Are Spiritual Disciplines Biblical? | Theocast

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Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, we are discussing spiritual disciplines. Justin and I have a conversation about the history of where they come from, how they are actually counter -Reformation theology, and then we look at how we should be understanding the way in which we grow and mature in Christ.

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And in the members podcast, we have a lively conversation about how spiritual disciplines tend to be individualized and could possibly hurt the unity of the

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Church. We hope you enjoy. Hey guys, as a quick reminder, if you'd like to join Theocast in helping other people find rest in Christ, a simple way of doing that is simply by leaving us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

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To learn more about how to support Theocast, simply visit theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Your hosts today are

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Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. And I am

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Jon Moffitt. I'm pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, which is just south of Nashville.

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And with great joy, we are celebrating a special podcast today because it is none other than JP's birthday.

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Birth of his day. So true. So true. Happy birthday, Justin. For those of you that don't know, we recorded it way in advance.

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So that is November the 11th is his birthday. Happy birthday, Justin. Thanks, bro. Here I am working on my birthday behind the microphone at Theocast.

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No place I'd rather be. I had to figure it out myself. It's true, but I'm not a big,

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I don't know. I'm not a big like birthday, holiday, whatever kind of guy. I'm not even a big,

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I don't know. I'm very extroverted, so it's not like I'm ever upset about a party. I'm not huge on surprises, but yeah, like good friends, good food, good drink.

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That's about all I would ask for when it comes to like birthday or any other time, really.

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Yeah, so I don't really publicize it. I don't make a big deal about it. Like, hey, you know, Jon, you should know today's my birthday. But yeah, we're here on a

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Wednesday morning recording Theocast, which is normal for us. There you go. It's what we do.

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I look forward to Wednesday mornings. It's midweek. Yeah. Midweek. We got a lot to talk about because typically we've already gone through the weekend and have had a day or two of work.

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So true. Yeah. A day or two of work, kind of back in the saddle. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

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No, you're right. So you're right. So it's raining today. The Lord didn't ask me about that.

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I would prefer sunshine. But anyway, I know he sends the rain on the just and the unjust alike, and he waters the earth.

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I get all that. And it's totally cool. You need to show some discipline and get this podcast moving.

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Oh, it's so true. We need to be more disciplined in how we navigate these early moments of our podcasts.

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That's right. Yeah. Get her going. So true. So today's topic is a good one.

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It's a topic that we get a lot of questions about here at Theocast, and it is something that is on the front burner for many evangelicals in our current moment, and that is the topic of spiritual disciplines.

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The way that, and we're just going to go ahead and come in, not hot. We want to come in pastoral, but we don't want to bury the lead either.

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The way that spiritual disciplines are framed and talked about and presented in our modern context, we would contend, is not directly from the

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Scripture. We don't get it directly from the Bible, directly from the New Testament, the way that spiritual disciplines are framed and talked about in our context.

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I think many people would be surprised to know where spiritual disciplines, in particular the movement of spiritual disciplines that has been on the research in the last 30 or 40 years, where this comes from, where it finds its roots historically.

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So we're going to talk about that a little bit today. But the question that I think I might even tee it up with too, just to maybe prime the pump for the listener, is how did we find ourselves here, where depending on who you ask about spiritual disciplines and what they are, you might be given a list of things that could contain dozens of items, even hundreds of items, depending on who you talk to.

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Those lists might contain anything from Bible reading to gardening, and how did we get here, and how should we think through these matters of spiritual disciplines and their place in the

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Christian life, and even the question of how do we grow in Christ?

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How do we grow in maturity, and in grace, and knowledge, and understanding? How is it that we're sustained in the

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Christian life is underneath this conversation as well. We hope to talk to all of those things, but to us, it makes all kinds of sense to begin with history, to begin with a brief overview about where these things come from, and some of the ebbs and flows and movements through the history of the church that matter for this conversation.

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Our brother, John Moffitt, faithful man that he is, has done a lot of work on this topic.

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He's written on this. John, you've given lectures on this, so you've got a lot of familiarity with this stuff.

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What I want to do is let you talk to us for a few minutes about the history of spiritual disciplines and this movement, and what

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I may do is just interject briefly as you're guiding us through the portals of history, and then what we'll do is move on from that historical overview to unpack this topic in terms of life in the church, the

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Christian life, our pastoral concerns, and stuff like that. John, teach us, man.

