False Spiritual Benchmarks (part 2)

Feeling a bit better today…thanks for all the prayers and well-wishes. 🙂

The comments generated from my earlier post on False Spiritual Benchmarks were good, and they have prompted some more thoughts on my part–now that my thinking is less muddled, that is. 🙂

I’ve gotten to pondering why we create these benchmarks in the first place. Why and how did we resort to measuring our spiritual health by how much we pray, or fast, or read the Bible, or any other specific activities we classify as spiritual? Again, not saying we shouldn’t do those things, but where did we get the idea that these practices are what make us more spiritual, “better” Christians, and so on?

I have a couple of theories as to why we do this…

1. Our culture loves to compartmentalize. Remember, we tend to interpret even the Scriptures according to our own culture, outlook and worldview. And we westerners have a tendency to compartmentalize everything. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Our career is a world all its own; our home/family is a different world, and many of us interact completely differently in both environments. We have our family life, our social life, our thought life, and our spiritual life. Yes, there is some bleedover, but for the most part we think in compartments. And for Christians, this has played out in our theology. We see ourselves as 3-part beings; we are a spirit, we have a soul, we live in a body. And have a responsibility to care for each part individually and separately from the other. Just as we feed, clothe, and clean (hopefully) our bodies…we have certain activities that are deemed good for soul and spirit. We have equated Bible study and sermons to “spiritual food” that help keep us healthy spiritually. (Does any of this sound familiar?) Thus, we tend to think of certain activities as “spiritual”, and other activities as “physical”. This is where the whole sacred-secular thing comes into play.

The problem is…we’re not as compartmentalized as all that. This compartmental thinking is a Greco-Roman-western way of looking at the world. The Hebraic mindset out of which the Scriptures were written didn’t tend to see life this way. While they acknowledged flesh and spirit, they still saw them as interwoven; life was interconnected and integrated, and one thing easily affected the other. To the Jewish mind, there was no distinction between sacred and secular–all of life was sacred if lived unto God. To them, the enjoyment of a good meal with good friends was no less spiritual than praying. Even the prescribed Jewish feasts, while interweaving spiritual truth, still were mainly about eating, dancing and celebrating. Why? Because the Lord had commanded them to celebrate, not observe religious ritual.

So all that to say…one reason I think we create these false spiritual benchmarks is because we see some activities as spiritual, and some as unspiritual, rather than see our whole life as a life lived unto God. I hear people talking about how they aren’t as spiritual as the next guy, and I marvel at that…because to my mind, we are all spiritual beings, and we cannot stop being what we are. Some people might be more spiritually aware than others, but we are all spirit.

2. We love no-brainers and formulas. Perhaps one of the offshoots of our compartmentalized way of looking at the world is that we like to reduce events and processes to step-by-step formulas. Do this, this, and this, and you’ll get such-and-such result. And like everything else, there’s a measure of truth in that. But not everything works that simply in the real world.

When we can describe a process as a step-by-step formula, we can stop thinking about it, can’t we? We just follow the recipe, and out comes the cake. And unfortunately, we’ve done the same kind of thing with our approach to spiritual growth. “Read your Bible, pray every day…and you’ll grow, grow, grow!” We’ve even done this kind of thing with the Bible; we call it “systematic theology”. We can reduce the entire message of the gospel to “four spiritual laws.” We’ve processed and processed the Scriptures until we no longer see the narrative; all we see are patterns and lists of doctrines derived from the narrative.

But here’s what I think about that. If God had intended the Bible to be reduced to all these formulas and lists…He would have had it written down that way! “Step one: God created the world. Step two: man sinned. Step three….” When that is all we see from the Scriptures, we are missing much of the beauty and mystery contained in the narrative itself. It just isn’t as simple as all that. Any more than life is.

So for us to transfer that thinking to our spiritual life and start creating these benchmarks that say, “I am spiritually healthy when I do this, this, and this…” we are oversimplifying something God created mysterious and beautiful. He never intended us to manage our spiritual health like a workout plan; He wants a relationship. A complex, intricate, interwoven relationship with us. And that actually takes more thought and engagement than just satisfying our guilt by telling ourselves we spent 15 minutes in prayer and 15 minutes in the Word. I think any marriage managed that way would end in divorce.

So…bottom line…while I think some folks might be frightened at this line of thinking, what I’m really talking about is deepening the sense of relationship with God, not making it more shallow. Not only do the false spiritual benchmarks load us with a false sense of guilt…I think they also can actually cheapen the sense of relationship we are to have with Jesus.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so concerned with how spiritually healthy we are; maybe that question would answer itself when we just follow Jesus from the heart, and see Him engaged in our whole life–not just in the prayer closet.