When non-believers ask us, “Why do you read the Bible? Why do you pray? Why do you go to church?” What will our response be? Because we inherit these practices from our parents, or because it feels “wrong” if we do not?
A lot of people pray but forget Jesus. Many attend churches week after week, read the Bible in their designated quiet time, but neither do they see Jesus nor desire to live His life here today. Knowledge about what happened 2000 years ago seems to puff up with Bible reading, but faith is quenched along with love for God.
Jesus demonstrated to His followers what it meant to live in this world. He characterized a spirituality that manifested both the human and divine dimensions. He lived an ordinary human life in a Jewish background, growing up like any young Jew of His time, and went through the rites of passages of Judaism. Yet, in His earthly living, He often spoke of the language of the Kingdom of Heaven. He preached and taught people about the Kingdom of Heaven, how people were called to live before God, and what life would be like under the rule of God. He also performed miracles that nobody doubted that He had authority. After resurrection, He continued to dwell with His disciples and spoke about the Kingdom of God. Jesus’s spirituality was distinctively a fusion of divinity in humanity.
As Christians pursue spiritual growth, we should also ask – what it means to grow spiritually? It is to grow in the understanding of the incarnational nature of Christ, and pray to live like an incarnated Christ through the Spirit’s empowerment this moment, and it could mean:
Independence of human authority – who gave Jesus the authority and power to drive out demons and healing the sick? The God who was with Him gave Jesus the power (Acts 10:38). Today, Jesus also gave His followers the same authority. We can also drive out demonic attacks on our thoughts, emotions, and living by exercising the authority given us, for the God who was present with Jesus is also here with us today. However, if we do not set time to be in alone with God, if we do not train our mind and heart to listen from Him and be taught by Him, cultivating our spiritual sensitivity to God’s voice, we will grow rusty and ignorant to the divine power indwelling in us.
Complete security and freedom – Not about having all, but having Jesus as my all. Believers often derive security from what we have, or our own preparatory work. Jesus did not have everything, He only knows the Father who is completely near to Him and whose provision and care that are beyond human imagination. Perhaps, to worry, is not seeing God for who He is, and how He is intimately related to every aspect of our life, working all things for our good. Christ's spirituality may be radically subversive of the world, but it is also a life of complete freedom. The world is full of human arrangement that is largely based on fear, programming human to operate out of fear, deriving security from things due to fear. But “Jesus had gone through death to destroy the one who had power of death, thus setting free everyone whose lives were held in slavery by fear of death”. We are not under bondages of fear, it is for freedom that God sent His Son to the world, to die for us, to conquer death and resurrect to life.
Death to self – This is not being ascetic, rather, we are relinquishing our old ways because our life is now saved by Jesus’s life (Romans 5:10), and we are desiring to keep in step with the Spirit. We live as new creations, and are under God's total care. We are contended in God’s hands for He is sovereign and in charge of all outcomes no matter how things may seem out of ways in human’s lens. It is out of love that we put to death our old ways of self-serving, our ideals, our expectations, our personal interests; it is out of love for God and others that we yearn to challenge our complacency and comfort zones by looking to Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, and press on to live in the new way of Spirit.
Spiritual growth is a life gearing towards more of Christ, and less of ourselves.
I hope when opportunities come and people do ask me, I can grasp the chance and let them know, “because I need Jesus, and because by doing so I get to know Him more and more, and I pray by God’s grace and mercy, I can be more and more like Jesus, so that people around me can come to know Jesus through me too.”
"The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." Galatians 2:20
A reflection after reading Jesus, by Dallas Willard (Dictionary of Christian Spirituality)
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