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Inform us as to the history of spiritual disciplines. Early on in my ministry, when

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I was working with college students, I would once a year let them pick whatever we wanted to study.

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They said, there's a lot of confusion on spiritual disciplines. Can we do a series on that?

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I started doing research on it, and I got every book I had in my library and every book that was in all the different pastors' libraries, which

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I had a large stack of books, and I started going through them. As I went through them, I realized these are not rooted in confessional, historic, biblical theology.

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I couldn't figure out where the concept of spiritual disciplines was coming from, and so I then started to read the most popular books that are out there, and footnotes is where all the key is, right?

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So I started looking at all the footnotes. Because you're looking at who these guys are citing, what are their sources, and where are these ideas coming from?

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Yep. So I went to the sources. So read the footnotes. That's right. And as I'm reading these footnotes,

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I'm recognizing some common names and threads, and so I started to research those names.

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And what I was very disappointed to find was that a lot of what was being quoted were not

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Reformation writers, but actually Roman Catholic writers.

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And so I started to do research and back up even farther, and this is kind of where the research led me, is that during the early stages of the

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Reformation, there was what's called the Counter -Reformation in the Catholic, or it's also known as the

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Catholic Revival or the Catholic Reformation, and this is a direct response. It's most famously known in the

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Council of Trent and the things that were written. So what you're talking about is a period of time, John, from what, like the 1520s through the middle to latter part of the 16th century?

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That's right. Yeah, that's right. And during this time, there was a very famous captain or basically warrior named

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Ignatius, and he is from Loyola, so it's called Ignatius of Loyola, and he ended up presenting to the

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Roman Catholic Church his concerns with the way in which the church was moving away from its spirituality.

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It had been digressing in its holiness, and so he had been leading soldiers for years, and so he's like, listen,

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I want to encourage the church to move back into this spiritual reformation, and he was basically saying what the reformers are saying is justification is by faith alone, and that's enough.

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He's saying, no, it's not enough. There's more that is required, which was the whole Council of Trent. So he wrote a book in 1522 and was republished again in 1524 called

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The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.

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And in this, he laid out basically this monastic movement where there were all of these different things that were absolutely required of you as a believer in order to grow as a

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Christian. And so there is a response from Luther, of course, when Luther finds out about this contra -reformation, and Luther's response later on in life is this, yet all these seemingly holy actions of devotion, which the wit and wisdom are nothing else but works of the flesh.

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Of course, that's really a direct quote from Colossians chapter two at the end of the chapter.

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All manner of religion where people serve God without His word and command is simply idolatry, and the more holy and spiritual such a religion seems, the more hurtful and venomous it is, for it leads people away from the faith of Christ and makes them rely and depend upon their own strength, works, and righteousness.

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If I may interject briefly, I think that the way I understand Luther when he says if you're doing anything devotionally or as a matter of discipline without the word and command of God, I think what he's meaning is if you're doing something that is not explicitly and directly commanded in Scripture, then what you are doing, you can call it something, but it is not an exercise in godliness.

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That's right. Then, of course, he's driving at this actually pulls people away from faith in Christ, which is a huge issue, and it actually places their trust and confidence elsewhere.

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That's right. So he says at the end of it, in like manner, all kinds of orders of monks, fasts, prayers, and hairy shirts are mere works of the flesh.

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Early on, this is the one who started this movement and used spiritual formation or even used the concept of spiritual discipline.

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During my research, I wanted to see how did we get from Ignatius to today?

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I don't know if you know this, but almost every book in history has almost been digitized.

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It's insane. So you can go on and do a Google search in the Google archives, and you can put years in there of what your search frame is.

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I put in from 1970, which I'll explain that date in a minute, all the way back as far as it'll go, so 1500s.

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There's like five books that show up on spiritual disciplines or spiritual formation,

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Ignatius being one of them. When you put in 1977 and forward, the pages are endless.

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It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books on spiritual disciplines. So the question is, what happened, right?

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What happened between Ignatius and the 1970s? What happened was the writings of Richard Foster.

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So Richard Foster was a Quaker, and he wrote one of the most famous books in history.

