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Spiritual Disciplines III: Work

Gary Stedman on March 17, 2013
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Spiritual Disciplines II: Eat

Gary Stedman on March 10, 2013

http://www.christkirk.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1714.mp3

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Introduction

So there are three imperatives we are considering as we look at the spiritual disciplines. They are breathe, eat, and work. We have already seen the need for the gift of breath, and we will now look at the charge to eat.

The Text

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17).

Summary of the Text

As we have considered, Adam was shaped from the dust of the ground. Eve was therefore a granddaughter of the soil, taken from the side of Adam, just as Adam had been taken from the side of the earth. After he had been shaped, God breathed into him the breath of life. Once he had become a living soul, it became apparent that this living soul would need ongoing sustenance. Here in our passage, the Lord God gave him all the food in the garden, with one exception. He was not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but every other tree was free and available to him. This included, incidentally, the tree of life (Gen. 2:9). That tree was only shut off to him after the Fall, most probably as an act of mercy. But the simple need for food in an ongoing way is plainly a design feature, unrelated to sin.

God Gives the Increase

The gift of physical life is sustained by the gift of physical food. Man was created an eating creature. So in the same way, spiritual life is sustained by spiritual food. Life seeks out food, and life incorporates food. But how food is able to do what it does is a grand mystery. Although this passage is about a plant being nourished and growing as a result, the principle is the same for all living things. “So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase” (1 Cor. 3:7). You don’t eat a sandwich and then set aside the next half hour for issuing commands down to your digestive system to make sure everything goes where it needs to. That part of it is built in. You just put food in, and life does something with it. How? God gives the increase.

The Menu

So just as a living body needs to import nutrition, so also does the soul. We have already considered the reality of it. But what are we supposed to eat to nourish our spiritual lives? In what ways are we instructed to feed?

Another way of asking this is to wonder what menu God has prepared for us. Here are some of the key items that feed us.

  • The Word of God feeds us. Man does not live by bread alone (Matt.4:4), but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We are called to eat teaching, eat doctrine—and not sporadically either (Heb. 5:14; 1 Pet. 2:2).
  • The sacraments feed us. They are explicitly described for us as spiritual food (1 Cor. 10:1-4; 16). We are instructed to take care that we eat in a particular way, but when we do, we are nourished by Christ Himself.
  • Music feeds us. We are to teach and admonish one another by psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:16). This is clearly a combination because the words are the Word of God also, but God wants us to feed on the Word while singing it.
  • Prayer feeds us. We too often think of prayer as outlay instead of intake. But Jesus said that prayer understood properly strengthens rather than drains (Mark 9:29).
  • Doing the will of God feeds us. The Lord told His disciples that He had nourishment that they didn’t know about (John 4:31-34). He told them this after He had ministered to the woman at the well.
  • And fellowship feeds us. We see this as one of the things the new believers on Pentecost naturally sought out (Acts 2:42).

Balanced Diet

We have made the point that healthy life doesn’t need “hungry lessons.” At the same time, if you established all your physical eating habits as a small child, you might now be subsisting on a diet revolving around deep-fried Oreos. This is the way of the libertine. But there is also the legalist, the one who wants to be put right or kept right with God by means of some healthy sounding thing that you can sprinkle on your salad, like pine bark shavings.

Use the dining table to illustrate the point about your Bible reading, or any other form of spiritual grazing. Why do you eat? For most people, you should eat for two basic reasons—first, because you are hungry, and second, because its dinner time. Why do you need other reasons? And if other reasons are front and center, you are probably over-thinking it.

Christ in All of It

So we feed on the Word of God. Christ is the Word (John 1:1). We are nourished by the sacraments—but the Old Testament saints are said to have been nourished by Christ. They drank Christ; they ate Christ, the bread from Heaven (1 Cor. 10:1-4). We are baptized into the death of Christ (Rom. 6:3), and we are made partakers of Christ in the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 10:16). We sing Christ (Col. 3:16). Christ prays for us (Rom. 8:34), and whenever we pray, we are praying in Christ. Because we know it is true that of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, we offer our bodies a living sacrifice, which proves and establishes the will of God (Rom. 12:1-2). This nourishes us. The fellowship we enjoy with one another is fellowship that is grounded in walking in the light as He is in the light (1 John 1:7). In short, it is Jesus everywhere.

