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EPISODE 13: Habits of Grace

 

David Mathis has a different take on the spiritual disciplines than we often hear or read about. He sees them as ways to enjoy Jesus! His insights are practical, realistic, and inspirational.

Show Notes:

desiringgod.org/authors/david-mathis

desiringgod.org/books/habits-of-grace

Transcript


Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host, Randy Newman, and I am delighted to welcome, as my conversation partner today, David Mathis. David is the executive editor at desiringgod.org. He's one of several pastors at Cities Church in Minneapolis- St. Paul. He's also a writer, author, and adjunct professor. And I've known David for quite a while, and I'm really delighted to welcome him to the podcast. David, it’s so great to have you on our show.

Randy, what a joy to talk to you, dear friend, after all these years.

What Prompted David to Write This Book?

You know, this is a strange way to begin, but pretty much everything I do is kind of strange sometimes. For my listeners, David interviewed me years ago, when I had come out with this book, bringing the Gospel Home, and I had done several different interviews and stuff. I thought, “This is the most thorough and best interview I've ever had.” I really mean it. Even still to this day. There was one point I remember thinking, “Okay, David knows my book better than I know my book. And so I've just been intimidated for being prepared for today's recording, because I don't know your book, David, as thoroughly as you knew mine. But there, we've gotten all my dirty laundry out in public.

David, you’ve written a really, really helpful book, Habits of Grace. Subtitle is “Enjoying Jesus through the Spiritual Disciplines.” Let's just start with, what prompted you to write this book? Because there have been quite a few books on the spiritual disciplines.

Yeah, you know, Randy, I don't fancy myself an expert on the spiritual disciplines. The idea and dream was not birthed in my own heart. There were three different impetus moments of it, three different inspirations and streams that fed the river.

One is I was in college ministry for a while with Campus Outreach. It's similar to Campus Crusade or The Navigators. And one of the key things we did with students is we taught them how to study the Bible for themselves. We taught them the importance of the local church. We taught about the importance of prayer and of fasting and of evangelism. And so that was an important part of college ministry.

And then, at Bethlehem College and Seminary, I got the assignment, a few years later, to do spiritual disciplines, spiritual formation for the college juniors. And I reached for a book that was very helpful to me when I was a college junior, by Don Whitney, called Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. And we used that book in the class. And as I taught the students, I would write some articles or sketch out some lectures, and I thought it would be helpful for them as they processed it.

And then—what year was this? I don't know if this was 2012. One of my colleagues at Desiring God—we're now pastors together at Cities Church. His name is Jonathan Parnell. He wrote me an email one day just saying, “I think you need to write a book on the spiritual disciplines.” We'd had some conversations, and there were some conversations at that time about sanctification that were in the air in terms of how justification, sinner, to sanctification and what's the role of the will and the role of discipline in Christian sanctification. And I had made some comments about those things, and he put that book in my head for the first time, and the guys at Desiring God kind of pushed me in that direction. And so it seemed that maybe there was a need there, that God had equipped me to do a book on this topic, even though it's not the thing I would have picked.

I don't typically wake up in the morning thinking about spiritual disciplines. I hope I wake up in the morning moving toward spiritual disciplines, but it seemed like, in some unique circumstances, God kind of shaped me in that direction. And it's still strange. I never sat down and just wrote this book from the beginning. It's an article here, it's an article there, trying to meet the needs of these college juniors, and eventually it came together in almost book form, and then I took a few days away and wrote in the missing pieces.

Well, I've read a number of different books on the spiritual disciplines. I don't remember any of them having anything like the word “enjoying” in the title or the subtitle. And perhaps that was one of the first things that grabbed me. I think a lot of people think of spiritual disciplines, “Okay, these are things you need to do. These are practices.” They fit in the same category that for me is physical exercise. I know this is good for me, and I've experienced it, but let's just say, for me, physical exercise and the word joy do not occur in the same 48-hour period. But you put “enjoying” in your title, and I was intrigued when I saw that, and it flows all the way through the book. But that wasn't just an afterthought, right? I mean, that was you’re really driving force, right?

That’s right, yeah. Not at all. That's at the heart of the book. And that's what I—knowing that there are many good books out there on the spiritual disciplines, and Don Whitney's book chief among them, which I think he originally wrote in the early ‘90s—to write the book, I felt like I needed to bring something, not as distinctive, but some particular emphasis that would perhaps fill in gaps, at least as I thought in my own soul as I looked at the different books. And that was a big piece, was seeing that the disciplines, as means of grace, are means to an end. That's been so critical in my own walk and in teaching students to think, “All right, we’ve got to talk about the end of the means.” We don't just do means for means. We do means for an end. And the spiritual disciplines are our “means.” The Puritans talked about them as the “means of grace.” That old term.

