God’s Word – SeqHim

March 27, 2009

What does it mean to believe God?

A couple of posts ago, we went a little deeper on what it means to hear God. If you remember, this was the first of three activities that we perform to help ourselves grow spiritually. Today, we will talk a little more about the second activity, believing God.

As with hearing God, numerous well-written books on “belief” have been written and many more could be written. Here, we will focus not so much on defining belief and faith, but on the things we can be doing to strengthen our belief in what God has said. But to do that, we will scope the term belief to “believing what God has said”. In the post of “hearing God”, we discussed some aspects of understand what God has to say; in this one, we’ll discuss some things we can be doing to strengthen our belief in what we understand Him to have said.

I’ve mentioned before that the activities associated with believing God are similar to training activities in the world of athletics. Baseball players become better players by playing the game, yes, but the best players excel at training between games. Every athlete at the top of his game is obsessive about training. They learn from experience, but they are compelled to train to the point of suffering out of devotion for being the best at what they do. How much more so should a Christian be compelled to train to the point of suffering out of devotion for being the most like their Savior they can be?

What are these training activities? I believe they are most widely known as the spiritual disciplines. Pick up anything by Dallas Willard and you will be blessed in his encouraging view of how God changes us through these disciplines. The disciplines are used by God to prepare us for our future circumstances. He knows what is about to happen to us, and he provides opportunities for us to discipline ourselves in more controlled circumstances before the trouble hits.

Disciplines like prayer, study, worship, solitude, fasting, scripture memory, scripture meditation, and others train us internalize God’s Word. They train us to make His Word part of us. They train us to allow His Word to change us…to change who we are and therefore how we react natually. In my life, I’ve tried to develop this habit of calling upon some specific verse of scripture when I excounter a challenging or tempting circumstance. How could I do this if I only read the scriptures in a cursory manner? How could I do this if I only engage extra-biblical resources? How could I do this if I only attend bible studies for social reasons or to check it off of my “what I need to be doing to be a good Christian” list? I can’t. Earnest prayer, thoughtful study, focused meditation, sacrifical fasting, and (most important this day and age) regular time alone are what is required.

I’m sorry to say that this is hard work, and unfortunately that is not what many Christians these days sign-up for when they walk down the aisle. But, God’s way is always the best and “safest” way. And, in most cases, I would say that this little bit of pain helps us to avoid the great amount of pain that comes by trying to deal with life without having been trained on God’s ways.

I’ll leave you with this. I’ve been a Christian since the age of eight, and clearly God has been providing for and protecting me since then…no question. But, I did not experience consistency in life or steady change until I got serious about spending daily time alone with the Lord. If you do not already, I encourage you to spend a few minutes every day reading a passage from scripture, really thinking about what God is saying to you through it, and praying about it with God. If you do not know where to start, start with the book of John.

I promise that there is nothing you can do that will have a greater impact on your life than this very simple yet difficult to stick with activity. For me, what started as a form of sacrifice (giving up some of “my” time) has turned into a joy that I cannot imagine living without. If it were not for this simple discipline, I would be full of knowledge, but I can’t say I would genuinely believe what God has said nor have experienced the charater change that I have.

March 20, 2009

What Does it Mean to Hear God?

Excellent question…thank you for asking! 😉

In a previous post, I introduced my view of spiritual growth, which I believe is a biblical view…please tell me if you disgaree!

Remember there are two fundamental principles:

spiritual growth occurs along three dimensions: knowledge, character and behavior.
growth on these three dimensions occurs by iterations of hearing, believing and obeying God.

And, remember the graphic we use to discuss this subject…hopefully it is an image that helps you get your arms around this subject at a high level as we dive deeper into different elements of this complex subject.

What we want to dive a little deeper on today is the activity of hearing God.

As we’ve discussed, the purpose of the iterative growth model is to help people understand what it means to grow in Christ and how we cooperate with the Spirit during the transformation process. Knowledge, character and behavior are the what…that is, these are attributes of our person that change. Only the Spirit can affect this change. Hearing, believing and obeying are activities that we are responsible for and are used by the Spirit as a tool, so to speak, in our transformation. They are the how. Therefore, when I talk about “hearing God” in this context, I’m talking primarily about the activities we are responsible for that the Spirit uses to increase our knowledge of Him.

