The Spiritual Practice of Reflection

A necessity is a must have, must do: You must read your Bible. You must pray. You must practice reflection.

But, why must you practice these spiritual disciplines?

The critic fears that “you must” establishes human behavior as essential to salvation, or gaining favor with God, or that improved personal effort can enhance how God feels about you. The critic of the spiritual disciplines hears: You must in order for God to (fill in the blank).

Not only are these misunderstandings, but failing to grasp the proper reason underlying the practice of the spiritual disciplines means that you won’t practice the spiritual disciplines. That creates a real impediment in living the Christian life. If the disciplines truly are a must, then you must practice them to attain your heart’s desire: to know God intimately. Falling short of this grace cheapens your relationship with God.

You must implement and practice the spiritual disciplines—not to gain standing or favor with God, but in order to optimally and consistently put yourself in position to practice the faith and implement it practically into your life. In so doing, not only is the abstraction of faith converted into concrete behaviors, but the depth, texture, and vitality of your relationship with God becomes more experientially real, i.e. relevant.

Richard Foster teaches that the spiritual disciplines are like a path that you walk to meet with God. On either side of the path are precipices. On one side is the cliff that falls into the abyss of legalism and on the other is the cliff that falls into the abyss of license.  

When a person becomes a Christian, the old self dies and a new self is raised with Christ. The dark, wicked heart that Jeremiah wrote about is transplanted with a new heart that is tender toward God. Upon the walls of this new heart are inscribed the desires and laws of God. Jesus Christ lives in us, we in Him, and the Holy Spirit is called alongside to guide us, comfort us, and intercede for us. In Him, we are sealed, secure, sanctified, and made holy enough for God to call us His dwelling place.

Simply stated: this is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Any attempt to improve upon the work of Jesus Christ is legalism. Any presumption upon the work of Christ, any disregard, and any manipulation of Christ’s work is license.

Thus, any hint of “you must in order to get God to” is to be renounced as legalism. Any hint of “I will do as I please because I am already forgiven” is to be renounced as license.

Yet still, “you must” remains integral to the spiritual life. There are over 1500 imperative statements in the New Testament. Rejecting this imperative to act for any reason is a failure to comprehend the deep desire of your heart that is your driving motive as a new creation: to know Jesus Christ.

Christian performance can be misguided into either legalism or license. But this does not remove the mandate of Christian performance in Scripture: “We are created for good works,” Ephesians states.

We must—but we must because it is in our hearts to do so.

We must because it is our true desire.

We must because it is part of our nature to be obedient to God.

We must because it is essential to making the abstraction of faith concrete in life.

We must because it is the means to knowing God personally versus knowing about God religiously.

The litmus test for performance is motive: Why am I doing what I do?

If I perform to improve my standing with God, my motive is misguided. How can I improve upon the finished accomplishments of Jesus Christ?

If I perform because I recognize doing so is the driving force of my new heart, then my motive is pure.

Returning to Foster’s image: As a child of God, I am on the path of the spiritual disciplines because I am motivated to know Christ more clearly, with deeper understanding, and greater earthly conviction.

I don’t do anything for God. Doing for God implies that God is poor enough that He needs my assistance.

The thing God deeply desires from me is my dedication to knowing Him foremost above all else in this life. The spiritual disciplines are my ticket to this increasing knowledge, understanding, and experiential closeness.

The first discipline—or practice—we explored was the spiritual practice of reading the Bible. To make reading Scripture more practical and beneficial, we formulated a series of four questions to ask:

What is this passage saying (am I comprehending)?

What is this passage telling me about God (who is God)?

What is this passage telling me about me (as a Christian, as a new person, as a child of God)?

What do I do with this passage (how does it guide my life)?

Building on the practiced discipline of reading the Bible, let’s explore the second discipline: the spiritual practice of reflection. It capitalizes on the four questions asked while reading and studying the Bible.

Comprehension is important. Retention—remembering what you read—is essential. Application is imperative. Failing in these means fundamental aspects of your salvation are pithy, unfounded, irrelevant to daily life.

Much of our Christian input comes in the form of an oral presentation, i.e. a sermon. While inspirational, maybe educational, here’s what research demonstrates: Immediately following a ten-minute presentation, listeners only remember 50% of what they heard. By the next day, their retention drops to 25%. A week later, 10%.

Is it any wonder that the people in the pew struggle to implement what they hear on Sunday? After a while, is it any wonder that the people in the pew decide the message they’re hearing isn’t relevant?  

