4 Cautions with Spiritual Disciplines Podcast Episode

Christian spiritual discipline is only uniquely Christian in the sense that it is directing us towards becoming more like Christ. Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Excellent to have you along as always. Isaac Funk is with me. 

Honored to be on. I’d like to talk about cautions with spiritual disciplines. I think there’s some importance in understanding a thing well enough to know both sides of a matter, or perhaps understand the shadow of a thing. Does that make sense? Yeah, certainly. What are spiritual disciplines? Let’s maybe start with that. 

To help define maybe what we mean by spiritual disciplines, you might think about disciplines just in general first. If I’m trying to learn to play a Beethoven piece on the piano, for example. There are certain practices, or you might call disciplines, that I’ll need to engage in before I’m capable of playing that piece, and those would include learning the scales, doing finger exercises, learning to read the music on the page in front of me. 

All of that and then breaking down the music into its pieces and practicing smaller portions of it and then eventually I can play Beethoven, but it takes time and it takes effort and it also takes directed intelligent and intentional effort. I can’t just do random exercises. They have to be the appropriate ones for what I’m trying to accomplish. 

And so, in a similar way other than a Christian spiritual discipline is only uniquely Christian in the sense that it is directing us towards becoming more like Christ. And so, the activities that I engage in are going to need to be the ones that are actually effective in bringing about that inner change within me, allowing myself to be, presenting myself open to God to be changed by him, molded by him. 

You’ve built just a beautiful case for the importance of spiritual disciplines and the promise that they hold. Yeah, I mean, thousands of years old, you take them back to Jesus, you can take them actually before Jesus in the Old Testament, you have examples of people practicing certain disciplines for their faith. 

So, with that foundation laid, where the importance of spiritual disciplines is clear, we can see its purpose and its effect and the hope that lies therein after the example of Jesus. Let’s talk about cautions. To understand a thing well, I think we need to understand its shadow well. We need to understand, sometimes we use the term, the ditches that you can fall into when applying a certain thing. 

And I would like to push into that with you, Isaac, and just pick your brain on four areas that I think spiritual disciplines deserve some attention. Those areas are going to be legalism, agency, syncretism, and mysticism. Those words might not mean much to people right now, but they’re impactful and they’re important and they all have a niche that I’d like to explore. 

So, let’s first talk about this concept of legalism. That might be the most familiar of the list. This idea that we can have an unhealthy dependence on performance and replace actual faith in Christ with this practice or behavior that I’m engaging in. Speak to that shadow.  

Yeah, well, I’ll just start by saying that legalism really is a real bondage. When Jesus walked the earth, he called that out and ripped it apart in pretty clear language about how practicing religious practices for practice’s sake. Yeah, in order to gain something or to be saved, seen by people or whatever, that is a real problem while legalism, or we can call it, works based righteousness. I get right with God based on what I’m doing. 

That is the opposite of what we’re really getting out because when it comes to discipline, what we’re aiming at is freedom. We’re not, we’re not looking for just rules to make our life better. difficult and unpleasant, so that God sees that and is somehow impressed that we’re willing to sacrifice whatever pleasantry. 

God is not impressed with us, and so when you practice a discipline, you’re actually aiming at learning to live life in communion with God, and there’s a real ease to that. Jesus calls that the easy yoke, right? When we come up under his yoke and cooperate with him, that’s through the practice of spiritual disciplines where we learn what it is like to cooperate with God, to work with God, and we can find that to actually be a very freeing thing because we find that it’s God at work and not just ourselves. 

Why do you think it’s easy though to slip into this type of mindset, though, that would replace the cart and the horse. Why is this a thing? It was in Christ’s day. When we have a life of practice, this is something that needs to be guarded against. Why do we slide that way? Yeah, there are probably a variety of reasons, but one thing that comes to my mind is, I think from little on, we’re given value based on what we do or how we act or what we’re producing. We see that on a societal level where you’re valued for the type of product you’re producing. And so, we want to show that we are worth something. And so, we’ll strive for that to be worth something. But, yeah, in God’s economy, it doesn’t work that way. 

You’ve helped answer it and say that one thing to have your eye towards is worth. If you place your worth in these behaviors, or you find your value or performance there, that would probably be a litmus test that maybe I’m off on the wrong foot. Yeah. Or if you think that God views me different because I do these things or don’t do these things. So, favor with God might be another one. 

