Today we are going to talk through the spiritual disciplines.

WHY?
If you are here or if you are watching online, it means that somewhere deep inside of you, you want to get closer to God. And while your relationship with God is not a program or set of procedures, but a program and a set of procedures will help make the relationship better and grow.

Spiritual disciplines are simply tools to help your relationship with God grow.

Remember, your task here is not to become perfect, but to develop your relationship with God. The goal in the gym is not to become a giant muscle, but to be healthy. The goal in your relationship with God is to become who he made you to be.

Spiritual disciples use your doing to help with who you are becoming.

So I want to tell you at the start of the message today that if you have reached a point in your relationship with God where things seem stale, stagnant, or getting worse, embracing the spiritual disciplines can help get you back on track.

Why these specific disciplines?
I’m going to share a list of the spiritual disciplines today, but I want you to understand why these specific ones are deemed spiritual disciplines. I am sure you might want to add a few. Sleep. That might be one for some of you. What I am sharing now is from Don Whitney, author of Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life.

First, the Bible prescribes both personal and interpersonal spiritual disciplines. There are those spiritual disciplines that we practice alone and those that we practice with other Christians. So, for example, we are to pray alone. That is a personal spiritual discipline. We are also to pray with the church. That is an interpersonal or congregational spiritual discipline.

A second characteristic of spiritual disciplines is that they are activities; they are not attitudes. Disciplines are practices. Spiritual disciplines are things you do. They are not character qualities. They are not graces. They are not the fruit of the Spirit. They are things you do. the goal of practicing any given discipline is not about doing as much as it is about being: being like Jesus, being with Jesus. But the biblical way to grow in being more like Jesus is through the rightly motivated doing of the biblical, spiritual disciplines.

A third descriptor of the spiritual disciplines is that these are practices taught or modeled in the Bible. The reason that is important is otherwise we leave ourselves open to calling anything we want a spiritual discipline. This mindset could tempt someone to say, “Maybe meditation on Scripture works for you, but gardening does just as much for my soul as the Bible does for yours.” Virtually anything being a spiritual discipline is one problem. The other problem is that it leaves it to us to determine what will be best for our spiritual health and maturity rather than accepting those things God has revealed in Scripture as the means of experiencing God and growing in Christlikeness.

A fourth characteristic of spiritual disciplines is that those found in Scripture are sufficient for knowing and experiencing God and for growing in Christlikeness. We are told in the famous verses 2 Timothy 3:16–17 that “all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” — including the good work of pursuing the purpose of godliness, the good work of growing in Christlikeness.

A fifth description of spiritual disciplines is that they are derived from the gospel, not divorced from the gospel. Rightly practiced, the spiritual disciplines take us deeper into the glories of the gospel of Jesus Christ, not away from it as though we have moved on to some advanced level of Christianity.

The last characteristic of the spiritual disciplines is that they are means and not ends. The end — that is, the purpose of practicing the disciplines is godliness — is to “discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7 NASB). And so we are not godly just because we practice the spiritual disciplines. That was the great error of the Pharisees. They felt by doing these things they were godly. No, they are means to godliness. Rightly motivated, they are the means to godliness.

I know sometimes we hear teaching like this and it can seem very programmed. Sometimes people see messages like this as not being very spiritual. We’ve steered away from liturgy because it became so stiff, but in that response, we’ve eliminated the power that comes from liturgy trying to “catch a feeling.”

Reminder: Christianity is not a feelings based experience, but a faith based one.

I know those “sound byte driven, hyped up” moments in a message can get us all pumped up, but so many people have had “spiritual experiences” that got them all excited on a Sunday morning, but because they have no foundation for how to maintain their relationship with God, the excitement fizzles out, and the result is either they walk away thinking it was just a moment and nothing more, or else they become junkies for spiritual highs, bouncing from moment to moment trying to maintain the high. Even then, most people don’t realize that the collective power in those corporate moments are not just the result of “two or three are gathering together,” but the result of spiritually mature Christians engaging in authentic relationship with God throughout the week that create that atmosphere for the Holy Spirit to engage the church body in these corporate, heightened moments.

It is not healthy to live 25/7 in the lows, but it isn’t healthy to live 24/7 in the highs, either. You need BALANCE in your life.

