Spiritual Disciplines are as Vital as Physical Disciplines

Some of the silly arguments we make when it comes to spiritual disciplines, such as bible reading, only become sillier when we apply them to daily routines that are necessary for physical life.

Often I hear from folks regarding bible reading that if they read daily or use a plan and stick to it that their reading would become legalistic or rote or both. 

Ok, follow me here. What if we took that logic and applied it to…say…food. Hey, I don’t want my eating to become a legalistic habit, so I’m just gonna eat protein bar like every other day. See what I mean?

What if we applied this logic to breathing. Man, breathing is becoming a law to me. I think I’ll hold my breath until breathing feels like it really means something to me. Silly, right?

Here’s the deal, Jesus actually spoke to the essential life giving nature of spiritual disciplines. Jesus called himself the Bread of life. John called Jesus the divine Logos (word of God). Jesus said that his food was to do the will of the Father in heaven. Jesus warned the disciples about the “leaven” of the Pharisees, and Peter would simply say when asked if he wanted to leave, “where would I go? You have the words of life.”

Point: Jesus, his word, prayer, obedience to God’s word, are essential for literal life. But we will find every silly logical argument to justify our spiritual malnourishment.

No doubt we don’t always get the goose bumps with every passage we read, and we don’t often feel the tangible presence of God every time we pray. But we don’t always take photos of our protein bar we woof down on the way out the door either like some people often do with their special meal with a special person, but the protein bar was necessary for energy the next four hours. Sometimes we do spiritual disciplines because they give us life not because they look and feel special all the time. We grab prayer time and bible reading on the go sometimes because it’s as necessary as that protein bar, and we know it. Make sense?

A sure fire way to kill discipleship is to apply logic we wouldn’t apply to temporal things to eternal things like we just illustrated above. 

Seek after Jesus’ kingdom and righteousness. Seek Jesus in ridiculous routine, and watch if we don’t find everything else just tastes better because of the actual vitality Jesus gives from disciplines for him to be with him.