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Spiritual Disciplines I: Breathe

Gary Stedman on March 3, 2013

http://www.christkirk.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/1713.mp3

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Introduction

We are going to be spending this week and the next two on the subject of the spiritual disciplines. I am putting them together as three imperatives—breathe, eat, work. When God put Adam into this world, He gave him the breath of life, He gave him food to eat, and He gave him work to do. This is the pattern we should receive from Him as we seek to order our lives rightly.

The Text

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7).

Summary of the Text

Although we were created and fashioned in the image of God, it remains a fact that we are utterly dependent creatures. The Lord God shaped and fashioned man out of the dust of the ground. When He was done “sculpting,” He had a very fine statue, but still lifeless. God then breathed the breath of life into His work. At that moment Adam became a living soul. And ever since that first breath, if God ever takes His breath away, all creatures, man and animal alike, return necessarily to the dust of the ground (Ps. 104:29-30).

The Meaning of Death

Our physical life is a spiritual reality, but we all recognize that there is more to our spiritual lives than just physical breathing. But we know that non-Christians have souls, for example. What do we have that they do not?

In the Bible, death refers to separation more than it refers to simple cessation. In the Garden, God told Adam that the day they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, they would die (Gen. 2:17). But what happened when they did? They were exiled from the garden, separated from the communion with God that they had enjoyed before (Gen. 3:24). And when Adam died physically, 70 years shy of a millennium later, what happened was that his soul and his body were then separated (Gen. 5:5). The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23), which means that because we are sinners, we are separated from God, estranged from Him (Col. 1:21).

This is why is says in Ephesians that when we were non-Christians we were dead in our trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1), in which trespasses we used to walk (Eph. 2:2). That is the biblical picture—dead but walking around. So the death cannot refer to a condition of being like stone, or like nothing. It refers to separation.

And when we are quickened in regeneration, we are made alive spiritually. Now the soul and spirit can be very hard to distinguish (Heb. 4:12), but there is a difference. Someone who is truly regenerate is quickened in the inner man (2 Cor. 4:16). “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses” (Col. 2:13).

The Word for Spirit

The word for spirit in Greek is pneuma. Interestingly, that is also the word for wind, and it is also the word for breath.

“The wind [pneuma] bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit [pneuma]” (John 3:8).

The Lord’s whole point here is designed to make us aware of how utterly sovereign the Holy Spirit is. We cannot whistle Him up. On a windy day, you cannot capture some in a paper bag to take home and show everybody. We cannot manufacture aerosol cans that will spray someone with the breath of life. This is outside of our control.

Gotta Be Alive

The spiritual disciplines all work within an assumed context of life.

But an entire religious industry has sprung up trying to make food attractive to corpses, and trying to get dead bodies to contribute more than they do.

One of the most remarkable things about life is that it incorporates, naturally and readily, the things around it that are conducive to its well-being.

But think for a moment about this. “As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby” (1 Pet. 2:2). Healthy babies are born hungry—you don’t have to teach them to be hungry. Their hunger is a sign of life. They have been given the breath of life. “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42, ESV). There it is again—born hungry.

Impressive Activity, But . . .

People who are separated from God, who are not in fellowship with Him, can do an impressive number of things that have a religious nature. They can give their bodies to be burned, and they can help the poor (1 Cor. 13:3). They can speak with the tongues of men and angels (1 Cor. 13:1). But, despite all of this activity, the whole enterprise amounts to a bunch of nothing.

In fact, climbing the highest mountain and swimming the deepest sea is what the unregenerate (but religious) man wants to do. It is an impulse that makes good sense to him, and doing anything else doesn’t make sense to him. When Naaman came to Elisha to be healed, the simplicity of the assigned task infuriated him. But his servants wisely observed that if he had been told to do some great thing, he would have done it (2 Kings 5:13). And why? Because great deeds flatter us. Receiving grace as beggar supplicants does not flatter us.

Where It Begins

There are no spiritual disciplines for creating life. Only the gospel creates life. Once given, life incorporates nutrients. Life seeks out nutrients. Life bends its entire nature toward that end.

So the first spiritual discipline is checking for a pulse. The first spiritual discipline is making sure you are alive. Breathe.

And to be alive, the God of Heaven must breathe His Holy Spirit into you.

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