Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit

Transcription

1 Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit SF507 LESSON 03 of 07 Richard E. Averbeck, Ph.D. Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois This lecture is entitled Holy Spirit, Human Spirit, and Individual Spiritual Formation, but it s part two the practice of this spiritual formation on the individual level. Some of the main ways God has given us to put up the sails using that image from the last lecture of the boat that we re on so that the wind of the Spirit can drive us along are called spiritual disciplines. Spiritual disciplines is a term that is commonly used. What we re talking about here is regular, daily, weekly types of practices disciplines, related to the word disciples. These practices are means of training, or not just behavior training but spiritual. That is, training that trains the human spirit under the influence of the Holy Spirit. We have this passage again in Matthew 28: Go therefore, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey or to observe all that I command you. So it s training so you actually do what the Master the Rabbi is telling you to do and follow Him in His practices. And these disciplines are different ways of coming at this Now it is hard to determine what to include in a list of disciplines and how to categorize them. There are a number of different approaches to this, and it s hard to be complete because you can look at one thing as a discipline, [but] others would not call that one, and so on. For example, Dallas Willard, one of the major writers in the field of spiritual formation, divides the disciplines up into two types. There are disciplines of abstinence, for example solitude, silence. In other words, solitude is staying away from hustle and bustle; silence is not talking. These are abstinence types of disciplines. Fasting staying away from food frugality, chastity, secrecy. He talks about secrecy as being a way of just not telling about things; letting the Holy Spirit use things without taking them up, but just trusting God to use things as they come. 1 of 15

2 Sacrifice. These kinds of things would be disciplines of abstinence. And then there s engagement. Instead of abstinence, you engage and study. These are activities you do. You engage in worship, celebration, service, prayer, fellowship, confession, submission. These kinds of things you actively engage in. And again, some collections wouldn t include some of these particular elements as actual disciplines, but they could be looked at as practices. So that s what I mean. These categories are not solid all the time in terms of the list what is included on the list as well as how they re categorized. Richard Foster is an associate of Dallas Willard. Both of them are very heavily involved in this Renovare system of spiritual formation that is popular. Richard Foster is the director of that, and Dallas Willard is a real guide to Richard. They are good partners in this process. But Richard divides them into three groups. The disciplines that are inward meditation, prayer, fasting, study as opposed to outward disciplines for example, simplicity, solitude, submission, service. And then he has a third category: corporate disciplines like confession, worship, guidance, celebration that involves engagement, specifically with others by the very nature of them. So these are categories, for example, from Dallas Willard and Richard Foster that have been used, and they re very useful good ways of thinking about it. There s a third way the one that appeals to me the most in my own work and it s got to do with what I will call spiritual breathing. This connects with the fact that the word spirit in the Old and the New Testament can mean breathe and breathing, just as much as spirit can mean wind and breath and so on. And I think that dividing the spiritual disciples into two categories corresponding to human breathing is a good way to go about trying to understand it while engaging in the very nature of these disciplines as living and life giving giving the nature of practicing spiritual disciplines as a living, pulsing sort of thing. This is what I think is best. No one can live without breathing, and breathing involves alternately inhaling and exhaling. The spiritual disciplines are about doing, alive with God and one another by inhaling and exhaling with the life giving dynamic relationship between them. For example, inhaling: we might think of that as taking in, like reading taking in the Word of God through reading, studying, meditating on Scripture, solitude, and silence, fasting. All of these as ways of kind of taking in impact from our Lord in one way 2 of 15