Comprehension—true understanding, learning, proficiency, and acquiring of knowledge—increases the more of our senses that are engaged.

The beauty of reading the Bible is, a) you are seeing the words on the page, and b) hearing God speak to you from His writings.

Adding the discipline of personal reflection to your reading means that a third sense is engaged. When you make notes or journal your reflection on the four questions, your writing adds the sense of touch. Said another way, by practicing reflection, you interact with the information you read. Doing empowers hearing, not to mention the benefit of deeply processing what you read in collaboration with the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

If you verbally dictate your thoughts into a document, you add yet another layer of sensory association with your studies. If you study individually, and then get together with a small group who’ve also studied the passage, your verbalization and the dialogue with others further enhances your mastery of the passage.

Some study methods, like Precept, encourage you to illustrate what you read with various images, diagrams, and color-coded highlight. This adds another layer of sensory connection in addition to networking the categories of how we learn: auditory, visual, tactile, and reading.

Let me repeat: The more of your senses you incorporate into your study, the greater your retention and comprehension will be.

Even if you learn in one, primary manner, by cross-referencing your learning style with other learning styles, you better understand how a concept is assembled and how resilient it is to your analysis. Conceptual resiliency, paired with deep learning, creates mastery of a subject that is meaningful, resilient, and readily applicable and associative across multiple platforms

It is one thing to ask yourself the four questions as you read your Bible. It is another to actively reflect on a passage by journaling what you see, hear, and consider—and I trust you grasp that “journaling” is broadly defined, not specifically the act of writing in a blank book.

There’s nothing wrong at all with reading the Bible for pleasure or casual reading. If you require your reading to be intense each time you approach Scripture, it is likely to become a drudgery. The key is to vary your approach to reading but to understand mastery comes from diligent practice to make application.

I’m a fan of words on a piece of paper. Writing requires you to discipline your thoughts.

Take note of your thoughts. Listen to a conversation. Your mind leaps and jumps. Conversation is comprised of incomplete sentences, nuance, assumption, and presumption, and if face-to-face it relies on other’s body language and facial expression to let us know whether or not you are communicating.

The written word is not this way.

Sentence fragments. Incomplete sentences. Assumptions. Presumptions. Leaps in logic. None of this works when you write. The written word must be logical, sequential, rational, and thorough or the reader gets lost. This is true even if you are the reader of your own writing—and this is the power of journaling.

By disciplining your reflections into written words, you force your reading and personal reflection to make sense. If it doesn’t, you are forced to reconsider and rewrite.

Now I’m a writer, so I write words when I journal. But, I write in my journal differently than I do when I write to you. My articles are edited for public consumption. My journal is not.

When I journal, I write like I do when I’m writing a first draft. That is, I write what is in my head to write. I correct spelling, and I review what I’ve written for continuity, but I don’t do what I call wordsmithing. This means I gain the benefit of disciplined writing without enduring the tedious work of editing.

In learning theory, one of the primary resources used to teach people how to reason is the tool of compare and contrast. This is a form of abstract reasoning versus the more direct forms of inductive and deductive reasoning.

For example: Let’s say you are studying Romans 6:4-7 and read: 4 Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. 5 For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, 6 knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; 7 for he who has died is freed from sin.

This passage is an example of both deductive and inductive reasoning: Since Christ died and my old self was crucified with Him, I deduce that my old self died. The inductive aspect of the verse is: Since my old self died in Christ and my body of sin with it, I understand inductively that I am freed from sin.

But what if you compare and contrast as well: What was my old self? What was it like? Why did God hate it so much that Christ had to die? Therefore, in contrast: What is my new self? What is it like? Does this explain why God accepts me as unblemished? Then, by comparison: To live as though my old self is alive, creates internal conflict because I am new. By comparison, new people live new lives that, by contrast with the old life, exemplifies Christ’s life by walking in the power of the Spirit.

When you get to verse eleven, “Even so, consider yourself dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus,” the passage makes sense, i.e. it is relevant: you know that by considering yourself dead to sin, you are focused on how Scripture is implemented into your life.  

Inductive, deductive, and comparative reasoning all build layers of comprehension, memory, and applicability. This further increases the resiliency and depth of your learning. That is, your Christian life is steady, you are confident, and your disposition is secure because you have learned at a deep level—by practicing these two disciplines—who God is, who you are, and how this comprehension is applied.

This is faith in action, faith that is relevant.

Next up: the spiritual discipline of confession, not just of sin, but also of belief, dedication, etc. More soon.