Certainly. So, if there’s any sort of idea that there are merits, I mean, there’s a famous line, grace is not opposed to effort, it’s opposed to earning. Effort is an action; earning is an attitude. And if you have an attitude that I’m doing the action that I’m taking is now I deserve God to give me X, whatever. 

Then yeah, you fall into that ditch. You have to work at maintaining a proper relationship with the discipline. That is part of the discipline set to have a proper relationship with your disciplines. Well, let’s move to the next one then, this concept of agency. It’s really akin to legalism. Now where legalism might place spiritual value in terms of my relationship with God with the practice, so we don’t have an appropriate relationship with the practice. 

Agency, my question is more to the source of the effort. Is this God, or is this me? Because it is very personal agent centric. How do I step in? How do I practice my scales? How do I practice and learn this piece? We have some decisions to make. What should I do to grow in a life of prayer? 

Maybe I’ll do this. Maybe I’ll do that. And so, we can get conflated, I think, in knowing who’s doing the work here? Does that make sense? Yeah, so there’s, obviously action and effort need to be expended, right? But there’ll always be a temptation then to take control of that, or to feel like you can control God or what he’s doing, which I think this actually fits really well into the legalism thing, because it’s kind of like, if I do X, I get, whatever. There’s an expectation there. 

And I just don’t think that’s how spiritual life works. Being formed into the image of Christ isn’t something that we can manage or control by our actions. But through our actions, we simply just present ourselves and make ourselves available to be worked on by God. Okay, so that’s helpful. So, really what you’re speaking to is that God is the first source behind any ideas or any practices that we would put in place while personal agency is required. 

He is the one who has equipped us, given us the mind to do those things. Well, I think of the Scripture, work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who is at work within you. Great. That’s a great verse that puts them both together. So, you have something to be doing, but also know that as you do it, you can do it with fear and trembling because God is now working with you. 

Yeah. I really like that. Okay, legalism, agency. Alright, let’s go to this one, syncretism. Syncretism is a term that basically is this blending or merging of different religious beliefs. I do think we need to speak about this. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, Isaac. Because imagine I see a person clearly out in the distance, and that person is praying. 

They’ve got all the posture of prayer. I really don’t know if they’re Muslim, if they’re doing a Buddhist meditation, if it’s a Christian prayer, Hindu, if it’s a Christian, if it’s a Jew, I can’t even tell all that. There’s a lot of similarity in the religious ascetic life. And I think this can be troublesome as we are employing things and then we look to the left and the right and find others of very different theological beliefs and religions doing much the same thing. 

So, I would like you to speak a little bit to this overlapping turf that sometimes the spiritual disciplines raise in the religions. Yeah, and just acknowledging at the get go that it can be a scary thing because this religious pluralism that’s really popular in our culture, there’s exposure to a lot more spiritualities today, and it’s all accepted, right? 

And if you don’t accept it, they’ll have a problem with you, you know? And so, when you, as a Christian, as a follower of Jesus, see these specific practices that are also included in these other spiritualities, it can make you think, you know, oh no, am I being influenced by the culture around me? Am I? 

Whatever. But the sad part of that, I guess, is a lot of those practices actually were commandeered from Christian tradition. If you go back thousands of years, you see church fathers, church mothers, Jesus and his first followers. So, you’re saying the variety of religious application of these things is really an acquiescing of them to us rather than us to them. 

From a historical perspective, they were ours. And I’m thinking just like meditation, Scripture meditation, things like stillness, quiet. Which are really hot topics right now. Very hot topics, even in the totally secular world. Secular atheistic, right, would very much see value in doing some of those things. 

Right. Well, because there is value in doing them. And Jesus led the way in that. But I think that’s interesting that you said that there is value in doing them. There’s even value for that secular person in doing them. There is. So, fill out that space, because I think that is exactly the discomfort somehow. 

Yeah. Right. So, you can gain an effect of focus, clarity of thought or something through just the act itself. And so, there’s just benefit in doing that. It’s only a spiritual discipline insofar as it’s actually conforming you into the image of Jesus. And so, insofar as you’re presenting yourself to God in those moments, that’s what makes it uniquely Christian. 

And that is something that you want to have an eye towards as you practice any discipline, if that’s what you’re doing it for. Now, maybe you’re doing it for God, quiet for another purpose and not to be with Jesus. Okay, fine. But it’s not a spiritual discipline at that point. I really like that, Isaac, because we are all human. 

There are practices that advantage humans. We should expect to see them in all walks of life, but that’s not something that we would shy away from because what we are doing is employing those for the purpose of growing in Christlikeness. So, you’ve given us a goal and a direction with why we would be engaging in the spiritual discipline that might look like, again, from the outside, certainly not in the inside, but from the outside might be something applied by some secular person. 