3 or another the inhaling. Fasting could also go with the second group. Some of these overlap into exhaling. So for example, prayer. It s an expression; it goes out from us. And [so does] worship, and fellowship, and service, mission, fruit of the Spirit this kind of exhaling by expression. And so you re inhaling you re taking in. Exhaling you re breathing out the very effects of those things you ve taken in. And so it s the nature of it to think of it in this particular way. Like physical breathing, doing one exhaling or inhaling without the other is to lose the life of it. It dies. You ve got to do both in connection with one another or it just doesn t work there s no life. And that s the way spiritual disciplines are. You take in, but you also express you give off. And they encourage and develop and they build off of and they play off of one another in terms of transformation in our own life. We need both to impact us. So there are numerous biblical passages that could be cited for each of the disciplines that I mentioned here in inhaling and exhaling. And you can even find them in all sorts of various combinations in certain passages. The one that I would like to look at with you right here is the chapter in Acts 2, the day of Pentecost right at the beginning of the church. This comes out right there. I want to read maybe I ll say a few things along the way here in Acts 2:37-47, and then go back and talk specifically about this subject of the disciplines. He [Peter] had been preaching based upon a text from Joel 2, and then in verse 37, When they heard this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, Brethren, what shall we do? So they knew they had just crucified their very Messiah. And the Holy Spirit was bringing that to bear upon them. And now What do we do is their question. Verse 38, Peter said to them, Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. So we re tying right in here, immediately, repentance and baptism; tying in with receiving the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit empowers the whole thing right from the beginning. In fact, back in 1:8 the Lord had even told them to wait until the Spirit came upon them and they could be witnesses based upon that. So this connection 3 of 15

4 with the Spirit we have been playing about is explicit immediately. Verses 39-42: For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself. And with many other words he solemnly testified and kept on exhorting them, saying, Be saved from this perverse generation! So then, those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about 3,000 souls. They were continually... And this is the verse I m going to come back to especially, They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Verses 43 Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe; and many wonders and signs were taking place through the apostles. And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need. Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved. Now in this passage, especially in verse 42 and this is on the notes there are two pairs of disciplines. They devoted themselves persistently to the apostles teaching of the Word of God, expressed through the apostles, and to the fellowship. They re relating to one another, then to breaking of bread and to prayer another pair. In the context in real life, the whole thing begins with entrance into the new and dedicated life talked about in verses repent and be baptized. Receive the Holy Spirit and all these promises will come. This is what the baptism by water and the Spirit are about. The old life and its impurities get washed away and we live a new life by the Spirit. And all of this happens when they engage in this baptism and receiving of the Holy Spirit. One of the very most natural things that happens is the transformation that takes place takes place in the midst of mission to the lost world. 4 of 15

5 So in verse 41, So then, those who had received his word were baptized; and that day there were added about 3,000 souls. So we have this in verse 41, and then you come back to verse 47 the last part of it And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved. So it s all in the context of [the] mission that they re engaging in the practices that are binding them together with the Lord and with one another that we re going to discuss here. So they mutually committed themselves in verse 42 in the context of this mission in the world. They committed themselves mutually to taking in the apostles teaching inhaling and to doing life together in fellowship exhaling to the breaking of bread together inhaling and praying together exhaling. They were doing these in combinations and in pairs. That s how it s expressed in the passage. And they do both all the time. If you stop one for any period of time and you re not breathing, the life goes out of it. These are combinations that are important. You can t just do one of them and really have the effects of the work of the Spirit. Now the following verses expand on verse 42. First, there was a sense of awe about all that God was doing, and [then] verses 43 and 47. Verse 43: Everyone kept feeling a sense of awe, and many wonders and signs were being done. And then verse 47: Praising God and having favor with all the people. There s this sense of awe, and then you have the apostles teaching was confirmed by signs and wonders, just as Jesus teaching had been. So this was a way of getting the church going; establishing the ongoing effects of what Jesus had done by creating the church and confirming this truth of the apostolic witness through various kinds of designs. Then you have the bond of fellowship; being so close that they held all things in common. They did life together as followers of Christ. They even took their meals together in each other s houses much of the time. This is a principle that we need to pay closer attention to. Not that we need to hold all things in common [and] eat together all the time, but one of the concerns that we must have in spiritual formation is that we just don t do life alone. We do it together as followers of Christ. He intended it that way. We ll 5 of 15