When you are not using spiritual disciplines to create that balance and healthy flow in your relationship with God, you experience roller coaster Christianity, bouncing constantly between those high and low moments.
That is not God’s design for a relationship with him.

I am convinced that if you will embrace the power of the spiritual disciplines I’m about to share, you are going to find you have more growth and depth in your relationship with God than in random highs in corporate moments.
You’ll find you stop chasing feelings driven moments and start experiencing faith driven relationship.

What are the Spiritual Disciplines?
First, if you want to dive deeper into the spiritual disciplines, I highly recommend: Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard Foster

The List in 3 parts:
Inward: Meditation, Prayer, Fasting, Study
Outward: Simplicity, Solitude, Submission, Service
Corporate: Confession, Worship, Guidance, Celebration

Inner Disciplines
Meditation
This is listening to God's word, reflecting on God's work, rehearsing God's deeds, ruminating on God's law, and things like this. In each case, the point is changed behavior as a result of our encounter with the living God.

This is you simply being still and quiet and allowing your mind to dwell on the things of God. The result of this action is a heightened ability to hear God.

Would you like to hear God more clearly?
Christian meditation, very simply, is the ability to hear God's voice and obey his word. If you would prefer more complicated things, I'm sorry! Christian meditation involves no hidden mysteries, no secret mantras, no mental gymnastics, no esoteric flights into the cosmic consciousness.

The truth of the matter is that the great God of the universe, the creator of all things, simply desires are fellowship. One of the best ways to entertain his fellowship is through the process of meditation.

Here are some hints on how:
Meditate on scripture.
Open up your YouVersion app and use the verse of the day, or just flip your Bible open to a verse, then read it, and then sit quietly and allow the Holy Spirit to show you the power behind that verse.

Meditate on what God has done in your life.
As you begin to recollect all that God has done, it allows you the opportunity to meditate on his faithfulness and goodness.

Meditate on what God has created.
The creators DNA is evident in the creator’s creation. Yes, you can spend time in nature and experience the beauty of a relationship with the Lord.
I know some of you are going to say, "See, the preacher said I can go fishing."

Meditation is not a single act, nor can it be completed the way that one might complete a project. It is a way of life.

Let’s add Solitude here.
There fear of being alone draws us to crowds.
But God promises Deuteronomy 31:8
It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.

Solitude is not being alone. In fact, Jesus calls us from loneliness into solitude. Multiple times, Jesus told the disciples to get away from people and practice solitude. We practice this by allowing ourselves to escape the noise of the world into a quiet, still place where we aren’t talking or being talked to, but in silence.

The reason I am tying this in with meditation is because it often takes moments of solitude before you are able to meditate.

How can we experience solitude?
In quiet moments like the 30 minutes before everyone in your house wakes up. In the 5 minutes you could spend sitting in your car once you drive up to the house. And yes, in intentional solitude moments where you are simply listening to the Father.

Prayer
The biggest misconception about prayer is that it is for God. That's false. Prayer is to change and transform us. Prayer is the central avenue by which God changes us into who he wants us to be.

James 4:3.
You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

To ask, rightly involves transforming your passions. In real prayer, we begin to think God's thoughts after him, to desire the things that he desires, to love the things that he loves, to will the things that he will. Prayer helps us to adjust our viewpoint to begin seeing things from his viewpoint.

One thing that can be difficult about prayer is that if God is in control of everything, and if the universe is already set and things cannot be changed, what's the point of prayer? Remember, prayer is not about changing God, it's about changing us. God may not answer your prayer in the way you think he should, but in the process, he changes your perspective, and typically perspective changes, they change everything.

So how do we pray?
Real prayer is something that we learn. Even the disciples asked Jesus in Luke 11:1
Teach us to pray.

These men had prayed their entire lives, so why did they need to learn a new way to pray? There was something about the quality and quantity of Jesus, praying that caused them to see how little they knew about prayer.
If they're praying was to make any difference on the human scene, they had to learn how to pray better.

Knowing that prayer involves a learning process is freeing. You are free to question, to experiment, even to fail, because even in failure, you are learning. You cannot make prayer complicated. At the end of the day it is just you communicating with God like you would communicate with a friend.