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At one point, it was in every Christian college. Every Christian college had a spiritual formation class after the writing of this book in 1977.

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He wrote Celebration of Discipline, The Path to Spiritual Growth was the name of the book.

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Christianity Today gave a review on this, and it basically said that the recent embrace and the way they quoted it is medieval

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Roman Catholic mysticism, and it's true because what

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Richard Foster ends up doing is quoting men like Ignatius, using them as references of saying, this is how the

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Christian life should be. So he's pulling Roman Catholic theology and adjusting it for Protestant purposes.

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And so before Richard Foster does this, the concept of spiritual disciplines was not commonly used or known in the spiritual sphere around the world.

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So those who are advocating for spiritual disciplines in the modern era, like you said, beginning in the late 1970s to now, so in the last 40 years, and in particular, some of the figures that really got this movement going,

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Richard Foster being one of them, they are looking back historically to not

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Protestant Reformation theologians and theology, but they are looking back to Roman Catholic medieval theologians and practices of that theology.

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And listeners of Theocast, many will be familiar with medieval theology and the

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Roman Catholic Church of that time and how it operated and functioned. But a couple of things are worth mentioning again.

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You've mentioned mysticism, where there is this mystical understanding of how we are grown or matured in the

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Christian life. It also too is this understanding that God's grace works apart from faith and all that, where we just kind of are there and get it, and something magical essentially almost happens as a result of that.

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But then also, there is a notion that we cooperate with the grace of God. It's a very synergistic, two people working,

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God does his part, we do our part. And so thereby, our spiritual state, our spiritual condition, our spiritual growth and maturation very much hinge upon how we're doing and how we're applying ourselves, how disciplined we are.

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And it's important that we understand that a part of that schema, it only would naturally flow out of it, is the monastic movement and monkery, which was an ascetic existence where you deprived yourself of all kinds of things.

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It's very much a Colossians 2, disciplining yourself according to the flesh, really, and these things have the appearance of godliness, but according to the

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Apostle Paul, are of no value in combating the flesh or training oneself for godliness.

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So all of those things are related to the medieval church, and it's very telling. Again, we're not trying to say that everyone who's talking about spiritual disciplines is aiming to draw upon Roman Catholic theology on purpose, but we're just saying it's important that we understand that many of the ideas and the citations come from this era and from this tradition.

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Yeah, and this is where they're citing their sources saying, these men wrote this, we should listen to what they say.

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For instance, the man that was really also influenced by Foster was another famous book that came out in the 80s by Dallas Willard.

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He wrote The Spirit of the Disciplines, Understanding How God Changes Lives. And in the introduction, he says this, today, for the first time in our history as a nation, we are being presented with a characteristic range of human behaviors such as fasting, meditation, simple living, and submission to spiritual overseers.

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Listen to this, in an attractive light. The reason he has to write that is because up to this point before Foster, these were not attractive because we saw them as contra -biblical.

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We did not see them as helpful. Even in his book, he says, he makes this claim that the ordinary means, he even uses this word, such as Bible study, prayer, fellowship, are inadequate and have failed and left most

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Christians in failing in their spiritual growth. So, he is saying this is going to fix the failure of the

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Christian growth. Now, the one that follows him and Don Whitney would be probably the most recent famous writer in his book,

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Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, became almost as popular as Richard Foster, and Don Whitney often will quote

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Willard and Foster in his book. This is where Justin and I are going to take, because this is probably the book that has the most influence today.

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Willard and Foster aren't really read anymore. Certainly amongst Calvinistic evangelicals, it does.

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In the world that we have been involved in, Don Whitney's book is still promoted heavily.

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This is what he says in his introduction. You can get his book. You can see what I'm reading here. He says this,

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I will maintain that the only road to Christian maturity and godliness passes through the practice of spiritual disciplines.

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Okay, well, Justin and I aren't going to take any qualms with that because he hasn't really clarified what he means yet, so let's see, maybe he's rephrasing means of grace.

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This book, this is further quoting the same page. This book examines the spiritual disciplines of Bible intake, prayer, worship, evangelism, service, stewardship, fasting, silence and solitude, journaling, and learning.

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This is by no means, however, an exhaustive list of disciplines of Christian living.

