I’m just not being Fed: On Diagnosing our Spiritual Moments
“You just need to pray more.” Have you ever been told that by a well-intentioned friend? In the midst of your frustration or exhaustion with a personal situation, you vent to someone about it, and they draw the conclusion that simply devoting more of your words to God rather than to your friend is the solution to your problem. Now, I love to pray. I am a firm believer in the power of prayer. It is a vital lifeline to communion with God. But can we entertain an idea that maybe we are misdiagnosing our specific spiritual issue (read: moment) by saying all that needs to be done to fix it is a few more “venting” sessions to God (be honest: when you’re desperate, you do it. I do it too)?
Enter: Spiritual Disciplines. In short, spiritual disciplines are actions found in the Bible that promote spiritual growth. Things like engaging in solitude and silence. There’s no shortage of accounts in the Gospel when out Jesus withdrew from the crowds and even His disciples to rest and to hear from His Father. And sometimes people might de-emphasize the importance of those actions by saying that Jesus only did it as an example for us humans to maybe try sometime, but let’s be real: Jesus was fully God and fully human. He needed to rest. And so do we.
So before resolving to “just pray more,” consider the possibility that perhaps your spiritual discipline of prayer is fine, but your situation is calling you to beef it up when it comes to reading your Bible, investing in godly friendships, working on submission, surrendering more of yourself in worship or service, fasting from “distractions,” or other practices. This is a short list (read more about it in The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard), so I encourage you to do some research to find one that’s more comprehensive. I firmly believe that practicing these spiritual disciplines are key to strengthening one’s faith, mainly because of the below disordered results that can come from the lack thereof:
1. Church hopping. Or leaving your church when you don’t really need to
· Maybe you’ve said this or heard someone leaving their church say something along the lines of “I’m just not being fed.” There’s some legitimacy to that statement. Perhaps that church is not preaching from scripture or is lacking or compromising fundamental components of scriptural constructs and responsibilities of a church. Got it. But if you are contemplating changing churches, care for one more consideration before you do? Re-assess the situation. Make a careful exploration of your spiritual journey as it relates to spiritual disciplines. Is it possible that you’re leaving because your church is not catering to the edification of the spiritual discipline you’ve realized you need to work on?
· I’m not a church planning expert, so I can’t say whether or not it is the responsibility of the church to have a specialized training program or sermon series for every single spiritual discipline available at all times. But rest assured that God is ready to help us learn to “feed ourselves,” rather than solely rely on the church building to supply all of our needs according to its riches in resources (or lack thereof).
· While we are meant to live in community, our personal spiritual journey is ours. Just because our friend feels called to leave doesn’t mean that we should follow their example, especially if we haven’t personally consulted God in a meaningful way. In the same way, just because our pastor didn’t delve so deeply into one discipline this week doesn’t mean that we cannot take on a personal responsibility to deepen our knowledge of that area ourselves. It doesn’t hurt to ask God to guide your process.
· Now, if leaving your church is about being obedient to the next step God is calling you to, that’s a completely different story. In all, I just want us to be careful when we make a decision to uproot ourselves from one community and into another. If done well, we will flourish. If not done well, we may wither. Which leads me to my next disordered result…
2. Disavowing the Christian faith entirely
· I want to believe that anyone who has ever decided to no longer follow Jesus didn’t just wake up one morning after consistently experiencing a flourishing and fulfilling sense of meaning through Jesus, and decide “Nah, I don’t believe it anymore.” I can’t speak for everyone when I say that someone’s departure from Christianity is, more often than not, slow and stepwise. Perhaps after a series of unfortunate events and unanswered (or unsatisfactorily answered) questions, unrequited feelings, and unreconciled betrayals, someone decided it’s just not worth it anymore.
· Perhaps we’ve never known that consistently engaging in these diverse spiritual disciplines is exactly what we need to encounter God in a different way, in order to cultivate our faith, like re-potting a plant in a larger vessel so its roots may grow deeper and its leaves and branches may grow taller and stronger.
· The key here is that these are things that are not self-focused, but God-centered. We benefit, yes, but the goal is loving God and knowing His heart more deeply so that we may have a heart like His, strengthened by Him to live out the specific path of life He’s calling us into. It’s not the same as self-love. At its core, it’s really self-sacrifice (our time, resources, habits, maybe social media).
· Lastly, we should be careful to not intertwine worldly spiritual practices such as witchcraft, horoscopes, fortune-telling, healing crystals, etc. with spiritual disciplines, as the former are strictly forbidden in scripture and will not only cloud our ability to hear from God but can draw us away from His being the focus of our lives.
Whether you’re flourishing or feel like you’re withering, if you’ve left your church and feel great about it, or didn’t and feel great about it, or you feel bad about the whole thing, own the spiritual moment you’re in and use spiritual disciplines to allow God’s grace and guidance to overflow.
In love and veritas,
Chioma