faith

Grace Upon Grace:: The Mystery of Meditation and How To Meditate

March 14, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 16 Comments

orange blossoms

In this modern era of the revival of new age practices, many christians are frightened by meditation. We wonder how to meditate in a way that is orthodox and God-pleasing. Dr. Kleinig is the perfect teacher on this subject. I loved this chapter with all it’s Christ-focused and practical advice. But since I’ve been at the San Diego Zoo all day and am about to go to Little Italy to Buon Appetito for dinner, I thought I’d let you discuss the chapter in the comments and then I’ll add my thoughts and your thoughts to this post once you’ve had a chance to share. Which reminds me of a post that must be written called ‘How Foodies Travel’.

Two other things:

1. I’m so thankful that I didn’t go my whole life without smelling orange blossoms. It’s a beautiful thing to be savored and relished. The orange was pretty awesome too.

2. Lanie Beth is ADORABLE and she has an awesome blog about style and we are so lucky to have her posting today over at life{in}grace girls! I LOVE her philosophy on personal style and gratitude. Go give her some love 🙂

Grace Upon Grace::The Mystery of Christ

March 7, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 11 Comments

Welcome to week 2 of our Lenten devotional book study of John Kleinig’s Grace Upon Grace: Spirituality for Today
Week one is here if you’re just joining us.

Our Hidden Life

Jesus maintains that the true goal of our spirituality is for us to be seen by God, open to His searching and yet gracious scrutiny, known and appreciated by Him. Our spirituality is part of our secret life with the unseen Father, the God who knows our hearts and sees what is done in secret. No progress can be made unless we are honest with ourselves before God the Father…….We are justified by God’s grace and approved by Him. Our justification does not depend on our piety (spirituality) and our performance but on Christ and His performance. We can therefore face up to our recurring failure to live as His holy people and people of prayer. In fact, our failure is meant to teach us to ask for what we lack and receive everything from Christ.

Wow! Dr. Kleinig says that the most common image that the scriptures give for our spiritual life is a journey. Our journey is simply a pilgrimage with Him as He takes on His way, the way of the cross, and delivers us ultimately to the Father’s presence in eternity.

It is a journey in which we live by the grace of God. As we travel with Christ, God the Father reaches out to each of us in the same way through His Word. Through this Word, He generates and maintains our faith; through His word, which is enacted in proclamation, absolution, Baptism, and Holy Communion, He gives us the Holy Spirit and all His gifts. In that journey everything comes to us from Him through His Word; in it we all receive grace upon grace from the fullness of the Father.

Dr. Kleinig then gives such a beautiful poetic description of how we participate in the mystery of Christ’s life in our daily journey with Him toward heaven. I can’t even begin to do it justice. You’ll have to get the book!

A Clear Conscience

One of the things that keeps us from yearning to spend time in God’s word and in prayer is our guilty conscience. And Dr. Kleinig makes such a strong case for how our state of our conscience ‘colors’ our experience with God. We all have this sense that something is not quite right with us. We try to ‘measure up’ to some standard but never seem to do it. This leaves us with a tainted conscience. Kleinig states that nothing is worse than the confusion that a bad conscience brings.

When we have a bad conscience, we see God as a strict lawgiver and a harsh judge, a moral watchdog and a moral detective, someone out to get us. His disapproval of our sin, His anger against injustice, is experienced as His personal disapproval and rejection of us as people. We resent His demands. We fear His condemnation. He seems to act as if He were our enemy. And so we work hard at getting God off our backs. Failing that, we try to avoid Him by minimizing our contact with Him and anything to do with Him.

This bad conscience that comes from failing to measure up to God’s law is only half the story. Through the forgiveness and life of Christ given to us at Baptism, we are granted a clear conscience because we are given the clear conscience of Christ Himself. “The key to life in the presence of God is the good conscience that comes from the Holy Spirit through the conviction of sin and assurance of forgiveness and salvation.”

What beautiful comfort when we let the gospel in all its’ take captive our hearts and minds.

That leaves about the last 1/3 of the chapter for you to talk about in the comments. Or you can talk about the first 2/3’s of the chapter.

What do you think so far? Doesn’t he have such a gentle and encouraging way about him? And his relentless focus on Christ as the giver of all good things is so refreshing.

