One of my favorite parts of the week is our Midweek program at church. After a long, but needed hiatus from regular activities over Christmas, it has been wonderful to see the church full of activity again as we started a new semester of classes. I’m especially excited about this semester because the Youth Ministry is starting a new series on Wednesday nights. Our topic of study is a simple yet profound question: “How do I grow in Christ?” The impetus for this series came from the students themselves and their desire to go deeper in their faith. In response to their interest in the subject, we’ll be looking at how we can grow in our personal devotions and develop habits that help us know and love God in a deeper way.
This is a challenging topic; not because the recipe for spiritual growth is difficult, but because it seems relatively simple -- listen to God’s voice in Scripture, commune with God in prayer, and gather with God’s people for worship and fellowship. Certainly, there are many other important things we could add to that list, but Bible study, prayer, and worship are core pieces to any plan of growth in godliness. That is the blueprint we see in the early church: “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2.42).
The problem with these well-known spiritual disciplines is actually making them a regular part of our lives. One of the most common struggles in my own life is having the desire to go deeper in my walk with Christ but always falling short. Most of us can relate to starting a Bible reading plan, only to get stuck in Leviticus after a few weeks; or setting our alarm clock to wake up early for prayer, only to hit the snooze button again and again … and again; or setting aside 30 minutes of our day for silence and solitude, only to have our minds drift to what needs to get done after our quiet time. We all desire to develop spiritual disciplines in our lives but struggle with the discipline part of the equation. When we think about growing in Christ, it’s easy to be overwhelmed with how much we fall short.
With all of these struggles in mind, one of my burdens for the series is for our students to know that our growth in Christ begins and ends with grace. We are saved by grace, and we are sanctified by grace. Lutheran writer Gretchen Ronnevik, author of Ragged: Spiritual Disciplines for the Spiritually Exhausted, put it better than I can:
We will never reach a point in our Christian life where we won’t need to remember our weakness and God’s complete sufficiency. Our growth in Christ isn’t about becoming more spiritually self-sufficient. Our growth in Christ looks like leaning more heavily on God’s strength than our own. The spiritual disciplines don’t earn us grace. They awaken us to the reality of grace. We do them because we get to, not because we have to… The spiritual disciplines are there for us to understand deeper and wider his love for us. They’re practices taught in Scripture to help us remember what God has done so that we depend on him rather than ourselves.
Calling Bible reading, prayer, and worship “spiritual disciplines” is a perfectly fine thing to do, but perhaps a better term might be “spiritual graces.” The purpose of these practices is not to highlight our spiritual strength and willpower; rather, they highlight our spiritual weakness and God’s great grace. We adopt these practices of devotion not because we have unlocked a new level of spiritual independence, but because we know in our weakness that we need more of God in our lives.
My hope is that this study series will give the Youth, and all of us, a fresh perspective on how to grow and draw near to the heart of Jesus. My prayer is that we will see “spiritual graces” not as a burden but as an invitation to sit at the feet of Jesus and rest, for His yoke is easy and His burden is light.
