Episode #250 What’s My Role in Spiritual Growth? Understanding Grace + Effort – Unforced Rhythms of Grace

Hey friends. It's Jen. Welcome to this episode of Good God Talks. We're in the series looking at the spiritual disciplines from a beautiful new lens. If your experiences in the church have been anything like mine, I did not like the spiritual disciplines. They felt like a heavy rule following form of obligation. But that's not actually what they are or how God invites us to experience them.

And so we're exploring this topic in the context of receiving God's unforced rhythms of grace, which is so much more life giving than I ever thought the disciplines could be. And I'm re-reading Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline and sharing themes and excerpts from that, as we're going through this series.

In the very last episode, we talked about how we need God's work in our lives. That we can't stop sinning by our own willpower. It just doesn't work. And one of the common questions that comes up in conversations like this is, okay, if we need God to do the work, then why doesn't he just do the work? Where's my part? How do I figure out where that line is between what God does and what I'm supposed to do?

And that's exactly what we're talking about today.

I'm going to start by reading from Celebration of Disciplines. Richard says, if all human strivings end in moral bankruptcy, and having tried it, we all know that this is so, and if all righteousness is a gracious gift from God, as the Bible clearly states, then is it not logical to conclude that we must wait for God to come and transform us? Strangely enough, the answer is no. The analysis is correct, human striving is insufficient, and righteousness is a gift from God, but the conclusion is faulty. Happily, there is something we can do. We place ourselves before God so that he will transform us.

Or in my words: we receive and participate in what God is doing in our lives.

It's not enough to have our own human effort, and it's not that we have no effort at all, but we receive the grace God has given us in this invitation to come and bring ourselves before him. And in doing so, we receive his good work in our lives. There's a partnership, an agreement, a collaboration that we get to have with God.

The Apostle Paul actually uses the analogy of seeds being planted in a field. In Galatians 6:8, he says,

“he who sows to his own flesh will reap flesh corruption, but he who sows to the spirit will from the spirit receive eternal life.” (Galatians 6:8)

Richard says that Paul's analogy here is really instructive. A farmer is helpless to grow grain. All he can do is provide the right conditions. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over. How God created growth to happen happens. And up comes the grain.

In a similar way, spiritual disciplines don't produce change. God does. Spiritual Disciplines position us to receive the grace and to live according to it.

And we know that the changes are real in us when they happen. I've shared with you all before about how I used to try and metaphorically duct tape the fruit of the spirit onto myself. I tried to act in ways that I thought would appear loving and patient and kind, because I knew I ought to be loving and patient and kind. But I had this inner struggle that was hidden where I'm constantly combating how I truly felt and wanted to act on the inside and sometimes even Trying to hide how I acted in private, so it appeared a different way publicly I wanted to look like I had the fruit of the spirit. But I needed the spirit to actually produce that in me.

And this is something that Richard talks about. He says that when we're trying to do it all on our own, bubbling up from the inner depths comes the thing we didn't want, a biting and a bitter spirit. But when we live and walk in the path of disciplined grace for a season.

We begin to discover these internal changes. We do no more than to receive a gift, but we know that the changes are real because we discover that the spirit of compassion, we once found so hard to exhibit is now easy. In fact, being full of bitterness would be the hard thing. Divine love has slipped into our inner spirit and taken over our habit patterns.

In the unguarded moments, There's a spontaneous flow from the inner sanctuary of our lives where the fruit of the spirit comes out.

Which we know from Galatians is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23) that seeps out of us because of God's inner working that's happening within us.

There's no longer a tiring need to hide our inner selves. We don't have to work so hard at being good and kind because in receiving God's grace, we are good and kind.

And so my hope in this episode today is that it encourages you to work less.

Look for ways to receive more of God's grace and to put yourself before him to receive what he has to give you.
Ask him to show you what it's like to partner with his spirit's work in your life in this way. And so here's a question that you can take to him:

God, what's an area of my transformation that I can trust you to complete in me?

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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