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A survey of other literature of this subject would reveal that confession, accountability, simplicity, submission, spiritual direction, celebration, affirmation, sacrifice, watching.

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I don't know what that means. And more is qualified as spiritual discipline.

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So he is saying, I maintain the only road to Christian maturity and godliness passes through practicing these lists.

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And he says there's even a larger list. So this is what we're referencing. When we say spiritual disciplines, there are other ways in which it has been described.

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We're referencing what has been properly written and what has kind of been spreading.

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And so when someone says to me, John, do you think spiritual disciplines are biblical?

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I would have to say, according to what Whitney Willard Foster and Nixius of Loyola wrote, no, those are not grounded on spiritual concepts.

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Now, do they say things that are biblical inside those books? Of course, praying is biblical, reading your

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Bible, evangelism. All of those are absolutely biblical things, but the confusion and the muddying of the water is when we infuse bad doctrine into these.

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So I'm going to say a few things at a high level that I know we're going to go on to talk a lot more about.

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Things that we understand to be clearly biblical are what have historically been known as the ordinary means of grace in the context of the gathered church, which we're going to discuss.

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In addition, rather than using the phrase spiritual disciplines, one of the ways that John and I would prefer we speak is to encourage the saints to pursue good works, and we want to define what those are biblically, and to pursue obedience, but to act like every act of obedience or every doing of a good work is a discipline is actually an unhelpful and unclear way to speak, so we're trying to clarify some things and ask some legitimate questions.

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With all due respect, I don't know what a number of those things are that Don Whitney mentions in the intro to his book.

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Some of the things that he articulates, I would completely agree with when it comes to the word and prayer and even worship.

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I understand him to be meaning something happening in the gathered church context there. I don't know if he means that to be synonymous with singing like many people do, or if he means that to be corporate worship wholesale.

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I agree with a number of those things, but then he also says some things like journaling and watching and sacrifice.

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I'm just kind of like, I don't know how to understand that as a spiritual discipline in my life, and I think

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I would take some issue based on how he's defining it, I would take some issue with his language of the only way to Christian maturity passes through this.

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If you're going to make a statement like that that is so definitive and absolute, then

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I would contend that we need to be saying something that is practically a quote from Scripture, that is absolutely grounded in the

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New Testament, a command that's explicitly given. You need to be doing these things.

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Give careful attention to these things. Don't neglect these things. I think as we're going to see, the

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New Testament speaks those ways about corporate realities in the gathered church, not neglecting assembling together, giving attention to the preaching of the word, the reading of the word, to sing together, to pray together about everything.

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Anyway, I could go on. We're excited to announce that we have a new free ebook available at our website called

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Faith vs. Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest, and we the hosts put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

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You can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. If you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us.

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You can do that by joining our Total Access membership, that's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry.

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You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

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I'm going to read you a quote later on in the book, which we're not going to deal with today, and I will mention this now.

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I have a three -part article series I've written that we will link to here, and then I also did a full -on lecture on this.

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It's called Reformed Spirituality. You can get this on our website. We'll link all of this, so you can download that and listen to that if you want all of the quotes.

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Later on, he ends up quoting Hebrews where he says, without gallantness, no one will see the

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Lord. He makes the connection between doing these disciplines and seeing the

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Lord. He's saying, look, I'm just quoting scripture here, which is a very dangerous thing to say because somehow simplicity and accountability, which

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I don't even know what those mean, simplicity, what does it even mean by that? So, without the discipline of simplicity,

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I won't see the Lord. I know I'm being a little bit punchy here, but the point I'm getting to is that we are placing things upon scripture that scripture itself never says.

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So, here's a helpful quote from Hebrews 12. It's about the way that the Lord, in His grace and sovereignty, disciplines us so that we might share in His holiness.

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That's right. I know. We have done one, and we'll link that podcast as well on what does that passage mean.

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So, make sure we put that in the notes. This is a quote by Carson I found helpful. He says this, it is not helpful to list assorted

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Christian responsibilities. We agree. There are Christian responsibilities. Amen.

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It is duties and label them spiritual disciplines.

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It seems to be the reasoning behind the theology that smuggles in, say, creation care and almsgiving.