6 say more about this as we go along, especially in the next set of two lectures. All of this is surrounded and immersed in praise and worship, effective witnessing to the grace of Christ in word, indeed. And they were enjoying the favor of all the people, adding to their number. The spiritual disciplines, or practices, took center stage in the life of the church right from the beginning. This is important to understand. This is not a new thing that we re talking about. These are ancient things. They ve been the basis of the life of the church all along, and we need to keep that in mind. We re not talking about a new thing. We re reinvesting in something that has been ongoing, and this is important. Now what has been going on in spiritual formation then is that we have this understanding of the work of the Spirit, but we also have the need, since the wind of the Spirit blows, we have to have the sail up in order to drive us along drive us along the path to following Christ and to praising and serving our Lord. So this idea then requires that we think about it. Okay how do we put up the sails? What do we actually do? How do we just engage in this process? We re not just passive in it, even though it is empowered and directed and motivated by the Holy Spirit. So one of the main ways of inhaling is what we call spiritual reading. There s a Latin term for it called Lectio Divina. It s a Latin term meaning divine reading. And there are many good things that have been written on this. I want to talk you through this one as a form of taking in the Word of God that really is reflective and helpful in doing transformational work. We all know that simply because you read and study the Bible. It does not mean that it s really touching you in the places that it needs to touch you. What you re doing in Lectio Divina is inviting God through the Holy Spirit as He brings Christ to bear upon us. We re inviting him to take us where we need to go with the Word of God in terms of transformation in our hearts and in our lives and in our mission. Now there are two main books that I suggest: Mario Masini, Lectio Divina, and then there s a most recent book on this by Eugene Peterson, the one who translated The Message. It s called Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, I think, based upon my reading of books and reflections about what people have written on this subject of Lectio Divina, I think this is perhaps the best book that has ever been written on the topic in 6 of 15

7 the history of the church Eugene Peterson s book. It is a really good book, so I m going to refer to it some along the way as well as some other things. But I really recommend that one especially. Now spiritual reading is essentially a form of Christian meditation on scripture. It s one of the main ways of inhaling the Word of God in the Christian life. It is slow, thoughtful praying of the scripture. You read the Word of God prayerfully in the presence of God and let the content of these scriptures inform what you are hearing from God and speak it back to God. It s a meditation. You re going kind of in a reciprocal relationship between you and the Lord, from the Word of God to you, and your prayers and meditations back to him a bit of a conversation meditation. It s a deliberate dwelling upon a passage with the aim of encountering God in it. Psalm 1 indicates that one who meditates on the scriptures will know stability and fruitfulness in their life that is not dependant on their circumstances. Sometimes we live our lives and how our lives feel to us are based upon the circumstances that are imposed upon us. Christian meditation enables one to live right through that and be fruitful right in the middle of the mess that we live in and the mess that we are as fallen corrupt beings. So this is an important part of the ongoing growth and stability. You re planted by streams of water if you do this, as it says in Psalm 1. You have water even in the midst of the desert. All sorts of things like this are part of the elements of that passage. Now the chief aim of Christian meditation on the bible is not to learn more information about God but to encounter God in His Word. Now this does not mean understanding it properly and correctly, but this is a more than type of approach. In other words, understand it, and then you just meditate on it in a way that enables you to encounter God right while you are sitting there in the Word. This is one of my favorite things to do. I have a certain chair in my home, and I love to sit and read, but not just read. I don t journal myself; I write in my bible and I reflect and I keep on praying and thinking about it and go back and around all sorts of ways. For me it s like a vacation right in the middle of things. So I take a vacation with God right in the day. It s a wonderful way for me at least to engage with God and really ask Him to affect me, to guide me, and to motivate me and direct me and so on. So this is what we are talking about here, and there s a certain 7 of 15

8 kind of pattern to it that I will be talking about, but it can be done in all sorts of different ways. It includes discovering the meaning of a passage, and that s one of the things that I do as I sit in my chair, but it does not stay with just discovering the meaning. It s a prayerful hearing or responding to the Lord in that scripture. Lectio Divina is divine or spiritual reading; reading so that the Word that is a spiritual Word has affect on my human spirit by the power of the Holy Spirit as I engage and pursue God, encountering Him while in His Word. Since the Bible is spiritual writing, to read it well we need to do a kind of spiritual reading which corresponds to the nature of what we are reading. Peterson says at one point that it s a forbidding discipline because it requires all of us our whole body and mind our whole life, daily and perpetually. He s talking about the kind of reading that keeps on being something that you think about as you go on through your daily life. He adds that it is the core curriculum in the school of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit went to a great deal of bother to inspire the writing of the Word of God. He invested in that through the work of the prophets, through the writers of Scripture. And He intends that this be one of the main ways that we do the kind of growing spiritually that spiritual formation is all about under His guidance and empowerment. So that s one of the reasons why I have chosen to really focus down in this particular lecture on the inhaling of Scripture taking it in and then, in a sense, also exhaling it by speaking it back to the Lord in our prayers, our concerns, and our meditations. It is a way of reading that intends the fusion of the entire biblical story and my story. I will say more about this later. But you might use a play on words here. The word history really is about His story. Many people have heard this, but there is a real sense in which history is God s story. We are all part of that story whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. We don t have a choice. God is God, and whether we believe in him or not and whether we like the fact that He is in control it doesn t matter. He is. That s what providence is all about. Now our story fits into His story in one way or another. The idea is to create a fusion between what is going on in my personal story and how it connects with what God is doing through history in creation and redemption, all the various works that He is doing. So this is a way of reading the Bible that engages my life right with 8 of 15

