Walking through the Door

I’ve been chatting via email with my aunt for several days on the difficulty of writing about spiritual habits. It can sound like I'm saying we have a check list of things we must do each day in order to be “good” Christians. Encouraging people to pray and read their Bibles daily can be misinterpreted as pretty legalistic. Worse, it can set up those of us with performance mentalities for discouragement when we fail or--conversely--for feelings of pride and self-righteousness when we “succeed.”

My aunt described the spiritual disciplines in a way that was helpful to me and so I thought I would share it. She said that we need to think of spiritual disciplines (like prayer and Bible study) as a simple choice to walk through a door. “Through that simple choice we enter a 'room' where we shift our focus from daily stuff to God, from earth to eternal--our choice did not DO anything but open us up to what God is doing all the time.”

This month, try to approach your daily prayer and Bible reading as a choice through which you are going to open yourself up to all God is doing and all He wants to let you in on. When you feel like quitting, just tell yourself, “I can make this choice one more day.”

If you are the guilty type, try to drop nagging feelings about whether you are doing “enough” or whether you are doing it “right,” and just picture yourself making a simple choice to walk through a door to the place where God is. If, on the other hand, you have been patting yourself on the back for your progress in developing good spiritual habits, back up and put them in perspective. You are not earning your way into heaven or making yourself into a good Christian or really doing anything at all except putting yourself in the place that God can get to work.

"I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture....I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." John 10:9-10.