Extreme Devotion
From the Series—Extreme
October 14, 2003This evotional continues our extreme series.
Let me tell you what this evotional is not. It is not a soft-sell, watered-down, sugar-coated, easy-to-swallow version of Christianity because that’s not what Jesus offered. And I don’t think that’s what we’re looking for. Jesus never lowered the bar. He always raised the bar. And that’s what he does in Luke 9:23. He said, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me.”
Disown
The word “deny” means “to disown.” Jesus was saying, “If anyone would come after me he must disown himself.”
Seven years ago we bought our first house and moved into DC. The day of settlement we went to our broker’s office and signed a stack of legal documents. One of those documents was the deed. The owners signed over the deed and there was a transfer of ownership. In the same sense, when you settle with Christ there is a transfer of ownership. You sign over the deed to your life. You disown yourself. You give yourself back to your rightful owner —the God who created you.
I Corinthians 6:19 says, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.”
This is theology 101: you don’t belong to you! You belong to God. And God doesn’t want part of you. He wants all of you. And that is what extreme devotion is all about—giving yourself unreservedly to God. Your body is His Temple!
Halfway
I Chronicles 28:9 says, “Serve the Lord with wholehearted devotion.” Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart.” Jeremiah 29:13 says, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all of your heart.” Malachi 3:10 says, “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse.” Luke 10:27 says, “Love the Lord your God with all of your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.”
All those verses say the same thing in slightly different ways. God doesn’t want half of you . He doesn’t want half your heart. He doesn’t want half your mind. He doesn’t want half your tithe. He doesn’t want half your talents. He wants all of you.
Think about it in these terms. Last week I did a wedding for two NCCers. I went back and rewrote the vows with a few minor alterations. Here they are: I take you to be my wife and I promise before God that I will share half my life with you. I will honor and respect you half the time. I will trust you and love with you with half of my heart through joy and sorrow, in sickness and in health for half of our lives. As the Lord is my witness I give you this half-hearted vow.
Can you imagine? Of course not! Your spouse wants and deserves all of you. In the same sense, God wants and deserves more than part of us. He wants and deserves all of us.
I like the way Brent Curtis and John Eldredge talk about it in their book Sacred Romance. “From one religious camp we’re told that what God wants is obedience or sacrifice or adherence to the right doctrines or morality. He is concerned about all these things, of course, but they are not his primary concern. What is after is us —our laughter, our tears, our dreams, our fears, our heart of hearts.”
Starting Line
Let me go back to Luke 9:23. Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me he must deny himself.” You’ve got to come to a point where you disown yourself. That initial decision to put your faith in Christ sets off an amazing chain reaction. In that moment, your sin is forgiven and forgotten. You name is written in the book of life. You become a child of God. You become a temple of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit infills and empowers you. That initial decision totally changes the trajectory of your life. But let me counterbalance that with this. Jesus says, “Take up your cross daily and follow me.” Devotion is not a once-for-all deal. Devotion is a daily decision.
Brian McLaren makes a great observation in his book A New Kind of Christian. He says, “I think the standard definition of salvation breeds passivity. It’s like a line in the sand, and we say, ‘The most important thing is to be on the other side of this line.’ What then? I see a huge contrast between crossing a line in this way, and following Jesus on a journey. It’s as if we’ve taken what was for Jesus the starting line and turned it into a finish line.”
What a great distinction. Some of you reading this evotional will make a decision to cross the line. And it’ll trigger this spiritual chain reaction that I described. But what I want you to know is that it’s not a finish line. It’s a starting line.
Day by Day
There is actually a double emphasis on the word “daily” in Luke 9:23. A literally reading from the Greek would read, “If anyone would come after me he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, daily and follow me.”
I love Fredrick Buechner’s perspective on today. He said, “It is the first day because it has never been before and it is the last day because it will never be again.” I think we need that perspective when it comes to extreme devotion. Today is the first day and the last day of your life. The question is: will you deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Christ?
One of my all-time favorite movie scenes is Ben Stiller’s pre-dinner prayer in the movie Meet the Parents. What’s funny is that several months after watching the movie I was reading a book on Ignatian prayer and I discovered that Ben Stiller’s prayer is a real prayer. It was originally written by Richard of Chichester in the 13th century. His original prayer went like this. “Of thee three things I pray. To see thee more clearly, to love thee more dearly, to follow thee more nearly, day by day.” Of course, Ben Stiller added the “day by day by day by day.”
I wish I had more time to talk about this approach to life, but suffice it say we are designed to live day-by-day. I think it’s at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. He says it here in Luke 9:23. And he says it in Matthew 6:34. “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” I love the Message translation. It says, “Live one day at a time.”
The way you live a life of devotion is one day at a time. Devotion is a daily decision. All of us have good days. All of us have bad days. But we need to break devotion down into daily units of time.
I think sometimes we take too much pride in what we did for God yesterday and live in the past tense. Or we boast about what we’ll do for God tomorrow and live in the future tense. But God wants us to live in the present tense. Thomas Carlyle said it this way. “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance but to do what lies clearly at hand.”
Distraction
Let me switch lenses and look at devotion from another angle. You can turn over to I Corinthians 7:35 or follow along in your notes.