What’s your favorite section/quote/concept?

At last, a devotional book that doesn’t make me feel more guilty.

Thank you Dr. Kleinig!

You Make Beautiful Things

March 4, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 19 Comments

I had the privilege of hearing my two oldest sing yesterday at the Ridgecrest Youth Conference.

After living through a horrific tragedy and watching God make beautiful things from dust, this song is my grateful anthem.

You think you’re raising your kids but they’re really raising you. (Thank you to my mother-in-law for that very true statement.)

Blessed Lent.

Grace Upon Grace:: Personal Devotions

February 29, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 20 Comments

This is week one of a six week devotional study of the book Grace upon Grace by Dr. John Kleinig. It’s not too late to join us and this book is such a gem as it relates to the devotional life of the believer. We are reviewing the introduction of the book this week which is called Receptive Spirituality and then we’ll dive into the 5 chapters over the next five Wednesdays in Lent. I will post each Wednesday and then if you’re participating in the study (or even if you aren’t!), I’d love for us to have a discussion in the comments section over what we’ve read. Dr. Kleinig is an Old Testament scholar and retired in 2009 from full time teaching at Luther Seminary in Australia. I first heard him speak when I listened to this unbelievable two hour study on the book of Leviticus on Issues Etc. I think I’ve listened to it 5 or 6 times. You think Leviticus is dry and uninteresting? Not anymore. Give it a try and make sure you have time to really listen and concentrate. It’s chocked full of Christ-centered teaching and will open up the OT law and its’ fulfillment in Christ like nothing you’ve ever heard.

Let’s dive in to Week 1:: Receptive Spirituality

I’m gonna confess right off the bat that I have ALWAYS struggled with personal devotions/personal spirituality. It’s been a constant source of guilt and doubt for me. If I truly love God and am a christian then why do I often despise His Word and neglect to seek Him in prayer? Why do I live so much of my life from my own strength and fail to access the gifts of Christ given freely in His Word? Back in the day of my outright legalism, my failure to live a ‘successful’ private devotional life led me to despair. Then I would try harder and succeed for a while. Until I didn’t and then my friend despair was always so happy to step in On occasion, I’d go for months with a stellar devotional life, or so I thought, and I’d be right proud of myself. Look how ‘spiritual’ I’m becoming, I would whisper quietly as I patted my spiritual self on the back. But those two ditches (self-righteousness and self-pity) are not where true spirituality are found. As Dr. Kleinig so wonderfully points out, they are found in Christ alone.

He, like Luther, likens our posture to God as beggars. We realize that we bring nothing to this process of spiritual growth. We are the receivers of all good things, of grace upon grace.

Kleinig says,

“Spiritual life does not come to us haphazardly. The Holy Spirit—and the life the Holy Spirit brings—is available to us only in Christ. And He gives this life to us through His word and through faith in His Word. This means that our spirituality does not come from having spiritual powers or from our spiritual self-development but depends on our faith in Him. Because we are joined to Christ we continually receive life from Him.”

and

“Jesus does not offer us superhuman life; He does not turn us into supermen and women with extraordinary physical and mental powers. Instead, He swaps places with us. He joins us in our human life on earth so that we can join Him in His life with God the Father. By Jesus’ union with us, we share in His sonship. Jesus’ position with God the Father, His status and all His privilege as God’s only Son, His righteousness and His holiness, His access to the Father, His Father’s love and delight in Him, and the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit, are all ours through faith in Jesus…… In short, we borrow everything from Him.”

Borrowing from Martin Luther and his study of the Psalms, he says you will find there 3 general rules for receptive spirituality: prayer (oratio), meditation (meditate) and temptation (tentative).

Prayer

We pray for the Holy Spirit to be our teacher and the Holy Spirit enlightens us through the Word. “So we pray for enlightenment, guidance and understanding that the Holy Spirit alone can give through the scriptures…..The Holy Spirit turns us would be spiritual self-promoters into humble, lifelong students of the scriptures. Prayer for God’s ongoing bestowal of the Holy Spirit through Jesus and the ongoing reception of the Holy Spirit is the foundation for Christian spirituality.