Prayer also involves communication from you, but also listening as well.
Pray for your family. Pray for your friends. Pray even for your enemies! But please don't forget to pray for yourself. It is not arrogant to pray for yourself. Anybody who teaches that is teaching false humility.

But as you pray, be sure you are giving God the opportunity to respond.
He might say something audible. He might put a Bible verse in your heart. He might have some random person walk up to you and say the very words that you were praying God would say to you.
Don't get so wrapped up in the process that you don't do the action.

Fasting
If you believe God is leading, you too fast, I can assure you of this: missing one mill a day for the next three days is not going to kill you. Even if you didn't eat a single thing for those three days, it's not going to kill you.

Because we live in a culture that emphasizes over indulgence, fasting can be an offputting idea leading us to one big question: why in the world would we fast?

Throughout scripture fasting refers to abstaining from food for spiritual purposes. What is meant is that we intentionally choose not to eat so that we can devote ourselves to other disciplines like prayer. Rather than taking that 30 minutes for lunch, you take 30 minutes to pray.

When we look in the scripture, we see people like Moses, David, Elijah, Esther, Daniel, Anna, Paul, even Jesus Christ engaged in fasting. They weren't doing it just to spend more time in prayer, and they definitely weren't doing it as a part of their diet.

Fasting is God-centered and God-initiated.
God uses fasting to reveal things that control us, to remind us that everything comes from him, to give us a tangible example of denying our flesh.

Study
Many Christians remain in bondage to fears and anxieties simply because they do not avail themselves of the discipline of study. They might come to church every Sunday, might fulfill their religious duties, so they are not changed. The reason is because while they have engaged in various other disciplines, perhaps, they've been neglected to effectively study God's Word.

John 8:32
You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Too often we fight against the enemy or situations in our lives with happy thoughts and positive mantras rather than using the word of God. Jesus rebuffed the enemy with the written word. If Jesus did so, we should do so.
But there is a catch: you cannot fight with a weapon that you are not familiar with.

The way we study the Bible is the way we study anything else. There are four steps: repetition, concentration, reflection, and humility. Even from kindergarten, we understand the power of repetition, so the more a Bible verse is before us, the easier it is to remember. We have to focus, to concentrate on that verse, perhaps using meditation. Once we are focusing, we can engage that verse through reflection where simple knowledge becomes comprehension. Finally, for the system to work, it requires we are humble enough to submit to the system, what the verse says do.

Studying the Word does not mean writing a paper on a verse a week, but it is important that if you are going to understand a verse, diving into the context, like who wrote it, to whom, in what society, and finally for what purpose. Exegesis is what we’re after, which is letting the Word say what it says. Eisegesis is when we make the Word say what we want it to say. Poor study is how we get the latter.

The key to studying the Word is not to read a bunch of it, but to experience personally what we read. This is how we are changed and how we learn to use the Word effectively.

Outward Disciplines:
Simplicity
Notorious BIG fea. Kelly Price
I don't know what they want from me, It's like the more money we come across, the more problems we see Mo Money Mo Problems.

How many of you know that complexity equals issues?
Life is very complex for me personally right now. There are a lot of moving parts. But often I see videos online of high schools from the 80 and 90s, or “Remember When” clips, and I genuinely get sad. I’ve often said, “Life was so much simpler back then.”

As we age, things do get more complex, however simplicity really is a spiritual discipline that nets spiritual results.

Luke 12:15
Take care and beware of all covetousness; for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

Jesus was very clear with the rich young ruler in Matthew chapter 19 about him detaching from his possessions, so he can more effectively follow Jesus.

Remember, God does not care what you have, but he does care what has you. So if the things that you have acquired, or if life in general right now seems to be eternally complex, perhaps practicing simplicity is something you need to do.

The best way I can tell you to act up on this is simply to take time and look at every area of your life to determine where you can simplify and become more efficient. The reason you do this is twofold: first, to be more effective, and second, to create space so that you can accomplish your role in moving God's kingdom.

Submission
Every discipline has its corresponding freedom. What freedom corresponds to submission? It is the ability to lay down the terrible burden of always needing to get our own way. You might be surprised to find that most things in our lives are not nearly as important as we think they are and our lives will not come to an end if this or that does not happen.

