Some ways we’ve hijacked your spiritual life
12.18.2009 | All Blog Posts, The Prayer of the Heart
Unfortunately, the spiritual life has too often been hijacked by well-meaning, but misguided agendas. These agendas are largely responsible for the ache you often feel, the emptiness in your spiritual life, despite the best intentions of religious leaders.
- You’ve heard pastors tell you that you are “blessed to be a blessing,” making your spiritual life an instrument toward some other purpose.
- Worship in the churches has often been reduced to entertainment, and you, a spectator—or worse a ticket paying patron of the artists who perform religious acts on stage before you.
- You’ve learned to think the faith, assenting to right doctrine, but despite your ardent belief, your heart misses the reality the doctrine is meant to communicate.
- And frequently your hunger for God’s nabbed by those who want to enlist you in their great causes—as good as they may be, they exhaust you and leave you panting for more than what they can give you.
You want God, but we’ve given you religion.
Religion is not opposed to God, but it can too easily become a surrogate for the real thing. Prayer—genuine prayer—introduces you to the goal of all religion, and the Jesus Prayer is among the most ancient forms of genuine prayer.
12.18.2009
and so…we move forward, listening, quietly for that still small voice that calls us to prayer, to heal the ache, and rest in our Saviour. Thank you Chris, for giving us God, not religion. blessings, lj
12.19.2009
And thank you, LJ, for helping us live a more vibrant spiritual life.
12.20.2009
I’ve had to respond/react to some colleagues recently, viz., that if we “think a thought” during a sermon (or a similar experience)- largely a cognitive exercise- then we interpret that as a faithful response to the Lord Jesus. To which I would elaborate: maybe.
The line dividing faithfulness from idolatry (trusting our own minds-thoughts-voices) without community and praxis engaging-constructing-critiquing that “thought” has a long history of merely producing the four bullets you listed.
12.21.2009
Mike, thanks for this. There is no question that we are to “think” the faith. But we do get stuck in our heads…over-identified with thoughts. St. Paul teaches that we are to “take every thought captive” (2 Cor 10). Who is it that takes thoughts captive? There must be a deeper self, a truer self beneath or above our cognitive self. But thoughts would love us to worship them; the unhealed/unheeled ego is essentially idolatrous.