Episode #251 Jesus Is Your Guide—Not a Taskmaster – Unforced Rhythms of Grace

Friend, if you have ever felt like navigating this Christian journey is something that you do for God, hoping that he'll be pleased or notice you, but not actually something you do with God, then I am especially excited that you're here for today's episode. See, that was my experience for a long time in the faith.

I thought I did things like read my Bible or go to church for God. Because he loved me, because he rescued me, because I wanted to please him, and hopefully I could earn his love or show that I was worth saving by my actions. But I didn't know that he invites each of us to experience life with him. That all of these same things, like reading my Bible, got to be shared experiences that I have with God. And I say have, because they still are today. That's something he invites each one of us into.

And we're exploring that in a few different ways here today. One of which is that there's a link in the show notes for a new tool that I'm offering called the Captivated Playbook. See, I saw what I did for God as a lot of work. But I didn't know how to engage with him as I read the Bible.

And because of that, I didn't know how to enjoy the Bible either. But over the years, I learned how to notice God on display in scripture how to actually experience his presence there with me as I read the Bible. And that captivated me. It brought life and joy and awe into my times of Bible reading in a different way.

And so I want to share that resource with you. And also, today we're talking about how Jesus is our ever-present guide. That he is our teacher who doesn't abandon us to figure things out on our own, and how he uses spiritual disciplines to do us good, not harm.

And I didn't know that either.

See, I experienced spiritual disciplines as a form of rule following. And actually even as a form of rule creating, where I would learn something, and I would kind of expect that other people ought to be behaving as I was. And even my awareness of spiritual disciplines was because other people in my life were learning spiritual disciplines and thought I ought to be too. That we all should be working as hard as we could be on similar standards. And that's not what the spiritual disciplines are created for.

In Richard Foster's book, The Celebration of Discipline, he exhorts us not to make more laws, which is the human tendency. Not to exert control or to try and manage ourselves or others or to see who's measuring up. He talks about how laws are an external thing, but the disciplines are an internal one.

He says without laws, the disciplines are primarily an internal work. And it is impossible to control an internal work. When we genuinely believe that inner transformation is God's work and not ours, we can put to rest our passion to set others straight. We must beware of how quickly we can latch on to this word or that word and turn it into a law.

The moment we do so, we qualify for Jesus's stern pronouncement against the Pharisees, which we see in Matthew 23:4 as one example. They bind heavy burdens hard to bear and lay them on men's shoulders, but they themselves will not move them with their fingers.

See, that's what I thought that the disciplines were: heavy burdens, more laws. I thought they were external controls on my actions. But that's not what God created them for.

We get to keep 2 Corinthians 3:6 in mind, and it begins
“as ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” (2 Corinthians 3:6b)

We're under the new law. We get to be those who minister life, not try to hold ourselves or others to the letter of a standard.

And so as we learn the spiritual disciplines in this series, there's always going to be a danger of turning them into a law, even for ourselves. But when we face that, as we navigate this journey, God is our ever-present teacher and guide.

Foster offers great encouragement for us, and I want to echo that to you. God's voice is not hard to hear. He is our ever-present teacher. His direction is not hard to understand.

If we are beginning to calcify, God will tell us. We can trust his teaching.

If we wander off, he will guide us back.

If we are willing to listen, we will receive the instruction that we need.

And that has been my experience in so many areas of my life, including in how I approach the Bible. One of the things I share in the Captivated Workbook is something I call the relational reading method, the R5M, in how we approach our time in the Word as something we share with God. And how God is the one who does the transforming work in us.

It's not all up to us. We get to partner with him as he brings revelation and as he carries out transformation. That's not a burden we have to put on ourselves because he is our ever-present teacher and our guide. And so here's a question that I encourage you to take to God today. And please don't just fill in the blank with something you learned from this episode or something you've been thinking about. But genuinely ask God the question and pay attention to notice and respond when he replies:

God, I'm listening. What do you want me to hear?

Have a good talk.

And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!

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