Resting in God’s Love: The Role of Spiritual Disciplines in Our Lives

Seeking God in the Ordinary

Sometimes, I wish I was like Moses who encountered God in a burning bush or I wish I was like Peter, James, or John who witnessed the Transfigured Jesus. I want to have an encounter with God, and I am sure that if I had the encounters that Moses or the disciples had with God, I would be a changed person! 

Well, the reality is that for most of us, we do not have such spectacular encounters with God, yet nevertheless, all of us are given regular opportunities to encounter God in our ordinary life circumstances on a daily basis.  We are given opportunities to seek intimacy with him and to be transformed by him.  We just need to recognize those opportunities and pursue them.  

The challenge is that we are a hurried and distracted people, who so often fail to see or hear the Lord in our daily lives.  

Quite frankly, we are also a people who often mistake knowing things about God or doing things for him as intimacy with the Lord.  For sure, delving into Biblical and Theological truth about God and serving him can lead to intimacy with God, but it doesn’t always. 

For example, just because I read up on Prince William and know all about him and his family doesn’t mean that I actually know him.  The same is true when it comes to knowledge of the Lord. I may know lots about the Lord without actually knowing him and spending time with him. I can also serve him out of some sort of obligation without actually getting to know him.  

Spiritual Disciplines as Means to Commune with God

So our call as followers of the Way is to slow down and find intentional times of being with the Lord.  And that, friends, is what the spiritual disciplines are all about.  They are about opening up spaces in our lives so that we might encounter God in the ordinary circumstances of our lives.

Unfortunately, however, the problem we so often encounter with the spiritual disciplines (or what I also call spiritual practices or soul-training exercises), is that we misunderstand them or misuse them.

For some of us, spiritual disciplines become obligations we must fulfill and so our pursuit of them quickly turns into ways to score points with God and our community, legalism, drudgery, and a means of self-condemnation when we do not practice them.

For others of us, spiritual disciplines don’t seem to do what they are supposed to do.  When we pursue these practices, we don’t feel God in these encounters in the ways we think we should or we don’t see immediate change in ourselves. So we quickly abandon them as useless activities.  We think: perhaps, they are good for the really spiritual people out there, but they aren’t good for us. Besides, who has time for this when our do-lists are already so long?

The reality, however, is that when we see the disciplines as legalistic obligations to the Lord, practices for the super Christian, or as activities that should automatically give us instant results in terms of good feelings and life transformation, we miss the point.

As mentioned above, the spiritual disciplines are a means to open up space to be with the Lord so that we can rest in his love and his good intentions for us.  That’s it!   And as we rest in the Lord over and over again, slowly but surely we begin to see real change in our lives and to sense a deep intimacy with the Lord, whether that intimacy is accompanied by strong feelings in us or none at all.  And slowly but surely, we begin to see that we cannot live without these spaces of resting in God’s presence.  

Patience and Intention in the Pursuit of Spiritual Disciplines

Intimacy with the Lord and spiritual transformation will not happen overnight though, and if we expect that they will, we will disappointed. That being said, we can trust in the Lord that these things will eventually come, just as the tulip blossoms will come from the bulbs I just planted in my front yard.  For the next half year, I will see absolutely nothing happening, but nevertheless, I will rest knowing that all kinds of biological processes are going on underground and that in the Spring, I will have beautiful flowers.  

It all begins with intention, however.  Just as I planted the tulip bulbs and now have to wait, we must take action if we want to cultivate regular times of being with the Lord.  And we must be “disciplined”, sticking with these practices for some time even when they don’t seem to “work”, trusting that God is at work “underground” in our hearts.

So friends, let us pursue various spiritual disciplines so that we may rest in God’s presence.  On this Website, I will be constantly introducing new disciplines we can engage.  The point is not to pursue them all, but to pursue some of them. 

Depending on our wiring and stage of life and faith, we will find that various disciplines are more helpful to us than others.  We’ll even find that some disciplines that have been helpful to us in the past will fade away in our lives to make room for others.  That is good and right because the goal in the end is not the practice of any particular discipline but intimacy with the Lord.  So let us seek that intimacy, friends.

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“I now understand the fundamental truth beneath the spiritual disciplines, that as author and Pastor John Ortberg says, “If a discipline is not producing freedom in me, it’s probably the wrong thing for me to be doing.” Practicing a spiritual discipline is not about trying to earn something, prove something, or win. Practicing a spiritual discipline is more about receiving power to live in the kingdom. It’s about training my mind and my will to practice what my heart deeply believes. It’s about knowing that each moment is packed with grace but sometimes I need practice to see it. It’s about becoming the person I already am in Christ. Really anything can be a spiritual discipline when we recognize the presence of God with us in it.”

— Emily P. Freeman, The Next Right Thing Podcast

“The [spiritual] dis­ci­plines should nev­er be used to bring self-con­dem­na­tion. Please do not set plans and goals in your spir­i­tu­al life and then end up using your fail­ures as ammu­ni­tion to prove you don’t mea­sure up. That is the way of the world, not the way of Christ. God is ever eager to meet us where we are, not where we think we should be. The dis­ci­plines are an invi­ta­tion, not an oblig­a­tion. Joy, free­dom, and laugh­ter are where this jour­ney is tak­ing us. Now cer­tain­ly the dis­ci­plines require ener­gies. And, some­times they lead us to suf­fer­ing as self-cen­tered­ness works its way out, but spir­i­tu­al train­ing is large­ly a move­ment of free­dom, a light bur­den, and an easy yoke.”

— Nathan Foster, "Spiritual Disciplines are an Invitation"

These are the tulips and daffodils I mentioned in this article. I planted the bulbs in October and here they are in April after many months of nothing seeming to happen.