“Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me, and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me – watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me, and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly.” (Matt 11:28-30 (MSG).
I love worship music. A lot of Christians do. When we think about it, worship is very relational; it’s time we set apart to fix our eyes on Jesus. We take time to draw near to Him and experience His presence. We silence all the distractions of our everyday life, we quiet all the voices, and we lean into a moment when Heaven touches earth, and it’s beautiful.
I was recently asked to share a word of encouragement at a meeting for small-group leaders, and as I prayed about what to speak on, I felt led to address spiritual disciplines. It’s not the most fascinating topic out there, but as I dug into it a bit more, I realized there’s a unique challenge we face when it comes to spiritual disciplines. Things like praying, fasting, reading Scripture, and practicing Sabbath are all things no one feels they do perfectly. But just like worship, the goal of spiritual disciplines is to lead us to Jesus, to draw closer to Him, to quiet the distractions. Spiritual disciplines are a means to an end, and that end is always Jesus.
Perhaps spiritual disciplines should come with a disclaimer or a warning. As great as they are, they can only take us so far because discipline alone cannot change our hearts. The goal is always to draw closer to Jesus; that is where we experience life-giving transformation. If we are not careful, we can forget that spiritual disciplines are practices that help us fix our eyes on Jesus, and instead we can get caught up in performance. We can easily get hyper-focused on the amount of time we spend, or don’t spend, in prayer, or reading scripture, or any other spiritual disciplines, and then it feels as though we never do enough. We never pray enough. We never read the Bible enough. We never take the Sabbath seriously enough. It’s never enough…
Performance always has two potential outcomes: either we don’t perform well and feel ashamed, or we succeed and feel prideful. We either fail and hide, or we succeed and show off. I honestly don’t know which is worse… Jesus had a lot to say about the proud Pharisees who loved to pray loudly and publicly for all to see (Matt 6:5). As it says in Romans 8:5 in The Message: “Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them – living and breathing God!” Performance never impresses God.
But since spiritual disciplines are not the end in and of themselves, in the same way we don’t worship for the sake of worshipping, then performance doesn’t matter. Doing enough was never the point. Grace sets the pace. Whether we pray for a minute or an hour doesn’t matter, because the goal is simply fixing our eyes on Jesus. All of a sudden, it’s less of a chore or hoops to jump through, and it becomes more about spending quality time with the one we love.
