Renewing, not wasting away
What things do you do to renew your spiritual life day by day? What things do you do to strengthen your spirit?
Here are some thoughts from a message I gave at Resurrection Spring Hill on June 9, 2024. My core text is 2 Corinthians 4:16. “So we do not lose heart,” the Apostle Paul says. “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.”
Getting old is not for sissies.
I’ve heard that saying for many years, and I’ve listened to many older people say that it’s true. Since I’ve started getting older myself, I can now testify directly that it’s true.
Call it a statute of limitations. After a certain age, each year seems to bring a new set of limitations.
For instance, I’ve had periodic back issues for a long time. Lately, though, they’ve been more regular than periodic, and they have become more limiting in what I can do. I do not like this development.
The other day I was leaving K&M Barbecue at the same time that a woman was entering who I thought looked old enough to be my mother, if not my grandmother. She smiled sweetly and held the door open for me. I smiled in return and said, “Thank you.”
I will gladly accept any help I can get it, when I need it. But it sure galls me to admit it when I need it.
In the passage we just read from Second Corinthians, the Apostle Paul is not speaking directly to the indignities of getting older. But I think it’s one of the things he has in mind when he talks about our outer nature wasting away.
A bit earlier in his letter, he suggests that the gospel is both a fragile thing and a strong and resilient thing. “We have this treasure in clay jars,” he says, “so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” (4:7)
Hear that? The power of our message belongs to God. It is strong and resilient. We who proclaim the message are fragile. We’re like clay pots. We’re useful, but we break easily.
Lately I’ve become fond of an old saying that was popularized by New York Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle. He said: “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.”
I’m never going to run a marathon or have muscles like the Rock, Dwayne Johnson. But there are a lot of things I can still do to take better care of myself: more exercise, healthier diet, less salt, much less processed sugar – you know the drill.
One day, I’ll breathe my last. I can’t stop that from happening, but I can work to postpone it as long as possible.
Meantime, as Paul says, I do not lose heart. Even though my outer nature is wasting away, my inner nature is being renewed day by day. Though my body is growing weaker, my spirit is growing stronger.
That’s what I want to focus on now. What things can we do to renew our spiritual lives day by day? What things can we do to strengthen our spirits regardless of how much our bodies challenge us?
Some things are obvious to those of us who are schooled in the Wesleyan way. We automatically think of what John Wesley called the “means of grace.”
These are the channels that God normally uses to convey God’s grace to us. When we open ourselves to these channels, by acting in certain ways, God’s grace can more freely flow to us.
Some of these channels are of obvious spiritual value. We pray often, and we read scripture, sometimes daily. We worship with others weekly and receive Holy Communion frequently. At a good opportunity, we talk about our spiritual progress with other seekers.
Sometimes we even fast or engage in other acts of self-denial to prove to ourselves that we can live without some things but never without knowing God’s presence.
Other channels of grace are things we do in our daily interaction with other people. These acts fulfill our pledge to do no harm to anyone but to do good to everyone. They might be simple acts of kindness or compassion – such as holding the door for someone – or harder things such as working to feed hungry people or fighting for justice for those who are oppressed.
Sometimes we do these things out of habit – and there’s nothing wrong with a good habit. Habit is just intentionality that’s embodied, that’s drilled into us through repetition. Such habits help us grow more like Jesus. They build spiritual muscle so that we can be stronger Christ followers.
When I was a kid, I read a story somewhere that has stuck with me since then. A boy says to his grandfather, “How can I get muscles like yours?” His grandfather says, “Well, let me think about that. Meanwhile, could you chop some firewood for me?”
Day after day, the boy asks the same question, “How can I get muscles like yours?” Day after day, the grandfather gives him some chore to do. Finally, the boy gets frustrated and asks, “Are you ever going to answer my question?” The grandfather says, “Let me see your arm.” And the boy’s eyes open wide when he sees the muscles he’s developed, through daily exercise of them.
We build spiritual muscle the same way, by practicing the means of grace day by day. You may not realize it, but when you are intentional and habitual about your growth in grace, you are daily growing closer to Christ and closer to that blessed state we call sanctification.
Some of those means of grace that I mentioned, I’m just not good at. Ever try journaling to keep track of your spiritual progress? I’ve tried it, and I’m terrible at it. Can’t keep it up longer than a few days at a time.
Just the other day, I tried to remember something and discovered that I just couldn’t tie it to a particular time or place. Maybe at the least we should do is keep a journal-style listing of events, and when and where they happened.
Or as one woman suggested in our discussion at worship this morning, you can record big events on a calendar and keep transferring them to a new calendar every year. Whether you are turning the pages of a journal or a calendar, such “tickler” entries could well trigger deeper memories.
Thankfulness is another way of keeping our spirits alive to the work of God in our midst. Maybe especially important here is thankfulness for loved ones whom we know will not be with us much longer. What can we do to cherish and enrich the time we still have together?
Another person suggested self-guided meditation. I should have followed up more on that one, Dale. Meditation and contemplation, though not the same, are time-honored ways of connecting our spirits with the Holy Spirit.
I must confess that I’m not as good as I want to be at daily Bible reading. I can easily do a deep reading in the gospels or one of Paul’s letters, but maintaining a daily reading habit seems to be beyond me right now. I need to keep working on this.
Ever try reading the whole Bible in one year? Several people in our group this morning have done it. What a marathon! I did it once, and I vowed to never do it again. Too much pressure to read too much at a time and not enough time to absorb what you’ve read.
I read a Bible-in-a-year version of Ken Taylor’s Living Bible. It was a paraphrase of the Bible, not a real translation, and it was not always a faithful paraphrase.
I kept running across passages I’d never heard before, and I kept saying to myself, “I never knew that was in the Bible!” Then I looked up those passages in several Bible translations, and I discovered that those things weren’t in the Bible at all. They were just Ken Taylor’s imagination.
As to fasting – I’ve never been very good at it, and after I developed diabetes I’ve been advised to avoid fasting, so I guess I’ve got a good excuse to skip it. You don’t have to fast for long periods, such as several days in a row. A one-day fast, from sundown one day to noon or sundown the next, is one time-honored way of fasting.
OK, let’s wrap this up.
Regardless of how much our bodies are serving or failing us right now, and how much we have or haven’t been working on building spiritual muscle, still, Paul says we do not lose hope. Why is that? Because it ultimately depends not on us but on God.
We need to trust in the extraordinary power of God working in and through us. It doesn’t come from us. It comes from God. But it can flow through us in the same way that God’s grace flows into us.
Each of us is, perhaps inevitably, focused on our personal weaknesses and the ways we cannot fulfill God’s mission in our lives. But it doesn’t all depend on us, does it? Our story is important, but each of us has just a small part in a greater story – and that is God’s redemption of the whole world.
We look only at what we can see, and that is very limited. What we cannot see is God working throughout the universe making good things happen in ways that are visible and ways that are not visible, through actions large and small, sometimes taken by people just like you and me.
So we don’t lose heart. Indeed, we take heart because we know we serve an awesome God who is in charge of making good in all things.