I Corinthians 7:35 says, “Live in undivided devotion to the Lord.” The word “devotion” means “without distraction.” Extreme devotion is becoming less distracted and more focused on your relationship with Christ. Here is the challenge. We live in a culture of distraction.
Thomas Davenport and John Beck have written a fascinating book titled The Attention Economy. They talk about everything that is competing for attention and they argue that most Americans suffer from attention deficit disorder. We just don’t have the wherewithal to give attention to everything that deserves and demands our attention.
The Sunday edition of the New York Times contains more factual information than all the printed material available to the average person living in the 15 th century! One newspaper! 300,000 books are published worldwide every year. There are 18,000 different magazines published in the U.S. alone. And if you have time to get through all the books and magazines there are 40,000 scholarly journals published annually around the world. All of that is to say this: information overload. The Nobel-prize winning economist Herbert Simon makes an interesting observation. He said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
I’m not going to take time to talk about television and the internet. But most of us can’t keep up with our email inbox let alone invest the time and attention necessary to build healthy relationships with our family and friends. Suffice it to say, if you want to you can live in a state of constant distraction. You can distract yourself to death. And the challenge we face as followers of Christ is live in undivided devotion to the Lord.
The Law of Concentration
Hebrews 12:2 says, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus.”
As a kid I remember watching Walter Payton do his patented up and over move at the goal line. We used to go down in our basement, pile up the pillows, and do up and overs just like Payton. In High School I watched Michael Jordan make his moves and we could put a trampoline out by our basketball hoop and we would imitate his dunks. Hold that thought.
The word “fix” literally means to turn your eyes away from other things and focus them on something else —in this case Christ. How do we do that? I think one way is by spending time reading and meditating on the gospels. You watch Jesus make his moves and then we try to imitate.
I like the way the medieval mystic Thomas a’ Kempis said it in his classic book Imitation of Christ. He said, “We must imitate Christ’s life and his ways if we are to be truly enlightened. Let it be the most important thing we do, then, to reflect on the life of Jesus.”
In one of his books, A.W. Tozer talks about the law of concentration. The difference between a good musician and a great musician is the ability of the great musician to concentrate more fully or for longer periods of time on their music. Great athletes have the ability to concentrate when they are in the batter’s box or at the free throw line. In the same sense, your ability to concentrate on Christ will determine the level of your devotion. Tozer said, “Christians who do not know this law will never be anything but half-Christians all their lives.”
Practicing the Presence
In the 17th century, a Carmelite friar named Brother Lawrence wrote a book that has become a spiritual classic titled The Practice of the Presence of God.
The singular goal of his life was to live in the presence of God. His life was an experiment in how to concentrate on Christ. What’s interesting is that he said that “formal times of prayer” appealed to Him less and less. He believed that prayer is not necessarily “saying prayers” but “a way of living in which all we do becomes a prayer.” He said, “Learn to see God and His glory in everything we do, say, and undertake.”
What’s impressive to me is that his life consisted primarily of menial tasks. But Brother Lawrence said, “Each of our actions is a way of carrying on a little conversation with God.”
He said, “There is no mode of life in the world more pleasing and more full of delight than continual conversation with God; only those who practice and experience it can understand it.”
Reasonable Service
Let me close with one more angle on devotion. Romans 12:1 says, “I urge you, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship.” That’s what the New International Version says, but I think the King James Version captures it better in this instance. It says, “This is your reasonable service.”
There is nothing unreasonable or illogical or unreasonable about this. To offer yourself as a “living sacrifice” is super-reasonable in light of God’s mercies! I love the way Jim Elliott said it. Just before being martyred for his faith, Jim Elliott journaled these words. “He is no fool who loses what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
Blaise Pascal, the 17 th century French Philosopher said it this way, “There are only two classes of persons who can be called reasonable: those who serve God with all of their hearts because they know him and those who seek God with all of their hearts because they do not know him.”
Reckless Abandon
I love the phrase “reckless abandon.” It seems so noble. It seems so brave. But I think it communicates the wrong message. This evotional is a challenge to live in extreme devotion to Christ, but not with reckless abandon. We believe that our most important decisions ought to be our most informed decisions. The ancient philosopher, Cicero, said it this way. “Nothing is more disgraceful than assent before you know.” The more informed your decision to follow Christ the more meaningful that decision will be. I’m not after a half-hearted or half-thought through commitment. What I’m after is “reasonable service.”
The Point of No Return
The week before our launch we did a prayer pilgrimage from Results Gym to Ballston Common Mall. After the pilgrimage a friend drove our mini-van to come pick us up. We drove back to Capitol Hill and when we got there the van was smoking. It was a terrible burning smell. We all stood around the van wondering what it was and then I think someone said something about the parking brake. Sure enough, I had driven the van from Ballston back to DC with the parking brake on. I’m not real mechanical, but I’ve heard that’s bad for your brakes!
That’s how some people live their lives— always riding the brakes. At some point you need to put the pedal to the metal. You hit the point of no return. The point of no return is that critical point where you can’t stop for the red light; you need to “ go for it.” In aeronautical terms the point of no return is that critical point where you don’t have enough fuel to return to your point of departure .
Halfway is no way to live. Live in extreme devotion.
D.L. Moody said, “The world has yet to see what God can do through one person wholly committed to him.”