That concept seems so simple and yet it is so profound. We approach the scriptures with humility and as beggars and we plead and pray that God’s spirit would enliven us through this powerful, living Word. It will change the way we read the Bible. We don’t come with my superimposed ideas of what I think this passage says. We learn to come asking, seeking and begging for help, answers, strength, and faith. And our Father who loves us receives us graciously and gives us Himself.

Meditation

God gives His spirit with the external Word. “The Word of God is a means of grace by which God the Father grants the Holy Spirit through His dear Son. We receive the Holy Spirit through meditation on His Word. If there is no Word, there is no Spirit.” He describes a very specific meditation where we speak God’s words to ourselves and we listen attentively to them them with our whole heart. “We speak it to ourselves again and again; we read and reread it; we compare what it says one place with what it says elsewhere in the Bible; we chew at it in order to digest it; we rub at it, like an herb that releases its fragrance and healing powers by being crushed; we take it in physically, mentally and emotionally, so that it reaches our hearts, our core, the very center of our being.” Kleinig borrows from Luther who is adamant that meditation is a mostly outward activity and that we ought to beware when we use the scriptures as merely a springboard for our own inward directed ascension into the heavenlies.

Temptation

“Temptation is the touchstone that God uses to access our spirituality…. Temptation reveals what is otherwise hidden from us…..and tests the authenticity of our faith and proves our spiritual health.”

As long as we operate by our own power, with our own intellect and our own human notions, the devil lets us be. But as soon as we meditate on God’s spirit-filled Word and draw on the power of the Holy Spirit by meditating on it, the devil attacks us by stirring up misunderstanding, contradiction, opposition, and persecution. He mounts that attack through enemies of the Gospel in the Church and in the world. The purpose of his attack is to destroy our faith and undo the hidden work of God’s word in us.”

This section on temptation hit me like a ton of bricks. The past few months, I’ve been much more diligent about making time to read and study. Instead of feeling more spiritual and knowledgeable, I’ve felt so inadequate. I’ve wondered if I really even have faith, at times. I don’t see any self-improvement, only a host of new sins and struggles. But that only serves to drive me back to prayer and to the scriptures. Hmmm, prayer, meditation, temptation. I think I finally see that the pattern. It’s not glamorous and it’s not some spiritual ladder to heaven. It’s daily dying and rising. Our lives are hidden in Christ and we shouldn’t look for some sort of measurable ‘growth’ or improvement.

“Christian spirituality is, quite simply, following Jesus.”

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Okay, it’s your turn. What are your thoughts? Don’t you love how he focuses so heavily on Christ and what we receive from Him—and not so much on what we do or don’t do?

Lenten Devotion::Grace Upon Grace

February 20, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 35 Comments

Lent begins this week on Ash Wednesday and I want to invite you to go on a Lenten journey with me. I’ll be reading the book Grace Upon Grace by John Kleinig and posting once a week about the reading. The book has an introduction and then five chapters so we’ll take the introduction this week and meet here to discuss it next Wednesday (Feb. 27th) and then take one chapter a week until Easter.

The book is about spirituality for the christian, perhaps the most misunderstood topic and word in our modern vernacular.

Kleinig introduces the book with this:

“The modern interest in spirituality is a bit like our interest in health. Our obsession with health is not at all healthy; in fact, it emphasizes the problems that we have without providing much of a solution to them. So, too, with our concern for spirituality! Despite the multitude of books on spirituality that can be found in the bookshop, Christians seem to find it harder than ever to practice what they believe. So many aspire to be spiritual high fliers but never seem to get off the ground for any length of time. As the failures mount, so does the fascination with what seemingly cannot be achieved. The only thing we learn is that something is lacking in this part of our lives. But we end up with no understanding on how to fill the void……If we have problems living the life of faith, if we have challenges in our practice of prayer, the solution is not to be found in what we do, our self-appraisal, or our performance. The solution to our problems is found in what we receive from God Himself, in His appraisal of us, and in His gifts to us. Like our physical life and health, our spiritual life is something that is given to us, something that is to be received and enjoyed and celebrated. Our piety is all a matter of receiving grace upon grace from the fullness of God the Father. “

Isn’t that good stuff? The book is chocked full of this all too rare theological truth—-that we already have everything we need from the Father and we are merely learning to live from His fullness, which was bestowed on us at our Baptism.