My intention is not to start a debate on non-essentials such as whether or not God speaks audibly now as he did in the past; however, one essential is necessary to move forward, and that is the sole authority of Scripture. Everything you read on this site assumes that while God may reveal Himself in many ways, there is only one source of divine authority for faith and practice: Scripture.

There are two major categories for activities related to “Hearing God”: Scripture and Non-Scripture. Ok, I guess that was a little patronizing…but, here’s the point. Scripture is the only authority, and everything else is subject to it; but, that is not to say that extra-biblical sources are not helpful, of course. Otherwise, I’m wasting my time writing this and you are wasting your time reading it. When I am discipling someone, my first goal is to get them in the Word regularly to a) establish private bible study as a discipline, joy and priviledge, and b) develop a foundational understanding of the essential doctrines of the faith tied to Scripture directly. My second goal is to feed them extra-biblical resources that strengthen weak areas of their understanding. In this way, I can be an effective disciple-maker without being the best teacher. I need only be concerned with helping the disciple develop skills of discernment…measuring everything they read against what they know to be true from Scripture. My prayer is that you are doing that very thing with everything you read from SeqHim!

What are these extra-biblical resources? I think of them as being any media that God uses to speak to his people, outside of the Bible itself. Yes, I do believe that God speaks to us through our conscience, and He does not need media to speak to us. I just don’t call that a “resource”. So, examples would include books, classes, sermons, podcasts, videos, dramas, bogs, twitter feeds, seminars, conferences, etc.

Now, relatively speaking, there is a little good stuff out there, and alot of bad stuff. The challenge for any disciple-maker is to discern the good from the bad. And not only that, but discern the best from the good, where the distinction between the good and the best has to do with knowing where your disciple is in his walk and the kinds of resources that would be most beneficial for him/her right now.

The vision of SeqHim includes tools and support for helping disciples and disciple-makers discrern the good from the bad and the best from the good. Presently, this blog (and more effectively, R2 coming in a few weeks) can be used to share opinions on the best resources. In the future, we’ll add structure, meta-languages and enhanced search capabilities to make a personalized community ranked list of resources one click away.

I’m sure there are other good sources of info on the best resources out there…I just have not seen any that live up to the standards I have in mind. If you know of some good ones, please let me know.

I would love to hear your feedback on the passages of Scripture and extra-biblical resources that have had the greatest impact on your walk!

February 24, 2009

Deeper Dive on Growth Themes

In my last post, I introduced the concept of a growth theme. Think of themes (joy, compassion, humility, perseverance) as the more concrete sub-components of the growth dimensions (knowledge, character, and behavior). And remember, growth on these dimensions within the themes is a result of hearing, believing and obeying God. Later, I’ll go a little deeper on hearing, believing and obeying God…the things we do. But first, lets look a little closer at what we are trying to become (increasingly joyous, compassionate, humble, and persevering).

Joyfully forget yourself and focus on others forever.

The above statement is something I made up as a kind of personal mission statement. Notice how it includes each of the four growth themes…joy, humility (forget yourself), compassion (focus on others), and perseverance (forever). We are followers of Christ if we do this increasingly, genuinely and in the context of God’s truth. Note that I did not say we are “saved” because of it. We’re “saved” because we professed faith in Christ and He gave us life by His grace alone. What I’m taking about here is actually following Christ after we have been regenerated.

Now, let’s look under the hood. Are four themes really enough? What about love, wisdom, righteousness, contentment, faith, dependenance, generosity, etc? As I said before, we created a mind map to organize these characteristics so that we could get our arms around the different facets and begin to eat the elephant one bite at a time, so to speak.

Here is a link to that mind map: Themes v0.3

Remember, this is one of an incalculable number of possible arrangements. This is just one that works for our purposes. I’m happy to take feedback on it, because I do want to improve it…but, let’s not miss the forest for the trees either.

And so you will see that we’re framing contentment as a joy issue. If you do not have God’s joy, it is possible that the underlying cause is a contentment issue. With this kind of vocabulary, we can use it in a number of different ways to help people. Here are a few:

Assessment: Helping Disciples Know Where They Are

We can develop a means of helping people understand where they are in their walk with regard to joy, humility, compassion, and perseverance. This then drives where/how they spend their time addressing areas of weakness (rather than simply ammassing knowledge by an endless stream of “bible studies”). The intent of “assessment”, would be to help someone understand that contentment is a bigger issue in their life than say generosity.

