Peter trying to build Jesus,
this beautiful ornate palace at the Transfiguration.
I’m all in on that.
I’m like, “Let’s design it and build it.
Let’s make it really good.” The reality is I often come to
the spiritual disciplines conversation with expectations of being sainthood level good,
whatever that means.
I couldn’t honestly tell you what it means, Clint.
But realistically,
I want to encourage you,
and maybe this is the most basic sort of thing I can offer in
a conversation like this,
is we are physical people who live physical lives.
We eat every day.
We need to take care of our bodies every day.
We shower.
We do our hair.
We need to get places
to do work or to care for people.
There are things that we have practices and habits of
doing every single day.
My simple advice to you is to choose one of those real things
and to connect it to a meaningful spiritual practice.
And so I’ll make that very clear.
For me, I drive to work every day.
It provides an opportunity for me to get from one place to the
other.
When I do that,
just this started for me about a month ago,
I began making that a moment
of prayer.
For me, I have a watch that lets me record things.
I record a conversation.
It’s a conversation where sometimes I end up doing a lot more listening than I do speaking.
Sometimes it’s all me speaking.
And quite frankly, if you listen to these audio journals,
some of them would sound
like ranting, and some of them would sound like a person of faith struggling,
and some of them would
sound like a person on the mountaintop because it’s all true.
But for me,
I have had this practice
of I’m doing this thing,
and when I do it,
it will be an impetus for a very small spiritual practice.
It’s not a long period,
but I found that that short period over many days has already made a difference for me.
Michael, I think that’s really helpful advice.
You know, if you are a kind of person,
maybe you take a walk every day.
As you walk past a neighbor’s house,
remember that neighbor in prayer.
Maybe you go to the grocery store.
As you’re checking out,
give thanks that you have
access to food and pray for those who don’t.
I think what we would call,
and this is kind of a
loaded word in the moment of our culture that we’re in, but mindfulness.
I might even say
awareness would be a better word with a Christian heritage.
An awareness of God and of the movement of God’s Spirit.
And again,
I think what we would also maybe say as we move into this conversation
is don’t get too hung up on the right way to do this.
You could devote your life,
and I mean that.
I mean, you could move to a monastery.
You could spend eight,
ten hours a day kneeling in prayer,
and at the end,
you would not be a prayer expert.
You would have a rich,
a deep prayer life,
but you would not discover some secret to it.
There is no secret sauce.
For most of us,
it’s a thing that we don’t have to learn to do.
We just have to do.
We just need to
put some time in.
Give yourself five minutes in the morning.
Set your alarm five minutes
earlier, and five minutes after breakfast,
just in a quiet house,
quiet room.
If you’re a parent,
that might be hard.
Maybe you need to do it after kids have gone to school,
maybe at night.
But start with five minutes of reflecting on your day when you saw God in it, being thankful,
praying over the things that are on your heart,
that are on your mind,
praying for those you’ve
interacted with during the day.
There is no trick to this.
It is just a matter of committing ourselves to begin following.
And the wonderful promise of our heritage is that God is faithful and
meets you in those moments,
which then provides the rich.
We do not provide the depth to it.
That’s what God does in meeting us there,
and we’ll grow quite naturally just as we spend time
and as we have the experience of continuing to do it.
If you’ve done the work here to reflect on
this assessment, one of the things that’s going to open for you is a little bit of a window into
some of your assumptions and some of the roadblocks to why you’ve struggled to find the time.
And the reality is some of us have a very specific idea of what studying the Bible and praying looks like.
And sometimes those ideas get in the way.
For me,
I grew up with this very strong idea that the
meaning of prayer was to be in your closet,
in a dark room,
in the morning, on your knees, every day.
And for me, that became the standard of prayer.
When I failed to meet it,
it brought with it a lot of guilt that I was failing to live up to what prayer should be.