And the “means” language made me ask, “What's the end? Why do I read my Bible? Why pray? Why be a committed part of a covenant community in the local church? Why fast? “And the answer, again and again, both in my experience and most importantly biblically, was to know God. “I will be your God; you will be my people.” “The surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” Paul says in Philippians 3:8. Or like the language of Hosea 6:“Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord.

And so I think my first answer to that question was “knowing God,” but that can be so big and vague. It says something about God being living and about my knowing Him in a personal way. But the word enjoying, I felt, really put the accent on where I wanted to put it as, at Desiring God, we talk about being Christian hedonists. Not regular old hedonists. We are Christian hedonists. We believe that the Bible commands us to pursue our joy in God. And that is what I have found to be so powerful in the spiritual disciplines, that when I take up my Bible, when I take up prayer, when I think about the life of the local church, I am pursuing my joy in God, which is not at odds with love for others, but feeds and inspires love for others.

Now, every so often, someone will say something, and then once it is said, it's just so obvious. And yet, before it was said, we didn't think of it. So I'm struck with—okay, I've heard the expression “means of grace” many times, and I'm going to ask you actually to unpack that in a second. But “means of grace.” Okay, this is something that moves towards, and it's of grace. But I don't remember ever thinking or asking the question, “Means toward what?” And you're right. When the word “means” is used, it should immediately spark “end” or “ends.” And so if the means are for the end of enjoying God, that just totally changes the perspective from, “Oh, these are some things I should do,” but they enable me so that I can do something much bigger.

By the way, this is terribly convicting, because I make all these jokes about physical exercise, which I really don't like. But this would help me tremendously if I thought, “Well, physical exercise is so that I can take long walks and hikes to places that I couldn't get to if I'm not in shape. And when I get to these really beautiful vistas and see things that I just love to see,” and I really do love. Well, see, no I don’t. I like to get to the end of a hike and take pictures. So if I could have someone helicopter me there to that spot that would be great. But I haven't met that person with a helicopter yet. But if I can exercise and be in great shape, then I can do those hikes and get to those places and enjoy. So you're really helping us shift the focus from the means to the end. 

Randy, is looking forward to the reward. Which is an amazing correspondence. This word reward? Amazing overlap between the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament and really recent neurological research as to how habits are formed and preserved, that the reward function is so critical. That dopamine hit from pursuing a certain activity that creates the habit to move toward that reward. So it felt like Jesus talks about rewards, and Jesus himself went to the cross. Hebrews 12:2 says, “For the joy that was set before him.” And even though Immanuel Kant taught very differently, that you are not to seek the reward, that you ruin the act of virtue if you pursue some reward in it. And then a lot of 20th century Christianity was weighed down with this sense of, “I better not pursue my own joy because my own joy ruins the act.” That is not the way Jesus talks. Jesus said “It's more blessed to give than to receive.” Remember the reward. Remember it's more blessed.

I'm appealing to you saying it's more blessed to give than to receive. I'm bringing into your consciousness the pursuit of joy. I'm reminding you of the reward, and so that's a link here between the way Jesus talked about accessing grace and how modern research of neurology has talked about the habit and habit creation just in the last generation.

I love it. You're talking about “blessed,” and so we think of the beatitudes and the fact that Matthew places that early on in Jesus's earthly ministry. Here's the start of the earthly ministry: Blessed are those who, blessed are those who, blessed.... And, of course, it has to ring a memory of Psalm 1: “Blessed is the one who does not, does not....”but he delights in. I just don't think we're hearing a whole lot about delighting and desiring and blessedness, being this fulfillment of the very reason we were created. So I love that whole flavor of your approach.

You know, I think there was a time where blessedness, in English, carried those richer, deeper connotations of happiness, delight, joy, thrill. But I wonder how much it was emptied of that with the kind of Kantian ethics, and so nowadays, to get at that biblical word, makarios in the Greek, which is.... We translate it blessed. But sometimes we talk so much about “hashtag blessed” and “bless this” and “bless that” and “bless you” when you sneeze, and all this blessing. Do we lose the meaning of it? In terms of happy is a very good synonym for blessed. So when, you think about the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes through and says happy are those, happy are those. Those who do this thrive in what they're created to be, in the satisfaction of their soul, in their relationships around them. They are in blessedness, happiness, on God's terms.

And the old theologians, in their systematic theologies, they would often have a section on the blessedness of God, which is essentially just talking about God's intra-Trinitarian happiness. His bliss of the Godhead in is God’s blessedness. And so the creature's blessing comes from God's sharing, God's grace of sharing the blessedness of the very Godhead, the happiness of God Himself, and that is a reward worth pursuing.