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But by the same logic, if out of Christian kindness, you give a back rub to an old lady with a stiff neck and a sore shoulder, then back rubbing becomes a spiritual discipline.

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By such logic, any Christian obedience is a spiritual discipline. I couldn't agree with him more.

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That's Don Carson. If you read different books, in my lectures

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I mentioned this, there are some people who have over 250 spiritual disciplines that you can do in order to gain godliness and to gain maturity and spirituality.

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So, the problem I have with this is two things. Sure, there are certain things you can do that are godly acts, meaning that they reflect the nature of God, but they're not guaranteed to bring about maturity.

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What concerns me is that nowhere in scripture, other than plain passages like Ephesians 4, say, do this and it will cause maturity.

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Paul flat out says that when the body functions properly, it builds itself up in love.

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Nowhere else in scripture does it say you will be built up into Christ by doing simplicity or quietism or journaling.

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I'm sort of restraining myself from wanting to jump on that Ephesians 4 train because what's the context?

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What's the understanding there? It is completely a corporate reality. It is the body of Christ, corporate, and all of the gifts that Christ gives to the church, which includes apostles, prophets, evangelists, teachers, pastors, all of those, and then the whole body.

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If we think about Paul's writing elsewhere about how every member has its function, the whole body functions under God by the ministry of God's Spirit to build itself up in love unto maturity in Christ Jesus.

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This is why we say all the time, and I want to be really clear because I say this in my own church all the time, and I know we say it here,

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John. I know you speak this way at Grace Reformed. God has promised to uniquely bless corporate realities in a way that he has not promised to bless something you do in private, and that does not mean that what you do in private is irrelevant.

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It's not what we're saying, but it does mean that the most important thing by miles when it comes to the

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Christian life and our growth and sustenance is that we gather with the saints to partake of the means that God has promised to bless and to use for our growth and maturation and our sustenance.

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You're exactly right. That language of Paul in Ephesians 4 is maybe the most obvious place where the apostle speaks, do these things and this will happen, but the

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New Testament is full of that at least at the level of implication with all of the corporate exhortations that are given in terms of how we live together and things that need to be given attention, the preaching and reading of Scripture, the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to one another, and even the exhortations to prayer are corporate exhortations to be praying about everything as a body of Christ.

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Certainly we pray individually, but it's really important. The individual prayer, according to Jesus, is a prayer of dependence.

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We are depending upon God for our ongoing sustenance. It is not an outworking of faith.

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If you turn prayer into a discipline, here's my problem with it. I'm not saying if someone disciplines themselves to pray at a certain time every day is different than turning prayer into a discipline.

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This is why, because you can equate, if I pray this much, I will mature that much, and it doesn't work that way.

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Prayer is about you depending upon God. It is the greatest acknowledgement of our weakness because we have to reach out to God in everything, in our meals, in our fears, in our joys.

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We always give praise, honor, and reflection to God because we depend on him for so much.

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Let me put it this way. The thing that I want people to hear is that the

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Reformers said the means by which God matures you and sustains you is through the corporate preaching and teaching of his word, the

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Lord's table, baptism, and prayer. So if you're going to discipline yourself, you need to structure your life in such a way that that becomes the priority of your life.

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Discipline your time at home so that you can participate in these corporate realities.

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What bothers me is that people want to go home and do all these spiritual disciplines, and yet they are so frustrated by their life because they aren't seeing and aren't having joy and aren't seeing growth, and I'm saying you're disciplining yourself in the wrong areas.

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Yeah, brother. Gosh, I've said this many times, and I want to be so charitable because people have never been taught well.

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They've never had anybody look at them, unpack Scripture, unpack history, and help them see these things, but you hear it regularly where people talk about discipleship.

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We need discipleship and accountability. Tell me about the Bible studies that are going on.

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Tell me about these meetings that are happening. By meeting, they don't mean the corporate gathering.

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They mean men's accountability or women's accountability, and what kind of reading programs do we have?

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People talk in these terms as though this is the real marrow of the Christian life. I find it very interesting when people that are all geeked up about those things are often very quick to miss the corporate gathering because it's as though the private stuff they do by themselves or that Bible study on Wednesday night or that men's group on Thursday morning is really what matters.

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The corporate gathering on Sunday is, at best, supplemental to that. I said this to you before we recorded, and I will unashamedly say this now for everybody to hear.