As I grew in my faith
and discovered that there are an innumerable number of practices of Christian prayer,
all the way from contemplative silence,
all the way to prayer journaling,
to even walking prayers,
to reading the Psalms and letting the psalmist be really the source of our prayers.
There are so many different ways to pray beyond the maybe ways that you are even aware of.
And that is an invitation.
It’s me trying to just invite you to consider if there’s a particular way that you have
come to think of prayer or studying the scripture,
and that isn’t a helpful model for you right now,
then do a little bit of research.
Find a new one.
Allow that to be an opportunity to engage in a new
and more meaningful way for you.
That is not the only way to converse with your loving Creator God.
I promise you.
And I think there’s a sense in which sometimes,
Clint, we get wrapped up in the
“shoulds” instead of the true and heartfelt invitation that God has for us to engage.
I don’t think God is particularly fussed about the ways that we connect.
I think God is far more interested
in the heart of those who want to.
And if there’s a way or an idea or a model that stuck for you,
then it may be time to look for a new one.
Agreed, Michael.
And I would just restate that
in terms of resources,
we live at an unprecedented time.
The digital collections of the prayers of
church fathers and mothers,
you can Google “Mother Teresa,” “St.
Francis,” “St.
Anselm.” You have, within moments, access to some of the most beautiful and rich devotional prayers,
and read one of those at the beginning of your day.
Close your day with one of them.
If you have a day where
you feel like you don’t have the words,
borrow the words from someone else.
You have access to audio Bibles.
Listen to a song in the morning as you get ready,
or at night before you go to sleep.
I think we shouldn’t get…
I think you’re onto something very wise,
Michael.
We should not get locked into the idea that there is a right way.
The right way is to do it,
and the wrong way
is to not do it.
And as we find our own way toward doing it,
all of those tools,
we should keep them
available to us.
Now,
at some point, yes, you want to spend significant time in silence praying,
but that doesn’t have to be every prayer.
That doesn’t have to be every day.
Yes, at some point, you want to have a very good working understanding of the flow of Scripture,
and you’ll want to be
able to converse with the Bible in a way that is structured,
and in a way that is…
I’m hesitating to use the word educated, Michael,
in a way that is informed.
But that doesn’t have to be every day.
Some days, you might just flip it open and see where it lands.
That’s not a good,
every day kind of practice.
But if nothing else works that day,
give it a shot,
because you’re still then seeking
to listen to what God has to say to you that day.
And ultimately, that’s what all of this is to be
about.
Yeah, I just really want to encourage you that as we come to really honestly,
and with some humility, assess how we’re doing in our faith,
it is not assessing ourselves for what we could be,
and definitely not what we should be.
In other words,
when we start imagining what a people of
faith should look like,
in my experiences inevitably,
we start creating not real people.
I think Dietrich Bonhoeffer is really helpful here.
We did a book series on his book,
Community,
Life Together.
And in that series,
it was abundantly clear that Bonhoeffer wanted to
point out to the church that our spiritual lives must always be real lives,
that we shouldn’t try to
escape into some other reality.
There are some times, Clint,
when we’re coming to assess ourselves,
we admit, you know, I have doubts.
I’m even a little worried if I engage with the scripture
in a more meaningful way.
If I start studying it,
I might discover some things that challenge me.
I might discover some things that I don’t even know if I could have an answer to.
And I would say to that,
yes,
absolutely.
That’s what it means to be people of faith,
is that we’re courageously
trusting that the God who we are following is big enough,
loving enough,
and accommodating enough to come alongside us like a parent with a child,
even if that child feels lost,
and to say it’s okay.
You know, it’s okay,
or we’re going to get you through today,
and today we’ll turn in tomorrow,
and before you know it,
after several tomorrows, we discover that we have gone far deeper,
and we have gone much farther than we could have ever imagined.
But we must begin with that simple thing.
And Clint,
I don’t want to sound too critical here,
but we overhype how hard it might be.
In other words, I want to study the Bible more,
but I don’t know how.
Start coming to the daily
Bible study Monday through Thursday that we do,
if that’s all you can do.
Maybe that doesn’t work
for you, and you buy a devotional Bible that gives you one verse a day,
and you read that verse with
some commentary, or you go just buy a Bible that has some commentary in it,
and you read one chapter
a day.
I mean,
sometimes the availability of tools itself is overwhelming.
Don’t get overwhelmed by
what you could do,
and definitely not what you think you should do,
and instead just start somewhere.
Make that beginning commitment.
I’m going to do this every day,
I’m going to do this every week,
whatever that commitment is going to be.
Write that down here at the bottom of this assessment.
I commit to do X,
and whatever it is,
whether you think it’s large or small,
that is the first step,
and the first step takes you much further than you think.
One of the great things about this
podcast and about having an audience,
you people out there that are listening,
is that there’s a
wonderful richness and a variety,
and we know that some of you come to this conversation
with very robust lives of prayer.
We see you in worship every week.
We know that you know your scripture,
and for you, maybe this is a kind of checkup.
It is a stopping path along the way.
For others,
you might be listening to this saying, “You know,
I don’t do much.
I don’t know a lot of what this means,
and this is all new to me.” That’s perfectly fine too.
Maybe that looks like for you,
send us an email.
We’ll help you find a devotional.
We’ll help you find something
where you read just a paragraph a day,
maybe an audio Bible.
There are those things that are
available, and if you find yourself thinking,
“I need to do something,” don’t look at the top of the mountain.
Just look at where the next step takes you,
and if that’s a first step,
great.
We all had to take a first step.
Maybe you climbed partway up the mountain,
and then you find yourself
kind of back down where you started.
We’ve all been there as well,
and the important thing for
all of us, whether we come really doing pretty well or feeling convicted about making some improvements,
is that it all looks the same.
It all looks like,
“How can I carve out a little more
of my time, a little more of my attention,
a little more of my discipline to grow in my faith, and
in this regard with prayer and study?” That is the place to start.
If this is all new to you,
we’re going to release several of these podcasts,
but I would tell you,
pour your effort into this
one.
If you’re making a first step,
this is the right first step.
Prayer and Scripture is the
place to start.
We’ll talk about other things,
but they will be connected to this,
and I think this
is the starting point we all need.
The danger and temptation with anything regarding faith
is that we make the tools and end unto themselves.
That exists far beyond just
personal Bible study and prayer.
This can happen in worship.
It can happen in our church buildings.
It can happen in our Bible study.
It happens in so many different ways.
I want to just encourage you,
there is no such thing as a tool or a right way or a should that is big enough to keep you
from what you can do today.
I hope that that’s encouragement and not just challenge.
I hope it’s encouraging to say,
whatever you have today,
the widow’s might is enough.
There is no amount of
time too small for the God who loves you and calls you by name.
That good Samaritan kind of God who’s
willing to go out of the way extravagantly to find and to love you.
The prodigal son kind of God who’s
waiting for you to return.
The great good news is there’s nothing too small.
I hope that today
you’ll be encouraged and that you’ll be willing to make whatever that commitment could be and should
be because I think you’re exactly right,
Clint.
If we can focus on this one,
all of the other
assessments and tools and things we’ll talk about in future conversations,
they will find a nourishment
and support and ongoing of really a way to grow from these practices today.
Absolutely. We are all,
I think if we take the future assessments seriously,
going to need those to be undergirded
in prayer and an understanding of grace,
an understanding of the gospel that will then set
us free to ask some of those other difficult questions.
So we want to thank you for taking
this first step with us.
We’re grateful that you’d be a part of the conversation.
As always,
questions and comments are welcome.
Let us know and we’ll do our best to provide some answers and
some thoughts as we continue the conversation.
But as we move forward,
we’re grateful that you
are going with us.
Absolutely.
Thanks for being with us.