How Can I Change? Practice the Spiritual Disciplines

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People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and gloom.

The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty God is hanging over our heads.

They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish.

God wrapped himself in flesh, condescended and became a man, died on the cross for sin, was resurrected on the third day, has ascended to the right hand of the Father, where he sits now to make intercession for us.

Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words,.

They will act upon them,.

And when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Welcome to Bible Bashed, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask. Listen and enjoy this latest episode as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions.

Here's Pastor Tim.

On this episode of Bible Bashed, we'll be continuing our discussion, How Can I Change? And the topic that we're specifically going to be talking about today is the importance of practicing the spiritual disciplines.

Now a good biblical passage to think through as it relates to this topic is John 15. And in John 15, 4, Jesus essentially says this. He says, Abide in me, and I in you, as a branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.

I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in me, he is thrown away like a branch and withers, and the branches are gathered and thrown into the fire and burned.

But if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. But by this my Father has glorified that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love. Now this is a passage that essentially talks about the importance of abiding in Christ, or abiding in his word, and the importance of practicing the spiritual disciplines along these lines.

Now the standard Christian adult, or standard adult, American adult, today basically spends about eight hours a day being entertained. And for many years we seem to have thought as Christians that we can basically spend the majority of our time being discipled and influenced by the world, and that will bear us little to no influence about the nature of the kind of fruit that we actually have in our life.

So we seem to think that we can just critically engage in what we are listening to and what we're being entertained by for hours and hours a day, and not be somewhat affected by it. So I didn't know that growing up there's plenty of discussions that happen along these lines where individuals were claiming that the danger of watching violent movies and everything else is that you're going to be desensitized to it, and that it affects us in ways that we don't realize.

But the problem was that these movies and these shows, they may not have had the danger that many people feared. So it might be that playing a lot of violent video games or watching a lot of violent movies has led to a slight increase in gun violence, maybe, perhaps.

I don't know that the statistics entirely bear that kind of thing out. I would probably blame it on the psychotropic drugs that are being prescribed like candy. I think that there are other things that are happening, and it's not intuitively obvious that an individual who watches violent TV or movies is going to go on a shooting spree.

It doesn't really seem that that statistically is happening very often at all. But then the real danger was the worldview that was present in these kind of things and the worldview that's shaping us. And so on the one hand, it's a worldview that's shaping us, but then on the other hand, it's just the time sink element of these things that are keeping us from doing the real things that are going to actually help us to grow.

So if you want to grow in the Christian life, there's no shortcut to growth in the Christian life. If you want to bear much fruit in the Christian life, you're going to have to abide with God. You're going to have to abide in His words.

You're going to have to spend your time listening to Him. And the way to listen to God is not to pray. The way to listen to God is to read His words in the Bible. And if you want to listen to God audibly, read them out loud.

The point, though, is just to say if you're not cultivating a relationship with God, you're not going to be conformed into His image. There's no shortcut to that. So as we read the Bible, we hear from God.

And as we pray, we talk to God. That's the way the nature of the Christian life actually works. The times that I have grown and seen the most fruit in my life have always been the times that have been saturated by Bible study and prayer.

If you're an individual who seems to think that you can grow in the Christian life apart from Bible reading and prayer, you have deceived yourself. You simply do not know what you're talking about. You are being influenced by these friends that you have on entertainment and television and movies and video games and whatever else you're doing.

You're being actively discipled by these individuals. And you are going to end up being like them. And if you look around the church, one of the things you realize is the church bears remarkable resemblance not to God and not to the Bible and not to His Word, but the church by and large is bearing remarkable similarities to the world itself.

You take the standard individual Christian. They sound like the world. They look like the world. They talk like the world. They emote like the world. They have the same kind of self-discipline and self-control as the world.

There's little to no difference between the way that they talk and the way that they think and the way that they handle their emotions, the way that they interact as a married couple. You can take the standard Christian at the standard church and they are indistinguishable from the television characters and the movie characters that they play.

They may not be engaged in the same kind of high-handed rebellion across the board, but the problem is most of them probably want to and would if they had an opportunity to. And the reason why that's the case is because they have been brainwashed by a worldview that essentially is telling them that life is all about them and that they can't help the way that they feel and they can't help the way that they think and that anything that they can be, whatever they want to be.