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If you are going to discipline yourself, and I'm kind of saying what you just said a second ago, if you're going to discipline yourself for anything in the

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Christian life, plan your life around the corporate gathering of your local church on Sunday morning or whenever your church meets for that corporate gathering.

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Structure your life around it as much as you can so that you can be there with the saints whom you have determined that you're going to live life with.

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We, together, are submitting to the doctrine of this church. We're submitting to the pastors of this church.

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We're submitting to the discipline of this church. We, together, are gathering and assembling to sit under the word, to come to the table, to pray, and to sing.

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We're going to experience the fellowship of the saints, and that, biblically speaking, God has promised to uniquely use so that we might be matured in Christ Jesus.

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If you're going to discipline yourself for anything, please, brothers and sisters out there, discipline yourself to do that reality.

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It is the most important thing that you could do. I will tell you that godliness is part of the

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Christian life. It is obvious that it's part of the Christian life. Who would say otherwise?

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Right. But you have to understand its place and its purpose. Godliness is not to confirm or somehow maintain your relationship with God.

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That would be Roman Catholic theology right there, because they believe that one is not fully justified by faith alone, that there must be works that add to it.

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This is also part of that final justification confusion that's been going around, that we will have our works examined to determine it.

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Listen, the way in which Paul and Peter and James all use good works, and they write on this extensively, is that it is for the very purpose we are talking about.

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If the body isn't functioning properly, which requires godliness, then it can't grow, and how does the body work properly?

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It's through love and patience and kindness. This is why he says in Ephesians 4, you need to walk in a way that reflects the calling of Christ upon your life.

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What does he say? With patience and meekness and long -suffering, maintain the bond of unity in Christ.

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He's saying the unity around Christ requires godliness. I mean, we talked about this passage.

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I'll let you jump on that and then I'll go to another verse. What's that? I was going to go to 1

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Timothy 4, which is often used and confused. I'm happy to go there in 1

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Timothy 4 in terms of training yourself for godliness, in the context of that passage.

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Which we hear this, so people will say, and I know we've already heard it, and I hope people made it this far.

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Maybe we'll say it in the introduction so that people will get here. 1 Timothy 4 .7, the new American standard will actually say the word discipline.

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ESV says, train yourself for the sake of godliness, which we would say, look, we need to look at the context there.

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Is he talking about maturity so that God is pleased and we confirm our salvation?

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No, he's not talking about that kind of godliness. There's a context. So, Justin, kind of walk us through the context here.

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Justin Perdue Yeah, let me. I mean, I'm not going to go way, way, but just for the sake of time, I think we can even start in 1

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Timothy 4 .6 and make very clear what Paul is exhorting

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Timothy to, and remember that these pastoral epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, are written to those respective pastors, but they are written to congregations through those pastors, if that makes sense.

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I mean, it's not as though Paul is just writing to the pastor in a vacuum. No, he's writing to the pastor with the congregation in view.

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And so even these letters have a very corporate aspect and tone and tenor to them, so beginning in 1

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Timothy 4 and verse six, Paul writes to Timothy, if you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained, this is important, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed.

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Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather, train yourself for godliness.

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For while bodily training is some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come, and he's going to go forward and exhort

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Timothy to teach. He's going to say, teach these things that I'm talking about. Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believer as an example in speech and conduct, in love and faith and purity, until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.

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Don't neglect the gift you have. Immerse yourself in these things and practice them. Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching, because in doing this, you're going to save yourself and others.

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It's very clear that Paul is exhorting Timothy to the proclamation and the teaching of sound doctrine and the sound words of the faith, as opposed to silly myths and irreverent nonsense.

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That's the command in terms of training yourself for godliness. Well, how would one do that? It's like, well, in the context of the church, your pastors and your leaders are going to give attention to the reading and the teaching of the scripture and to give attention to the proclamation of sound doctrine and the tradition that has been handed down to us, the faith once for all delivered to the saints.

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That, Paul is contending, is going to lead us toward godliness, whereas there's all kinds of silly stuff and irreverent stuff that's talked about that's useless.