9 the story of the Bible itself the story that the Bible is telling. Now the tradition of Lectio Divina proper referred to as that and developed in the Middle Ages in the monastic world of the early church. It was formerly clarified by a monk called Guigo II in the 12th century. It had been practiced before that, way back in the third and fourth centuries. I ll say here in a few moments that actually it has good, sound scriptural foundations as we were talking about even in regard to Psalm 1. But Guigo II put it this way in a very illustrative summary of what it is all about (there are a few modifications and explanations and clarifications that I have slipped in here you can see that in the notes): he said, Reading, as it were, puts a solid food in our mouths. Meditation chews it up and breaks it down. Prayer obtains the flavor of it and swallows it, and contemplation is the very sweetness which makes us glad and refreshes us, digesting it as we go about our daily life. The idea is that reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation are like steps in this pattern of Lectio Divina that we are going to be talking about. It is a good image that helps us to understand what we are doing. The basis for this Scripture is found for example in Joshua 1:8: Do not let this Book of the Law part from your mouth; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it, and then you will be prosperous and successful. Similar expressions are found in the passages to which we referred before. I have it on the sheet, Psalm 1:12. Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the Law of the Lord, and on His Law he meditates day and night. This word meditation in the Hebrew language is a term for murmuring or mumbling quietly under your breath. It can be heard a bit. Sometimes we see this being practiced in pictures about the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem where they are going back and forth and you can see their lips moving. That s what this word this Hebrew haga means, to murmur. Peterson uses the image, it s like a dog with a bone. He actually starts out his book on this; how a dog is with a bone keeps on grinding on it, keeps on going, works on it. That is why he entitles his book on spiritual formation Eat This Book. It s a good image for understanding what we are doing with the Word of God. We 9 of 15

10 are going to it like a dog with a bone. It helps us to understand, and it is kind of a comical picture, but it is a very useful one, I think. The descriptions that I have read of Lectio Divina have varied considerably. It is usually broken down in various steps or stages whether it is practiced in private or in a group setting. You can do it either privately or in a group setting, this practice. One of the passages that perhaps helps us to get at what we are really doing here is this passage in James 1, starting in verse 22: but prove yourselves doers of the Word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. It s about not just hearing it but really working it in, inculcating the Word into our lives so that we don t just delude ourselves and think that something is really happening in terms of growth and change. Prove yourselves doers of the Word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the Word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was [verses 22-24]. We can look into scripture and see mirrors of ourselves. It reflects back upon who we are. That is what he is saying here. The idea is to look intently. Verse 25, one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does. It s using Scripture as kind of mirror to look into ourselves and our relationship with the Lord and with one another. That is a good passage as well to think through and regard to what lectio, what reading, what meditation is like in scripture when it is done effectively. I have given on the notes four stages with a fifth that relates to if we do it in a group setting rather than privately. Lectio, in particular, is listening to and interpreting the biblical text maybe 10 to 20 verses perhaps. Reading it through several times, slowly, and what you are doing is you re watching for expressions or metaphors 10 of 15

