I Thought I Was Abiding. I Was Actually Exercising.

For most of my life I thought I was abiding in God, but I was really exercising. Those two words look similar, but they are actually quite different.

I'm not here to talk anybody out of spiritual disciplines. I owe them too much.

For fifty years I studied the Scriptures. I led small groups where the whole point was to actually grow, community, accountability, honesty, the works. I fasted and prayed. I sat in silence, which is harder than it looks. I served, exercised, read stacks of books, journaled through all of it. And that built something under my feet that has held through every hard season since. I'd do it all again.

I still do all these things, it's just different now.

These days I get to live on the foundation those years poured instead of re-pouring it every single morning. There's a freedom in that; not one I have to work up, just one I live inside. It's what Jesus meant in John 15 about remaining in him. Stay, and you get His presence, His grace, His pushback, His peace.

So the practices worked. And that's exactly where it got dangerous.

All that good stuff slowly turned compulsive to me. And every time I trace it back, it lands on one of two motives that snuck in while I wasn't watching.

One was to please God.

If I think I'm pleasing God by doing my practices, then I've quietly bet the whole relationship on my ability to do things that please him. God loves me because of what I pull off. The moment I begin to believe that about myself, I start believing it about everybody else. God must love them for what they do also. Or don't do. Swap "loved" for "pleased" and honestly nothing changes.

Now, is God ever displeased with the things we do? Yes. I think he is. But it's not the displeasure you're bracing for. It isn't rejection. It's the look on a father's face when he watches his kid settle for so much less than the person he knows is in there. His pleasure was never riding on my performance. It's riding on getting to be close with me. That's the whole thing. He just wants us to be intimate.

And there's always this pull to push a little harder, do a little more, squeeze out a bit more approval. I lived inside that pull for years. It never lets you arrive.

The other motive is sneakier, because it looks like maturity.

I'd do the disciplines to become a better Christian, or husband or leader.

Except the whole project is still about improving me. For Christ, sure. For my family, of course. But it's my improvement, my effort, my plan to get myself into position for God to move. And that one dries up too, every time, because it runs entirely on what I'm doing for me. Same trap, different door. Same endless "just a little more."

Did these build a foundation? They did. Did they curdle into compulsion? Also, yes. Were they a waste? Not even close. I really think these are essential stages one needs to go through. 

But if you never grow through this first season of your life into the second half, it will turn you into a Pharisee or inward. Either will leave you tired. In the book, Falling Upward, by Richard Rohr, he describes this as the difference between the first and second half of your spiritual life.

Willard named the thing I couldn't see.

James Bryan Smith once asked Dallas Willard what he made of the whole spiritual formation movement taking off. Willard said it was wonderful and then named exactly what scared him about it. That it would grow so fast nobody would do the hard work underneath. And without that work, "the spiritual formation movement will degenerate into technique. It will focus on practices and not on the soul."

That is what was happening quietly under all my good habits and I didn’t realize it.

The practices are good tools. But somewhere I mistook the tools as the end. Never confuse the means for the end. Formation was never mainly about the practices, or the warm feelings they stir up. It's about becoming who I already am in Christ. The point was never to exercise better. It was to stay close to my Lord.

A New Role for Spiritual Disciplines

They're not how I earn a smile from God, and they're not my self-improvement plan. Some mornings a practice pulls me straight into his presence. Some mornings it doesn't, and I've learned to let it go without paying the guilt tax I used to. I’m not righteous because of them. Figuring that out has been one of the quiet plateaus of getting older.

Paul understood this two thousand years ago when he wrote, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free..." Galatians 5:1a. Where the Spirit is, there's freedom. Not freedom I crank out every morning, freedom I get to live in.

And Willard, near the end, said it better than I could: “What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives—is simply the person we become"