Today marks the fifteenth day of Lent, and it also marks the fifteenth evening I will go to sleep with a sullied record. In other years I would have not bothered with Lent at all, or by this time have raised my white flag in swift defeat. This year, however, I feel free to embrace discipline, and the consequent uphill climb that comes with it.
When deciding on my Lenten practices, I didn’t choose that which would be the most sacrificial. I decided to scale back my online reading, giving attention only to the five or six writers I subscribe to. And while I did incorporate abstinence, my focus bent more towards the adding in rather than the taking away.
I had noticed in recent months that when it came to learning, I was never feeling full. I had been consuming such large amounts of opinion and information that engorgement was my new baseline, and anything less left me hungry.
The slow digesting of truth was no longer satisfying.
In a recent post, Jen Pollock Michel said this:
“I’m growing to believe that our invitation into spiritual formation isn’t the abandonment of desire but its reformation. My wisest prayer is not, Help me STOP wanting. My wisest prayer is, Teach me to want. Teach me to want in better ways. Let the character of my wanting be marked by trust in your goodness, surrender to your will. And help me to want for better things. Let not my heart’s affections be secured to lesser things.”
I had become so habituated to consuming the world, that I had become unacquainted with desire. I needed to re-introduce myself to the taste of food that satisfies. I needed a fast that would enable me to feast, a fast that would leave me wanting for Christ, and this would require nothing short of discipline. Not for discipline’s sake, but to instill the habit of clothing myself with Christ in every moment.
Putting this into practice has been difficult, though this should have come as no surprise. Paul speaks of self-discipline as strict training, not as a runner without destination or a boxer striking thin air, but a blow to the body, the enslavement of our flesh to the Spirit (1 Corinthians 9:24-27).
We’ll have to fight for discipline.
Perhaps this is why effort often gets thrown out as legalism. As soon as we sense a feeling of ‘trying’, we assume we must be lusting after our own righteousness through law keeping. We mistakenly think that if more of God is what we’re after, we would come to our practices with yearning. And so we run from that which will propel us through the race, in lieu of embracing the grunt work that yields reward.
In The Weight of Glory, C. S. Lewis wrote that “a man’s physical hunger does not prove that man will get bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist.”
Your desire for putting on Christ through sacrifice and habit does not ensure that you will always have success. But this desire attests to the fact that you were made for the serious task of sanctification. Sometimes yearning precedes discipline, but often discipline not only precedes, but breeds that yearning. Let us not forget that the regular habit of coming to God, in whichever form you choose, will always yield a reorientation of both heart and mind. When you want to want, meet God and trust that he will meet with you.
God will never fail to honor the desire that propels your discipline.
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