“The biblical teaching on submission focuses primarily on the spirit with which we view other people. Scripture does not attempt to set forth a series of hierarchical relationships, but to communicate to us an inter-attitude of mutual ordination. In submission, we are at last free to value other people. Their dreams and plans become important too, as important as our own. For the first time, it allows us to love people unconditionally. We have given up the right to demand that they return our love. No longer do we feel that we have to be treated in a certain way. We rejoice in other peoples’ successes, we feel genuine sorrow in their failures.”

Jesus said in Mark 8:34.
If any men would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.

We are much more comfortable with words like self fulfillment than we are with words like self denial. But Jesus calls us to self denial without self hatred. Self denial is simply a way of coming to understanding that we do not have to have our own way. Our happiness is not dependent upon us getting what we want.

Submission is not, then just men submitting to Christ and women submitting to her husband, but the mutual submission between brothers and sisters in Christ for the purpose of benefitting each other.

Philippians 2:3-4
Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

This is so important, that we learn to deny ourselves and consider others because it not only squashes selfishness and pride in us, but it also moves us more effectively towards service.

Service
Just as Jesus was about to wash the disciples feet, the disciples were arguing about who would be the greatest.

Luke 22:26-27
26 …let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. 27 For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves.

Jesus then washed the disciples feet. You can’t effectively serve without being willing to submit. Submitting might be the cross, but service is the towel. The risen Christ beckons us to both submission and service.

How can you use your gifts, talents, and abilities, to serve the Kingdom?
This is a spiritual discipline that will help you become who God created you to be.

Corporate Disciplines:
Guidance
Believe it or not, you need people. You need this congregation. This is why watching online is great when you can’t be here but it is never a substitute for being in the room, meeting face to face.

Hebrews 10:24-25
24 And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, 25 not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.

Meeting together is not so the attendance data looks good. It is because you need encouragement, love, and yes, even guidance! One of the most incredible things about Men’s Group every Tuesday is how men feel comfortable enough to share what is going on in their world, their struggles, and then the group begins to feed godly counsel and advice to them, and the result, if they follow through, is a life changed for the better.

You were not made to live life alone, and if you feel like you don’t have that encouragement, support, and guidance, perhaps it is in a lack of the spiritual discipline of guidance.

Not everyone needs to give you advice, but you need a group of godly people who love you love God know you know God and have your best interest in mind to help you, lead you, and guide you.

Confession
Another huge role of the congregation is in confession. Not only do we confess things like Jesus is Lord, but we get to confess to each other when we are wrong.

Now why would anyone want to cough up what they did wrong to another person? You trying to invite judgment!?!? If you judge, you have just forgotten what God has done for you.

You confess your sins to God for forgiveness, but you confess your sins to each other for healing. (James 5:15) How?

I can’t help you if I don’t know what you are going through. But if you will let me behind the curtain, I can help you stay clear of that which led you to sin in the first place, and help bring healing to you.

Confession is never about uncovering someone, but covering someone.
We should all be quick to help someone else be restored to a right relationship with God.

Why should you confess to each other?

Galatians 6:1-2
1 Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. 2 Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.

And when our heart is clear before the Lord, it is so easy to do the last two:

Worship and Celebration
We can whine and complain, but can we worship and celebrate?
Philippians 4:4
Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice.

So what is worship and celebration? It's what happens when, because you run face to face with God's goodness, you simply cannot contain the joy in your heart because of it. Worship is a natural byproduct of experiencing God. Celebration is simply the soul’s response.

The best way to get into worship and celebration is not a great song, but a grateful heart.

What are 5 things God has done for you lately?
This is the best way to let worship and celebration begin in you.

Lot of info today. 12 Disciplines
Inward: Meditation, Prayer, Fasting, Study
Outward: Simplicity, Solitude, Submission, Service
Corporate: Confession, Worship, Guidance, Celebration

Three questions:
Which ones are you good at doing?
Which ones do you struggle with?
How can you take your next step with engaging in these disciplines more effectively?

Maybe it is diving into a DGroup.
Maybe it is being more proactive about your time with Jesus.

Whatever it is, the relationship with Jesus you’ve always wanted is on the other side.

If you’ve never said yes to Jesus, it is time to start that relationship today.

Let’s pray. Help our hearts yearn for you more. Help us as we embrace these disciplines.

What is the Holy Spirit saying to you through this message?

How does he want you to respond?