11 or various types of useful elements of the passage. For example, in the Psalm 1 passage that we were just reading Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked that s an image, walking in the counsel or stand. You have this walk, then you stand in the way of sinners or you sit in the seat of mockers. These are images for how you might settle into the way of evil and follow it. You re meditating and you notice: what are the different ways this would look like? What is the opposite of that? It s meditating on the Word of God day and night. There s this watching for various kinds of metaphors and there are many of them in Psalm 1. There are many of them in Scripture. In fact, biblical theology, to a large extent, is based upon different kinds of metaphors or images that we use. For example, God is the shepherd; we are the sheep. That is an image. God is a king and we are His kingdom people. We have all sorts of things along this line in Scripture He is the [bridegroom and we are the bride].* We can go on and on and you can think of many. We have all sorts of different kinds of metaphors and figures of speech, and then listening just soaking it in and thinking about it. That continues on then into number two Meditatio, which is deepening and taking to oneself its message, its implication, for your own life situation thinking about it in terms of where you are right now in life. It is entering into the world of the text as a scriptive word. It is the script for one s life; learning from it how to live out life. It becomes scriptive in the way that we think about what we are about in life. Meditation is about how to bring what we read and meditate upon right on into our world right now. Number three is Oratio transforming the Word of God into prayer. We orate about it by praying its impact and implications back to God for your own life or for the group if you are doing this in a group. So you are actually now turning it from inhaling in numbers one and two to a number three and four that we are talking about now and breathing it back to God exhaling it in terms of prayer and making it what you pray about. It actually permeates the promise of Lectio Divina. You pray all along the way, but there is a point at which you really make an attempt to pray what you are meditating and hearing right on into your life, and the way you were thinking and the way you are feeling, the *Please note that the terms bride and bridegroom are inadvertently transposed by the course lecturer in the lesson audio. 11 of 15

12 decisions you make, the way you approach people, and the way you respond to God, all of these things are matters of prayer then. Then number four is Comtemplatio. These are all the Latin terms for it, but they just mean these kinds of developments that you can think about. In Comtemplatio, you have the submitting to the Word by taking it into mind for the whole day, every day. There is a preoccupation with the Word of God. You might think of it this way: if you could empty your mind of everything that you were thinking, if you could just go blank and then let it go, to what would it go first? Well what it goes to first is that with which you are preoccupied. It s what you really think about when you go into neutral. What we are wanting is that during your day, what you are doing is having this as your preoccupation. It is where you want to go; it is living it plainly and humbly; you are working it in; you are thinking about it in terms of personal life and relationships and your effectiveness in the world as salt and light for Jesus. So, these are four lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio. These are four, and the first two would be more inhaling and the last two would be more exhaling. Then there is Collatio, which is a fifth one that really fits in between numbers two and three. If you were in a group, you would share its impact on your self with others in the group. This is a very good part of Lectio Divina when it is done in a group. So people can share what they are hearing in the text and how it is striking them the lectio and the meditatio. That becomes part then of what you pray for one another as you go into numbers three and four. These are terms that show up constantly in this discussion of Lectio Divina. And again, this is one of these disciplines, at least one of the ways of doing one of the disciplines of meditating on Scripture. So what we are after is this being one of the ways to raise the sails, to catch the wind of the Spirit, to invite the Spirit to blow into the sail and drive us along in the direction of godliness and spiritual life and vitality. This is what we are really talking about here. Now we need to remember that, by and large, believers through the ages have not had their own personal or even family or clan copy of the Scriptures. Many people through the history who knew the Lord and loved Him were not even literate. In some places and in some instances this is still true even today. That s important to keep in mind. That s why so much of what has been done in the past and continues to be very effective today is done in groups 12 of 15

13 with someone doing the reading out loud. This was a common part of practice, and the Bible talks about the importance of reading scriptures out loud in the public context, because people didn t read. They didn t even have a copy of the Scriptures like so many of us do today. A lot of it was done by memorization, based upon vocal reading over and over again. And then you have the lectionary, liturgical type of reading that was being done too for a long time. We don t think of it as much today in the literate society that we re in, but think if it wasn t literate, and if you were dependent upon hearing the Word of God by it being read out loud, how valuable that would be. Part of the lectio the listening to and interpreting the biblical text where you read it through several times slowly comes out of the need to do this, because people just didn t have access to it in a literary sort of way in their own life. In some ways, this might be better anyway. You re not just looking but you re hearing. There are different gates that are being used for it to sink in. So the idea is to think in terms of the realities, even of history, that this was one of the things that had to be done. Lectio Divina really derives from the need to actually meditate on Scripture in order even to know what is said. So there s a lot that goes on with understanding this and taking it into our lives. Now, unfortunately, we have to be concerned about some things about Lectio Divina. Some things that I ve heard about it and have evidence of in terms of how it s practiced are a bit alarming. For example, as spiritual reading, it s often contrasted with the disciplines of study and exegesis and hermeneutics and theological reflection. Well the fact of the matter is that this is a serious problem. I remember different occasions, for example, one time one leader of a spiritual formation group was talking to me about, It doesn t matter what somebody thinks they find in Scripture. You just go with it as you re meditating on it together, and whether it s right or wrong, there s no problem with that. The fact of the matter is you have to be concerned about that, because what we re supposed to be meditating upon is a Scripture that God had some meaning in. He intended us to understand it. It s revelation. So the problem is that you don t want to just float through the Scriptures here. The best writers on spiritual reading emphasize the importance of serious interpretational reading. Richard Peace, in his book for example, even recommends that actually in a group Lectio 13 of 15

