The Disciplines

Well, Jesus gives us some very important advice on the last night of his life. One main word that in my mind really stands out. That word is abide. We read it in John 15 verse 4 where Jesus says, abide in me and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. And then just a few verses later it says, if you abide in me and my words abide in you, you will ask what you desire and it shall be done for you. By this my father is glorified that you bear much fruit, so you will be my disciples. So the gospel of the kingdom is a really great idea. I mean I'm giving my life to it. But the trick is to apply the kingdom to our lives such that it manifests the freedom and the grace and the power so that we can do amazing things in his name and our father is glorified. You see, the kingdom of God is a gift, but what good is the gift if I don't unwrap it and make it mine? So this is Kingdom Offerings. This is the podcast environment of A Hundred Fold Ministries and I was hoping to make the kingdom, the gospel of the kingdom, a bit more practical for you today as you listen in. Not long ago after a sermon that was centered on this very verse about abiding, abiding as the hope of a believer, a young couple, young married couple, came up to me and they both asked, you could just see it in their eyes, this is really great, Dave, this idea of abiding, but how do you abide? It's such a good question. Let me try this word picture. When you give in to Jesus and you yield, you jump into the river of life and the current of that river will naturally carry you to the Holy City. In a way, staying in that river is a way of abiding, simply staying in the water and letting it carry you along to the destination of heaven. You will eventually drift to your eternal destination without striving. You can just float along. However, there are three other ways to negotiate this river or to participate with it. The first is to swim with the current. Some decide that this is what they want and all they want to do is swim hard and apply everything they know to the journey because they have bought into this idea and they simply want everything that God has set aside and so they are on their way to the Holy City. They are swimming and they're swimming with the current and they're doing it hard. But the truth of the matter is some fight the current. They get started swimming, maybe they're just floating, but for one reason or another begin to swim against the current and sometimes really fiercely. Here's the sad thing about it, they swim all the harder when they realize that they are standing still, so to speak. They're not really going anywhere and they get mad about it and they blame the current for their troubles. And there's a third way yet and I think this is worse. The person grows so discouraged that they just get out of the river altogether. They dry off and they set out on their own across country with all of its dangers and false hopes. And for me this is the saddest of all the circumstances. So to swim with the current, in order to do that, we practice the long-standing, time-tested disciplines of the faith. Disciplines that help us swim with the current in the direction of the Holy City. Keep in mind athletes or musicians, they practice, practice, practice. They work hard to master their craft. The longer and longer they work at it, the better and better they get, the more natural it seems. The deeper you are into the hope of Christ, the more you will find yourself participating in the disciplines more naturally and easily as you go deeper in Christ. In 1978 Richard Foster wrote a book called Celebration of Discipline and it is one of the five most important books of my entire life. As a young married man, a young believer, I devoured this book. I had been a believer for barely ten years and I had never heard anything about the disciplines of the faith. I was married, I was in full-time ministry, all of 24 years old, and my eight-year-old faith had grown stale. I was working hard for Jesus. I was working 50, 60 hours a week. I was leading teens to Christ, but I was still growing weary. Then this book came into my life and I discovered shortly in my reading that the powerlessness, the exhaustion that I was experiencing was because I was failing to abide. And this book not only gave me a map to abiding, but a step-by-step guide to going deeper in Christ. Richard Foster wasn't the first to write about it. People have been writing about the disciplines since the beginning of Jesus's church, but he wrote about it with a certain confidence and kindness. Then others now have also written into this discipline, but I always look back to this book by Foster. He talked about the inward disciplines of meditation and prayer and fasting, outward disciplines like solitude and submission, and then there were the corporate disciplines, disciplines like confession and worship. You see, to practice the kingdom is to be with Jesus, to linger with him, to know him and his attitudes and his moods, his priorities. What makes him laugh? What makes him sad or angry? What makes him proud? This is my hope. So this is A Hundred-Fold Ministries, and you're listening to Kingdom Offerings, and I'm Dave Scherrer. I hope you can put on some of this. Check out Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline. Peace to you, eyes on Jesus, and the hundred-fold blessings of the kingdom await you in your obedience. Take care.