Oct 20, 2020
By night I went out through the Valley Gate toward the Jackal Well and the Dung Gate, examining the walls of Jerusalem, which had been broken down, and its gates, which had been destroyed by fire. (Nehemiah 2:13)
Sunday evening, our high school youth gathered for a (socially-distanced) campfire to worship and talk about Spiritual Disciplines—on this particular night: the discipline of gratitude (click or tap here to learn more about this spiritual discipline!).
We started that Spiritual Discipline conversation by recognizing that the methods of being formed in the Christian faith that we’ve long relied on, like Sunday worship, are not quite as reliable as they once were. Some might even say they’ve been broken down.
Just think of all the spiritual disciplines we practiced together in worship as a Christian community pre-COVID-19: Prayer, Scripture Reading, Giving, Confession, Gratitude, Song, Community/Fellowship, Silence, etc. This weekly practice of all these disciplines in worship forms us in the Christian life and in Christian character over the years, it really does! Worship is not only something we offer to God, it’s also one of the means through which God forms Christ in us!
But now, this central practice of Sunday worship which once carried so much of the freight of our Christian discipleship has broken down. Not completely of course. We worship, we really do. But it’s also not quite what it was. And while technology is a good stand in, some things (like the support, encouragement, and accountability of Christian community) simply cannot be digitally mediated forever.
As the practice of Sunday worship has weakened in our communal life therefore, and all these weekly reinforcements of the Spiritual Disciplines with it, so have our “defences” against our “old enemies” that Pastor Michael mentioned yesterday: namely, the world, the flesh, and the devil.
The World: we get busy and distracted with all the other pressing demands of work, school, life in a pandemic, and the ever-urgent notifications on our devices and eventually we start to slide away from worship and Christian practice—slowly. Never all at once. But, bit by bit, Sundays easily get filled with all the other things that have always been vying for our attention and adoration.
The Flesh: we sleep in on Sundays, don’t feel like doing worship, or just plumb forget to engage in worship and the other Christian practices. Discipleship is hard. Lots of other things are easier.
The Devil: as C.S. Lewis reminds us in the Screwtape Letters, there are indeed forces at work in this world that give aid to the seemingly benign churn of our fleshly lives and our world’s pressures, helping them to erode our Christian practice with the relentless force of waves that pound the shore.
Perhaps it’s time to take a silent walk with God to go out and “examine the defences,” as Nehemiah did.
Are the “walls” of Christian habit and discipline broken down in your life? Have the gates to your heart and mind that put a conscious check on what gets in and what comes out been burned up?
The restoration of our spiritual practices starts at just that same place that Nehemiah started his restoration of Jerusalem’s defences. First, we have to take honest stock of where we’re at, what we’ve lost, and what we’re up against.
Take time to examine just those things in your life today. What spiritual habits and practices have been lost or broken down in your life since the beginning of this pandemic? Take stock, and bring it to God in prayer.