Too often our Lenten journeys are ‘try-hard’ failures. We give up coffee—-for a while. We pray daily—-until we don’t. We pull ourselves up with our spiritual bootstraps and suffer, by-golly.

But Lent is not about our supposed sacrifice of some earthly passion. Lent is a journey with Christ to His passion.

Lent is not a time to focus on ourselves and our own particular abundance or lack of self-discipline. Lent is a time of self-forgetfulness, where we learn to live more in union with Christ and less from our own capabilities.

Our Lenten discipline does not make us more holy. We have the very righteousness of Christ and His holiness already.

Our Lenten failures do not make us more wretched but serve to remind us that our wretchedness has cost our Savior His life and that He has gone to every length to secure our ransom.

We take this journey with Him to learn from Him what it means to be His child. To remember what it’s like to be loved by Our Father.

To learn to receive from His hand nothing more and nothing less than what He Himself gives.

Lent is about Christ and His pilgrimage to the Cross, where His love is poured out for all humanity.

Spirituality is His work in us as He creates faith and repentance.

But what does that daily spirituality look like? Dr. John Kleinig will be the perfect study leader as we explore what it really means to be spiritual. Join us for lenten devotions.

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You may purchase Grace Upon Grace through this link and I’m donating my Amazon Affiliate funds to purchase 4 books for anyone who would like to participate in this book study but isn’t able to buy the book right now. Just email me with your name and address and I’ll choose the first four people who respond:)

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Winner of Grace for the Good Girl by Emily Freeman is Sarah Pinnault! Email me with your address, Sarah, and I’ll get the book out to you.

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You can find podcasts of Dr. Kleinig’s teachings here.

Shame

February 12, 2012 by Edie Wadsworth 35 Comments

We go to great lengths to cover our sin. We hide it, deny it, justify it, psychologize it, and rationalize it.

Perhaps we are even so far removed from our sin that we call it by a different name altogether. We make ‘mistakes’, we are ‘inclined’ toward certain things, we have a ‘tendency’ to get angry, we are in the bad ‘habit’ of lying, gossiping and cheating. And perhaps we do this unconsciously because the word ‘sin’ makes us uncomfortable. Sin often travels with his big brother Shame and we’d do almost anything not to have Shame around. Psychologists have gone so far as to convince us that we need not have shame at all, only ‘repressions and inhibitions’.

C.S. Lewis said this of shame, “Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one….In trying to extirpate shame, we have broken down of the ramparts of the human spirit.”

Shame literally means ‘to cover’ and it’s one of the most uncomfortable human emotions that exists, which is why we avoid it like the plague.

Shame is the painful feeling that arises from the consciousness of something dishonorable, disgraceful, humiliating. Shame makes us seek cover. It makes of want to shrink to nothing.

Lewis claims that we as a civilization have lost our ability to know real shame and thus lost our ability to appreciate the depth of our depravity.

But we’ve all been there. We’ve all been guilty of that ‘thing’ which we hope noone ever finds out, ‘that ugly and mean action which not even the worst of our friends would have done.’

Lewis says, “At such a moment we really do know that our character, as revealed to us in this action, is, and ought to be, hateful to all good men, and to God.”

And then he makes a leap that I’m still wrestling with in my mind.

He entertains the thought that though our sins are forgiven fully in Christ, they are not washed out by time. Time does not cancel them. His argument is that all times are present to God and perhaps it’s possible that He forever sees you ‘lying and lusting and in that moment of cowardice.’ “It may be that salvation consists not in the canceling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe.”

“Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public place.”

So, my question to us all is this; why will we do almost anything to prevent ourselves from being exposed, from feeling shame?”

Why do we so violently protect our ‘good’ name and ‘good’ reputation. I suspect we have not plumbed the depths of our own sinful heart.

But it is at that precise moment—-in our despair—-that our hearts can perceive the need for forgiveness. It is on the bedrock of guilt and shame that we can know true Rescue. Our brokenness and disgrace has brought death, a literal wasting away, and now the mercy and compassion of Christ can raise us to life. Shame is not our enemy. He may well be the gatekeeper to our freedom and joy.

“The perfected humanity that bears the shame forever…..”—–that will take a Divine intervention.

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All ideas and quotes taken from The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis