D.A.
Carson once wrote: “People do not drift toward holiness. Apart
from grace-driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness,
prayer, obedience .. to Scripture, faith, and delight in the Lord. We
drift toward compromise and call it tolerance; we drift toward
disobedience and call it freedom; we drift toward superstition and
call it faith. We cherish the indiscipline of lost self-control and
call it relaxation; we slouch toward prayerlessness and delude
ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism; we slide toward
godlessness and convince ourselves we have been liberated.”
It
takes discipline to be a disciple, because spiritual growth is
intentional not automatic. If left to ourselves, we tend to move away
from God and His glory. Just as our bodies atrophy without exercise
and our minds weaken without challenge, so our spiritual life withers
without, as Carson says, "grace-driven effort."
Jesus
is committed to our spiritual growth. He is not content to allow us
to wallow in spiritual immaturity. The Bible, in Ephesians 4:15
says, "...we will speak the truth in love, growing in every
way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the
church." (NLT) Jesus loves you the way you are, but He loves
you too much to leave you the way you are. He's committed to enabling
you to grow spiritually so that you become more and more like Him in
every way.
That's
why uncommitted Christians are spiritually miserable. They go to
church, but get nothing from it. They sporadically read the
Scriptures for their devotion, but see no application to their daily
lives. Prayers are occasional, mostly before meals, but spoken from
childhood memory rather than heartfelt devotion. They have a form of
godliness (basically good people), but deny the power of it. They
sense something is missing, but can't quite put their finger on what
it is. Often, their solution is to withdraw and put the empty feeling
on the back-burner of their lives. Because it is easier to ignore the
problem than to practice the discipline needed to grow spiritually.
But
it takes discipline to be a disciple. The apostle Paul wrote: Don’t
you realize that in a race everyone runs, but only one person gets
the prize? So run to win! All athletes are disciplined in their
training. They do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it
for an eternal prize. So I run with purpose in every step. I am not
just shadowboxing. I discipline my body like an athlete, training it
to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to
others I myself might be disqualified. 1 Cor 9:24-27 (NLT)
Paul had a plan for
spiritual growth:
1. He knew what the goal was - Paul knew the goal of spiritual maturity (Christ-likeness) and he went for it
2. He trained himself in godliness - Paul practiced the spiritual disciplines of prayer, study, obedience and others.
3. He lived with purpose to his life - Paul's goal in life was to glorify God in everything He did.
4. He mastered his fleshly desires - Paul made his body subject to his spiritual nature. Many times I've heard it quoted (and said it myself), "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matt 26:41), but I'm afraid that verse often becomes the excuse for failing to discipline ourselves in godliness.
It
takes discipline to be a disciple, because spiritual growth is
intentional, not automatic.