Right. You can’t tell the difference necessarily just from looking at something, but even within the Christian context, people may be doing the same things on the outside but be having very different experiences on the inside. That’s why some people are truly formed by you might say the classic practices of attending your church service, reading the Bible every day, praying every day, and God deeply forms you into a person of self-giving love through that. There’s the likeness of Jesus and the fruit of the Spirit being born out in you. 

And you may have someone else who’s doing those things and going through the motions of those things who comes out completely unchanged or, worst case scenario, changed in the worst of ways and actually is just a judgmental, bitter, angry person. So, it’s what’s going on behind it. 

Okay, I think that’s helpful, syncretism, this concept of syncing up or having a blend of religious thought. I think we have to think about this space as we employ spiritual disciplines. I think this is part of doing things circumspectly. And the last one I want to talk about is mysticism. I’m going to use that term by saying experiencing God in ways that transcend ordinary sensory perception or intellectual understanding. 

This concept that we have experiences with God at new and increasing heightened ways that are very personal, they sometimes inspire us with thoughts about us and the world and God, and I think there is a caution that people have to say, is that altogether healthy or are there some boundaries that I should be thinking of? 

Yeah. If you open something up to just pure experience, we have a draw towards individualism. And so individual experience of something becomes reason enough to give it a stamp of approval, but that’s not necessarily the case. I think we should acknowledge that there have been people we would term as mystics in the Christian faith who have been pretty kooky, right? 

And really done some things that are, you need to have a discerning eye with some of these things, they might’ve been certifiably crazy in some respects, but as we learn to experience life with God through the practice of disciplines. There is an element of like experience that goes along with that, right? 

So, you’re growing and sometimes it’ll be emotional but the boundaries we want to adhere to are our boundaries of scriptural truth and making sure that we aren’t feeding into just a caricature of God that we’ve created for ourselves or that culture has presented to us. And we’re not only feeding that but rather we’re finding groups of people who have a high view of Scripture, who are in it often, and being able to help discern what is true and what is false, or what is kind of just made up. 

Yeah, I really like that. I think that’s helpful. Isaac. Two things I felt like you mentioned there. One is the role Scripture plays, that if ever I come out with an idea, whether I ever come out of an experience with God, with an idea that doesn’t square with the Word of God, I can be sure that what I experienced was emotional or it was something I ate, something I didn’t get enough sleep, but it wasn’t the unction of God. And the second thing you mentioned is the power of community. Life in spiritual disciplines really does require community, doesn’t it? Always better in community. Pretty much anything that you’re doing, if you can do it with other people, that’s going to be the way to go. 

We just need to be held accountable and we need to be checked and we need perspectives that are different than our own. You know, the path really is narrow as Jesus said. To help us stay on that narrow path, we’re going to need people to help us do that. That’s good. Spiritual disciplines can be one of the most life-giving helpful things that you can engage with, or it can be one of the most deadening restraining things that you could implement in your life. 

But I think of a story of freedom and it’s a story of Italian opera singer Pavarotti, opera tenor of our time. And when you watch a video where Pavarotti stepped out onto the stage, you would just see this sense of total freedom. Calm and confidence like this non anxious presence that comes out onto the stage as he gets ready to sing. That’s freedom and then he opens his mouth and it’s just the most beautiful song that comes out with just ease, unlike anything you’ve seen, that’s there because of discipline. 

That’s there because of the effort and the agency that he had to wisely, intelligently, and with other people, other instructors who were along with him, learn to do appropriate practices that allowed him to become somebody who could create stunningly beautiful music for millions of people. Thanks, Isaac, for sharing that. 

And to our listeners, I hope today’s conversation was an honest conversation about spiritual disciplines as we think about them and employ them in our own lives. That we do so with our eyes wide open, well aware of ditches, well aware of where things can go off the rails if we don’t think well about them, not to discourage us in their practice, but actually to encourage us to practice them well to the glory of God. 

If discipleship and spiritual disciplines are an interest to you, you want to grow in more understanding, if you want to dialogue with people about it, April 20th will be a great opportunity to do that. In Tremont, Illinois at our church there, we’re going to be having a discipleship conference hosted by ACCFS. 

We’ve got several speakers who will speak to that, practice forums as we talk about this beautiful topic. To learn more and to register, go to our website and just type in the search menu, discipleship conference. We would love to see you there.