“We intend what is
right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.”
I have met very few “bad” people in
my ministry though defining “bad” with any precision is a slippery slope. Most
people I know, and have known, are basically good and decent people. They have
been people who belong to churches and people who don’t. Membership in a church
is a weak benchmark for identifying the character of people. That conviction
has continued to be strengthened by people I meet who demonstrate considerable
generosity, both financially and with volunteer time to nonprofits, and have a
grace about them that simply blesses all who know them – yet they personally
appear to have no interest in the church.
Many of those good and decent people
have also shared with me that they intend
much more with their lives, greater generosity, greater demonstration of
love for others and greater movement toward some identified set of aspirations,
core values or moral standard. They want to be so much more than they are now.
The difficulty is that identifying a pathway “from here to there” isn’t done. What
they “intend” for their life is rarely realized by the lack of a purposeful
approach.
For Christians, the primary
“intention” for life is to grow in the character of Christ. This isn’t one
choice among several. Christlikeness is the intention, it is what “Christian”
literally means: to become a little Christ. Naturally, this intention will
rarely be realized without a purposeful approach. What is unfortunate is that
for some who take a purposeful approach to growing in the character of Christ, they take the wrong road. That road may be marked by profession of perfectly
correct beliefs, more study of the Bible or greater participation in the
activities of the church. These are certainly good activities but each are
insufficient for realizing our intention to be Christlike.
Dallas Willard, perhaps the most
influential thinker in spiritual formation today, argues that there are two
primary objectives for realizing authentic character development in the
likeness of Christ: falling dearly in love with our Heavenly Father, constantly
delighting in Him and realizing that there is no condition to His love for us
and disrupting habitual patterns of thought, feeling and action that diminish
Christ in us. The first is developed through the regular reading of scripture,
not for more information but to experience the presence of God and regular
worship, private and corporate. The latter is accomplished by developing intentional
practices that, over time< become formative of our nature such as the practice
of solitude and prayer, expressing gratitude regularly and financial
generosity. The life that is pattern by these two objectives will find its way
into the embrace of Christ.
Joy
No comments:
Post a Comment