Imbalanced Life, Imbalanced Discipleship: My Ongoing Discovery of Another Way
When I was a child, I was a straight-A student, and while this was admirable in many ways, as an adult, I have begun to view this reality a little differently. You see, during the school year, my sole focus was on my school work. I was very disciplined and conscientious. It is not that I didn’t have room in my life for other things - friends, church, choir, and more - but my school work took the priority in almost all cases. For example, in high school, if an occasion arose where there was a choice between getting a school project done excellently or going to church, getting the school project done excellently won out every time.
Unfortunately, this set up a precedent in my life where I was very disciplined in one area of my life and pretty undisciplined in just about every other area of my life, including my spiritual life, and that is even after I began to take my faith more seriously in college. For you see, when I began to pursue the Christian life more seriously, my focus was on the life of the mind. And of course, that made sense. Naturally, as an over-achieving student, the most natural approach to the life of faith for me was to accumulate more knowledge, and so I did, eventually pursuing two seminary degrees.
Now, I want to be clear: I am thankful that I pursued this knowledge because I believe God greatly values the life of the mind, and I have also personally come to know and love God more through this study. Yet, over the past couple of decades, I have had a deep sense that there is more to the Christian life than just knowing more about God. There is more to discipleship than just endless Bible study or theological inquiry. The Christian life is more balanced than that.
God calls his disciples to know him personally, to become like him, and to live out a more embodied discipleship - to follow him by loving God and neighbor, not just in thought but in action. Unfortunately, for many western Christians, however, this is not how they have been discipled. This is not something they know how to do, because for them, Christianity has been more about a belief system than a way of living.
As Alan Fadling says in his new book “The Way of Presence”,
“ . . . we often focus on the teachings of Jesus (“the truth”) and the gift of eternal life in Jesus (“the life”), but not as much on how Jesus does what he does or how Jesus actually lives his life (“the way”). Jesus as way speaks to me of a journey we take, a path on which we walk, a companionship that we cultivate, and an ongoing interactive experience. Day by day, moment by moment, we are on the way with Christ. ”
Well, friends, what would it look like for us to embrace this Jesus way? This is what I am passionate to explore on this Website.
So while I can’t answer this question fully here for this it is too big of a conversation (hence the Website itself!), I do believe that each person is called to pursue a balanced life of loving God and neighbor - of following in the Way, and I believe one way to think about doing this is considering how we can pursue rhythms in our life that keep us well-rounded, balanced, continually growing, and in God’s presence.
On this website, I talk about the rhythms of UP (worshipping the Lord), IN (spiritual formation), OUT (loving and serving our neighbor) DOWN (finding rest in God and his creation), and TOGETHER (pursuing the Way of Jesus in community). I believe that following in the way of Jesus involves all these rhythms, no matter who we are.
Now the way we pursue these rhythms will be unique based on how God has uniquely gifted and called us, what stage of life we are in, and where we live and work, but nevertheless, I believe that each one of us is called to pursue these five rhythms.
So friends, how can we live out these rhythms? During my next post, I will introduce the concept of spiritual practices or disciplines, asking what the point of these practices are in the first place, and then after that (either in that post or the next), I’ll speak about how we can pursue spiritual practices in each rhythm. So stay tuned, and in the meantime, check out the Rhythms page.
“Furthermore, we need to maintain a balance between learning and doing. We ought to spend much more time in doing. If we are not careful, we will spend such a large segment of our lives in gaining knowledge that we shall need another lifetime to put our knowledge into practice. We are in danger of evaluating our spiritual maturity on the basis of the amount of knowledge we have acquired. But the fact is that education, instead of helping self to die, only nourishes the old man by making him proud of his intellectual attainments. So if you want to make some great strides toward spiritual maturity, then do not trust in your own power or your own knowledge. Humility before God and distrust of your old self, with an open simplicity, are fundamental virtues for you.”