day 24- making the unnatural natural

How do you move from a life of radical ruin to a life of radical goodness? You have to get off the throne of your life where you are the ruler and god, and allow Jesus to take his rightful place on the throne. You need to transform all five parts of heart, mind, body, social life, and soul.

That should be easy, right? Just get a little more focused? Just try harder? Actually, you can’t change using the direct approach at all. Either you won’t think you are capable of changing, or your instinct will be you don’t need to change. Self-worship is a powerful force. Everything that makes you, “you,” will scream out, “No!”

We need to take a different approach. Just like in athletics and the arts we need to practice. We need to take a disciplined approach. There are age-old spiritual practices that have been effective for those who have become more like Jesus over the centuries. These “spiritual disciplines,” as they are called, take what is unnatural, self-denial, and make it natural. We address ourselves indirectly, because the direct way will fail. The devil and our own sinful selves’ gang up on us to convince us that there is no way this denial is possible or necessary.

Spiritual disciplines like silence and solitude, prayer, Bible reading, study, journaling, practicing simplicity, worship, and the like, make it possible to become more and more like Jesus. This indirect approach to transformation distracts our natural tendencies to rule in our own lives. Let me give you one example. You are experiencing one of the disciplines that I practice right now.

By reading this, I hope I am being helpful to you. Yet, I’ll let you in on a little secret. This is one of my key spiritual disciplines. I study and think about what I am studying and pass that on to you in a form of journaling, the blog. This has been a good discipline for me and I am honored to be connecting with you.

Consider this: If Jesus is God, why did he practice spiritual disciplines?