Into The Deep

The life of a Christian is marked by the desire to grow close to God. When I read the Old Testament and see how God overtly engages with his people, something inside longs to experience his voice. When I read the New Testament and see how Jesus heals the broken, I want to see the people around me experience that same healing touch. When I see how God changes Saul’s life and converts thousands through his life and ministry, I aspire to be the always-wise, ever-bold pastor/evangelist leading and inspiring people to follow Christ. It isn’t egomaniacal. I genuinely want to see god move in the lives of people. I genuinely want to see people come to know God’s love and plan for their lives. And I genuinely want to be the kind of person God can and does use to bring change about in a very broken world.

So, with these incredible desires rolling about in my head and in my heart, I can’t help but question the stagnancy in which I repeatedly find myself. Why do I find it so hard to do those things that draw me close to God? Why is it always easier to stay up with friends on Xbox live than it is to go to bed and wake up early to pray? Why do I find myself scheduling times for game nights and making it a point to use my Movie Pass, but when I start to think about scheduling a worship night or a Bible study or just going into my home office to read or pray, I convince myself that my schedule is too hectic and adding something else would just be too much? For all this genuine desire to see God move, I seem to be quite adept at settling into the least challenging routine I can find. It’s easy to desire; it’s not so easy to follow it up with action.

This conundrum has been particularly bothersome for me lately. As I grow older, I am less and less satisfied with keeping up appearances, and I am more and more concerned with the true state of my life and my soul. I don’t want to look like a good father, I want to be a good father. I don’t want to look like a loving husband, I want to be a loving husband. I don’t want to look like a great leader in the ministry in which I serve, I want to have a real and thriving relationship with God. Looking the part just isn’t enough. I’m increasingly aware that my soul longs for more. When I come to the end of my life, I want there to be peace in my spirit because I know I gave everything in me to pursue God and all that he has for me and the people I influence.

In his book Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster describes the sentiment perfectly: “Psalm 42:7 reads, ‘Deep calls to deep.’ Perhaps somewhere in the subterranean chambers of your life you have heard the call to deeper, fuller living. You have become weary of frothy experiences and shallow teaching. Every now and then you have caught glimpses, hints of something more than you have known. Inwardly you long to launch out into the deep.”¹ So, what do I do with this longing? How do I answer this beckoning to launch out into the deep? How do I overcome the urge to fill my time with games and instead engage in the activities of the soul? How do I ensure that the appearance of fullness in my life isn’t appearance only?

In my experience, I have found that there are no shortcuts. It turns out that to have a robust prayer life, you must make it a point to pray. To hear from God, you must make time to listen. To feel at ease in silence and solitude before God, you must practice silence and solitude. In the natural world we know that in order to get to something, we have to take one step after another to cover the ground between us and our destination. To launch out into the deep, to grow closer to God, we must cover the ground of the spiritual disciplines in much the same way.

If I want to grow in my relationship with God, if I genuinely want to be the kind of person God can and does use to bring change about in a very broken world, it means I must deliberately and intentionally disengage from certain things and engage in others. There is nothing inherently wrong with playing games with friends or with having a relaxing night watching Netflix on the couch. In fact, sometimes those things are completely necessary. God made rest a commandment. But if the pursuit of my life is God, then the actions in my life should reflect it.

In effort to live a life marked by spiritual discipline, I have resolved to do two things:

The first is to read. Whether the book is by Judah Smith or Timothy Keller, Brian Houston or R. C. Sproul, C.S. Lewis or Brennan Manning or Kierkegaard or John Eldredge, there are people out there who have had experiences with God that I have not had, and they have written it down for me to learn from. I believe that some of the best moments in life are when somebody shares their God-experience with you, and what are books if not someone’s written God-experience? Only, in the form of a book, we get the opportunity to glean from those who are removed from us in time and space.

The second is to act on what I’m reading. What good is reading Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline if I never put his lessons into practice? What benefit is Eugene Peterson’s Answering God if I never dive into the Psalms and allow them to influence and guide my prayer life? If I read in order to check off a box on my yearly goal list, then all I have gained is a checked box on a piece of paper. But if I begin to put action and intentionality to the things I’m taking in, then maybe I stand a chance at living the life with God that I long for after all.

None of us want to look back on our lives and see wasted time and missed opportunity. I don’t want to wait until I’m fifty (or even thirty!) to have an intimate walk with God. What that means is taking some concrete steps towards him. As I continue to grow, I’m sure more and more steps will be added to my list of “Read, Act,” but until then, I hope you’ll join me. The world doesn’t need more people wasting time on Facebook, no matter how enticing those BuzzFeed videos look. What the world needs is passionate people walking with the love and power of God. Let’s be those people.