Guidance: Helping Disciples Know Where to Go and How to Get There

Guidance can be attached to the same vocabulary. Guidance (e.g. passages of scripture, teaching, books, podcasts, disciplines, ad-hoc experiences and advice, etc) can be provided on how to become more generous, for example, and loaded into a shared repository.

Search: Helping Disciples Find The Best Stuff Fast

Now that guidance has been loaded against a specific vocabulary, and a person understands their need using the same vocabulary, an extremely efficient search capability can be put into place that helps a disciple find exactly what they need almost immediately.

There is alot more to be said, but alas…it will have to wait until next time. Until then, I will continue to pray for all of you as you strive to become more like our Savior.

February 20, 2009

Themes of Spiritual Growth

Let’s pick up on a thread that I started several days ago re: spiritual growth. Remember that we discussed two basic principles:

spiritual growth occurs along three dimensions: knowledge, character and behavior.
growth on these three dimensions occurs by iterations of hearing, believing and obeying God.

And, we used the following as a picture to illustrate the basic concept.

Now let’s break down the components of knowledge, character, and behavior so we can get to something that each of us can use in our daily lives and help others to do the same.

Several months ago, some faithful buddies and I brainstormed “christian attributes”. We asked, “what are the characteristics you would expect to see in a follower of Christ?” Obviously, many attributes came to mind, including wisdom, righteousness, humility, generosity, love, contentment, etc. We then organized them into four major themes: joy, humility, compassion, and perseverance.

Therefore, when we talk about growing in knowledge, we’re really talking about growing in knowledge of what it means to be joyous, humble, compassionate and persevering. When we talk about growing our character (internal attitudes and unseen behaviors), we’re talking about developing a joyous, humble, compassionate, and persevering character. When we talk about growing in behavior (externally observable behaviors), we’re talking about acting joyous, humble, compassionate, and persevering.

Clearly, there are many, many ways to organize these attributes. This is just the way we did it, and I think it works pretty well. In future posts, I can share the detailed “mind map” that describes how we organized the attributes and dealt with “super-themes” like righteousness and wisdom.

Now, remember the second principle that describes how we grow in the three dimensions and their four components. Generally speaking, we grow in knowledge by hearing God; we grow in behavior by believing Him; and we grow in behavior by obeying Him. Therefore, we grow in our knowledge of what it means to be joyous by hearing what God has to say on joy; we grow in chracter with respect to joy by genuinely believing these truths from God; and, we grow in joyous behavior when we obey these new truths that we genuinely believe.

I have lots of examples from Scripture and from my own experience to share, and will do so over time, but for now let’s start with one from Acts. Do you remember Paul and Silas in prison (Acts 16)? They behaved in an extraordinary way. First, rather than grumbling (which I’m sure I would have been), they are singing and praying. Then, when the earthquake hits and the prison doors are busted open, they did not flee.

Now look, I’m excited by the growth God has caused in me over the past several years, but I am nowhere near this level of mature behavior. Paul and Silas were so focused on the welfare of their guard, they essentially sacrificed themselves for him…a non-Jew and a non-Christian. Why on earth would they a) be singing in prison; and b) not leave when God “obviously” was trying to set them free by way of the earthquake? In the first case, they had learned to be “content in all circumstances” (we bucketed contentment within the joy theme). In the second, they had serious compassion for the jailor and knew what “the right thing to do was” (see my previous post). Why were they so joyous and compassionate? Because they knew the promises of God and they genuinely believed them. They had already invested years into knowing God’s word and practicing the disciplines required for training themselves for just such a moment. Of course, Paul (at least) had the additional experiences of supernatural encounters with God, but these are not necessary to grow to the point Paul was. We can all get there by studying God’s word, proactively training ourselves to believe it, and them acting upon it in any circumstance.

And so my encouragement is simply this: know God’s word, believe what you know, and obey what you believe. Over time, learn a little more, believe a little more and obey a little more. Just keep moving forward and never stop.

If you need help, please raise you hand. I, and many others joining this community, are here to help you!