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That's right. When someone comes to me and says, well, John, do you think daily

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Bible reading or the spiritual discipline of daily Bible reading is unbiblical? I would say, if you assume the amount of time you spend in your word equates the maturity of Christianity, then

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I would say, yes, that is a confusion. But if you say, I love God's word, I want to know

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God's word, and I want to know God because I'm his son, then I'm like, bro, dig in.

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Amen. Sister, dig in. And if your time in the word is not producing patience and kindness and long -suffering and love for neighbor,

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I think you're missing the point of God's word, and those are the things that I agree with Don Carson when he says the

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Christian responsibilities, let's not relabel them. Listen, we as Christians are responsible to show kindness and patience and love to all.

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It's the response to our receiving kindness and patience, right? But do not think that the more you perform that, the more godly

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God assumes that you are. That's a dangerous comparison. I mentioned this earlier.

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It is crystal clear, and no one could ever object to this, that in the New Testament, we are encouraged to pursue good works and to pursue obedience.

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Now, there are other questions underneath those, like how do we do that? Why do we do that?

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And for whom do we do that? And for whom do we do that? And then what are those good works? Yeah. I mean, that's really another podcast for another day, but let's not relabel everything a discipline.

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Let's just encourage people toward love and good works. And then, again, if we're going to discipline ourselves for things, we need to be disciplining ourselves for the stuff that the

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New Testament is absolutely clear about in terms of the stuff that we need to be doing. To your point about the

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Bible, though, and Bible reading, I've said this before, and I'm unashamed of this too.

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You, in terms of your own personal Bible reading, I agree completely with you that in terms of the motivation matters a lot, and don't wig about your motivations.

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But if you're seeing this as like, well, I'm ticking the box for godliness, not so good, but if you're seeing this as like, no,

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I love God and I want to read his word, then amen, brother or sister. Absolutely dig in and dive headlong into it.

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And at the same time, you are going to be helped, and it's going to be much safer for you to spend a lot of time reading your

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Bible personally if you are doing that in the context of a faithful church that teaches sound doctrine, like what

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Paul is talking about in 1 Timothy 4. This is why you need the corporate gathering. There are a million reasons you need it, but we together on Sunday mornings are learning how to read and understand our

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Bibles. You need pastors, and we need the tradition of the church, the history of interpretation and the rule of faith.

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Evangelicals are notorious for just kind of going it alone when they do theology. And we just kind of write systematic theologies sort of on our own, or we go about thinking about theology by ourselves rather than doing it corporately with saints who have lived for the last 2 ,000 years.

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But this is why you need the church, so that when you go to your Bible and when you are reading it, because you're going to run up against passages where you're like,

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I'm not sure what that means, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. And instead of coming up with something wild, you've got a pastor that you can go ask, or you've been given good theology and a good framework through which to read and understand scripture, and you have a much better chance of being able to make something of it rather than having spent time looking at something and say,

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I have no idea what I just read, and thinking that somehow that is going to be profitable for you.

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So even that Bible reading is undergirded by the corporate reality of the church and the proclamation of the word.

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I want to read something that's so plain that Paul says, this is to train you.

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So we always assume personal devotional time, journalizing, all of these other things that we've kind of been told say, this is what trains you.

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Paul says, this is what trains you. He says in Ephesians chapter four, he says, and he, the

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Holy Spirit, gave the apostles, the prophets, and evangelists, and shepherds, and teachers to the church to equip the saints, so to equip them for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain the unity of faith and of the knowledge of the

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Son of God, to mature manhood to the treasure of the stature and the fullness of Christ, so that we're no longer children.

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So he's saying the path from children to adulthood or maturity, to the path of more knowledge of Christ, to effectively doing the work of ministry, where does he say it happens?

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He says it happens through those who the Holy Spirit has brought into the church to equip the saints.

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So you need to understand the priority. We're not saying Bible reading isn't helpful. It's just not the primary means by which

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God grows this church. Your spiritual disciplines aren't the way in which God grows you.

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They're necessary. It's necessary for you to live a disciplined life, meaning that you have to structure your life in such a way that you reflect love, and kindness, and mercy, and patience.

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But that's not the way God grows you. You do those things because God is growing you, and God grows you through these means, which is

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God using his church. So we reversed it. We put spiritual disciplines at the top, saying when you do these, you will then act right.