14 Divina type of context that there be two sessions on the same passage. The first one is devoted to understanding the text what it really says and then the second is actually the meditative, spiritual impact of the text for life. So he really thinks that this is an important part of leading it properly. Eugene Peterson would agree. He spends an entire chapter in his book on the need for exegesis. Now that s just a technical term that comes from the Greek word. Jesus used it in John 1:18. Jesus has made Him, the Father, known. It s the word to make known. It s making known the meaning and submitting to the text and its intended meaning rather than our own imaginations. He writes this, and I m going to quote him on pages 57 and 58: Without exegesis, spirituality gets soupy. Spirituality without exegesis becomes selfindulgent. Without disciplined exegesis, spirituality develops into an idiolect in which I define all the key verbs and nouns out of my own experience. Prayer ends up limping along in size and stutters. He is very concerned that we just try to understand what God really intends to say in Scripture. That s part of the Lectio Divina process. It is not to be left behind so we can just have our own imaginations about what is being said. So there is a concern in that. Spiritual reading is not a less than but a more than approach to reading the Bible. Informational reading and spiritual reading function together as two modes, and they modulate each other, moving back and forth between them. So I might be moving on and I might be thinking that I am praying things to God oratio at this point, but then something occurs to me, Hey, I wonder if I understood that correctly? Well you might go back then to trying to understand what the text means as part of this process. They can overlap and lap back upon one another. There are not rules here. There are simply dynamics that need to be engaged in as they are necessary and as they become part of moving into and encountering God in what He s really saying in the Scripture. We don t leave our intellect or our spirituality behind when we do the reading of the Bible. Spiritual reading does not allow that. Take God seriously in his Word. When you do that it means you need to take seriously what He actually means to say in His Word; not what we might see in Scripture if we read it in a way that takes God s intended meaning lightly. 14 of 15

15 There are some legitimate differences of opinion obviously on particular passages and struggles that we have with understanding. There is some level of subjectivity. Sometimes equally gifted commentators come up with opposite views on the same passage in Scripture. This is just part of what you would expect as fallen people. We live in a corrupt world, so we should expect the way we read the Bible to be corrupt too. We have struggles with it. We have to work through things. So it is important to recognize that there is some level of subjectivity that is unavoidable. But we are looking for a well-informed subjectivity in the way we read the Bible. Get well-informed, and the more you read it, the more you have to bring to bear upon other passages that you ve read as you progressively move. This is a whole life process of reading, meditating, contemplating, and praying through Scripture. The problem goes the other way too however. Some react strongly to any kind of, what they would perceive as, mystical practice. Spiritual reading is sometimes associated with this kind of mysticism. When all is said and done there is still much about God that is a mystery to us. There is something mystical about practicing His presence daybyday, moment by moment. There is a proper Christian mysticism that pays attention to the work of the Holy Spirit in the human spirit as we read in Romans 8:15-16 earlier in these lectures, For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of Sonship. And by him we cry, Abba! Father! The divine Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God s children. Now there is a great deal more to be said that I hope we will come back to later on in this passage. But one of the things that is very important is that we are looking for the Holy Spirit through the Word that He himself inspired to work on our human spirit and bring transformations so that we just sit there as people who are so deeply convinced of God s love for us that we can cry out Abba Father! We are His children and we are fellow heirs with Jesus Christ, as it goes on to say right in the middle of this groaning that we face that Romans 8 talks about. We get to be driven to God with the Holy Spirit guiding us and directing us so that we become more like Jesus along the way. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 15 of 15