There's just profound confusion that's happening with the church and a lot of that confusion is related to the fact that it's not so much related to the fact that they have a stunted understanding of how sanctification works and a lack of sophistication as related to all these things.

These things have their place and we've talked about these things and these things are important, but then the truth is that if you really want to be holy, there's no short circuit. There's no way to short circuit just Bible reading and prayer.

If you were to basically say that what I'm going to do for a month is I'm going to change out that eight hours a day that I spend being entertained with Bible reading and prayer, you will be holy. You'll be more like God.

You will grow in the Christian life. You will bear much fruit. And instantaneously, one of the things that you'll realize what will actually happen to you is you'll realize how much this entertainment is shaping the way that you actually think and it's shaping the way that you actually approach life.

You'll look around and like Solomon, you'll realize that with much knowledge comes much sorrow. You'll look around and you'll see that man, the church, they don't know the Bible like they should. They have no idea what's in here.

All of a sudden, you'll start having conflict with everyone around you because you'll realize that you're called to certain things in the Bible that you can't fight and you can't ignore and you can't get rid of.

And you have to do something with what's in there. And you'll actually know what's in there at that point. So what I'm not trying to say is that there is the kind of category for an individual who can be a hearer of the Word and not a doer of the Word.

The point that I'm trying to make though is just to say... What I'm not trying to say is if you just read the Bible and you just pray, that's it. Embrace some kind of passive view of how sanctification works.

You'll never have to do anything. You're just going to be radically different and radically change form. But I am trying to say that there's no such thing as orthopraxy without orthodoxy. Meaning you can't have right actions without right doctrine and without knowing what's in the Bible.

So as a prerequisite for biblical change, you have to actually know what the Bible says. And for the vast majority of Christians, there is a vast biblical ignorance about everything the Bible says start to finish.

They've never thought to sit down and just ask themselves, What does God say about a particular topic? And I want to know what His Word actually says there. And it's no surprise that we look like the world, we sound like the world, we act like the world, we think like the world.

We speak as of the world and the world listens to us because the world loves us and we love the world. That's the way it works. So if you're talking about how can you bear fruit in the Christian life, how can you grow in the Christian life?

There's no way to do that apart from intentionally spending significant portions of your life in the Bible and praying. There's no way to have the resources that you need. There's no way to have the information that you need.

Part of the Holy Spirit's job is to bring to remembrance the things that Jesus has taught you. If you don't even know what He has to say, if you don't know anything about Him, you will be serving some kind of God, but it will be a God of your own making.

And it will be following a standard that makes sense to you. And I wouldn't discount the amount of real pressure that individual Christians experience living in a world which is essentially hostile to everything that we believe.

And the problem is for the standard Christian, we don't know what the Bible says and we don't know, we don't have, we haven't hidden God's word in our heart that we might not sin against Him. And so there's nothing there to rely on, there's nothing there to draw on.

We've essentially embraced some kind of superstitious, charismatic nonsense that says that any time you need to know something, God is just going to whisper to you His will in your ear without you having to do anything.

But then the truth of the matter is that God's given us a book that He expects us to read that's going to tell us His will. And if you want to know what's pleasing to God, just read His word. And the more that you soak yourself in that, the more that you will experience fruit, you will bear fruit, you will be changed in the process of doing that.

And there's no way to short circuit that process. So if you're an individual saying, I wish I was more devoted to God than what I am, you may try to spend a month saying, for this month, instead of turning to entertainment, I'm going to turn to God's word, I'm going to turn to prayer, and I'm going to binge God's word like I binge Netflix shows.

And one of the things that you might find is that you'll see how different you actually think at the end of that time, if you actually devote yourself to the things God wants you to do. And in prayer and dependence on Him and asking Him for help to understand the things that He has given to you and to soften your heart towards Him to help you to devote yourself to it and to cultivate a hunger for His truth and His word.

One of the things that you'll find is that you will be different, and there's no way to short circuit that.

This has been another episode of Bible Bashed. We hope you have been encouraged and blessed through our discussion. We thank you for all your support and ask you to continue to like and subscribe to Bible Bashed and share our podcast with your friends and on social media.

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Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.