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And the discipline list is so crazy. Here's my favorite question,

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Justin, and I'm sure we've got to get into the members' podcast here. What is the most important spiritual discipline?

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I mean, if you're going to pick one, of all the lists that people offer you, I love asking this question. What's the most important one?

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One is faith in Christ. Two is then going to be, if you're talking about something that you need to do, like an action, then it's get to church on Sunday.

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Right. But if you look at people's lists, it's prayer, it's Bible reading, it's evangelism, it's tithing, there's all kinds of stuff.

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Justin Perdue Do you know what's wild, brother? I think this is just an observation that just popped into my brain, so look out.

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The thing is, I feel like a lot of people act like showing up to church is some sort of legalistic, ritualistic thing that people do that really has no value.

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I'm like, yeah, I think that in reality, the thing that often becomes very legalistic is all of these boxes that we check in terms of our personal disciplines.

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It's just ironic to me the way that we speak sometimes, because it's like we're going to turn the corporate gathering into this legalistic thing, but what

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I do in private is really a devotional act. The opposite, I think, is actually true, that you showing up to church on Sunday is something you've been commanded to do in Scripture, and this other stuff is supplemental that I think actually often becomes a yoke of slavery because we turned it into this legalistic thing where the act itself is somehow sanctifying me.

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I think we need to check our thinking, and we need to assess ourselves, according to God's word, as to how we're approaching these things and viewing them.

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Last thought before we go in. Go ahead, John. You want to jump on that? Yeah, I was going to say, I really want to unpack this in the members' podcast, and I'm sure you have some stuff too, but my biggest beef with the modern -day concept of spiritual disciplines is that it takes your rest and places it on your own efforts.

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That's pietism. It's pietism. It takes your focus off of Christ and puts it on you at the most basic level.

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Pursuing Christ in your discipline, you end up feeling good depending on how well you are in your discipline, and you end up feeling you have a lack of assurance if you are not being disciplined, and so we even tell people you're a bad

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Christian or you're a lazy Christian or you're maybe not even a Christian at all because you aren't performing these spiritual disciplines.

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I'm going to read a quote from Horatius Bonar in the members' section from his book,

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God's Way of Peace, that speaks to some of this. Yeah, and I have a lot more to say on that for sure, and I have a lot more to say on this.

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The thing that bothers me the most about spiritual disciplines is that those who pursue them the most tend to have either pride and they are very judgmental or they have no assurance because they can't seem to find rest.

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They cannot find any rest. That's right. No, it's true. A lot more

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I could say. I'm going to save it for the sake of time. Just another quick thought, and I don't really have time to unpack this fully, but just to offer it, and maybe this prompts some good thoughts for others.

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We are called in the Christian life to deny ourselves, and you said it a minute ago, that discipline absolutely is a part of the

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Christian life. There are any number of things that we need to discipline ourselves to do. Amen.

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Please do not misunderstand us to be saying that there aren't duties or responsibilities. Don't misunderstand us to be saying that you don't need to discipline yourself or deny yourself.

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We absolutely believe biblically that we need to deny ourselves and discipline ourselves, but what are those things that we need to deny, and what are those things that we need to discipline ourselves for?

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Thinking about Jesus and the apostles, we are needing to deny ourselves so that we might love and serve others.

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We deny ourselves and consider others as more important than ourselves so that we might love and serve them and be concerned for their good.

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We discipline ourselves so that we might be patient and kind and gentle and self -controlled in the ways that we interact with our brothers and sisters and with our neighbor, because they need that from us.

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We wound them and harm them when we're not those things. I think our emphasis on discipline is misplaced, and I know you agree,

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John, that we need to be concentrating our efforts in terms of self -denial and discipline in a much more corporate way with our brothers and sisters in view.

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At the same time, certainly that is in no way contradictory to the Bible's exhortations to flee from sin. It's all of that.

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So that denial of self and that theology of the cross that calls us to die to ourselves and love others is legit, and let's put some effort there in terms of our disciplines rather than in all the other areas that we tend to put it.

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Cool. Amen. Let's do it. I got something to say to that. Bring us over. All right.

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There's some confusion between me and John. No worries. So I will happily, because John said, welcome to the podcast earlier, which means that I think he's supposed to do this part.

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