Oh, man. Now, I said a few seconds ago, I'm going to ask you to unpack. And so some people might say, come on, get back to that. “Means of grace.” Can you give us a working definition? Or an explanation?

Yeah, let me put it this way: Who first put me on to “means of grace” is actually the forward to Don Whitney's spiritual disciplines book. It was written by J.I. Packer. And Packer says there: Spiritual disciplines, that’s a relatively new term. Richard Foster's book in the late1970s. So there's a lot of talk today about spiritual disciplines. Frankly, I'm not wild about the term. It's not a battle I'm going to fight, like, “We change it to ‘means of grace!’” Spiritual disciplines gives the wrong impression. I think it does. Don Carson agrees with that. Spiritual discipline is probably not the best term. However, we kind of have the term. That's not my crusade.

I do think “means of grace,” as Packer talked about that, is very helpful, because it sets up a picture in which I, as the creature and not the primary actor doing, achieving, exerting effort, so that I might obtain and reach out to receive. Rather, “means of grace” implies a picture, atleast the way I'm going to develop it, is our God is the God of all grace. He is lavishly, in Christ Jesus, bestowing His grace on His people. Sometimes it's apart from our actions and efforts and patterns and practices, and He just gives us a grace that we didn't even expect. But you know what? He's given us a big book, and He’s revealed to us how He most often loves to distribute His grace, His means, His channels of grace. What are His paths or avenues?

One illustration would be in the life of Jesus. If Zacchaeus wanted to encounter Jesus and receive grace from Jesus, it wasn't best for Zacchaeus to walk around in the wilderness. He needed to position himself along the path of grace. He heard Jesus was coming this way. Jesus is coming. He's coming along this path. Position yourself along the path. Or blind Bartimaeus. Same thing. “Lord, have mercy on me.” How's he going to encounter Jesus? He needs to come to the path, and he has heard a word, Jesus will come down this path. We have heard a word, in God's word, that He wants to meet us in particular avenues. And so if we can shape our lives around these means of grace—that's why I'm talking about habits of grace. If we can build habits in our lives that give our lives access to God's revealed means of grace, so that we can go on receiving His grace as power in the Christian life.

Conditioned by Habits

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Well, yeah, I think that word in your title is really important, “habits.” And it just has, I don't know, a more... I hate to say user friendly, may be user friendly... than disciplines. So habits, things you do regularly, so that you then are able to experience and enjoy and delight in these things. We do have illustrations in scripture about comparing living the Christian life and spiritual growth to the way an athlete prepares.

Right.

And there’s so many times when you're watching professional athletes, they do these incredible things with their body, and you think, “How in the world did they do that? That was like a magic trick!” Well, if you ever get to the court or the field or whatever early or can somehow watch a practice, their discipline of throwing the ball over and over and over and over, so that then, in the game, they're doing something. But their body and their mind and their eye sight have been conditioned by habits. There was a time when we were able to go out of our house, before this plague, and I would like to go to baseball games, and I like to go early and watch them warm up, because I was just so intrigued with these guys who would throw these pinpoint shots with the baseball, back and forth to each other. I mean it was amazing, and it looked so calm and just very, very focused. Then, in the game, they would do it, but it had to be instantaneous without warning. And anyway, I'm going on and on. I should let you do the talking. You wrote the book on this. Go ahead.

One think I can say on that is the human body, when you start comparing humans to the animal kingdom, it is amazing what the human body can do. I mean these big brains we have; comparatively to other animals, our brains are huge. And the kind of movements that we can do. You can teach a computer to beat you in chess, but what you can't teach a computer to do is to move chess pieces like a six year old can, because the human brain is so amazing in its ability to move with precision, the hands, the feet, like no other animals. There's no other animals we watch in dance or gymnastics, like the Olympics, or baseball. And I've heard that's the fastest that the human body moves on its own is the fingertips when a pitcher releases a baseball. So what the human body can do, from ballerinas to linebackers, is amazing. However, that doesn't happen overnight. The difference between the linebacker and the male dancer is what they did with their life every day for the last 20 years.

There's probably a lot of guys who had similar or even better natural abilities than Tom Brady thirty years ago, but they haven't worked like Tom Brady has for the last thirty years. And that's a significant way, that's getting at the habit function that God has given to humans as a gift, so that.... Our bodies have a logic and have an intelligence beyond our consciousness. This is weird to think about. Our bodies are doing all sorts of things we're not conscious of, and when our limited amount of consciousness can focus on areas where we need to give thought, rather than all the habitual areas of our lives that we just need to do. Putting a seatbelt on when you get in a car, you don't need to think about that.

Or Sunday morning, you don't need to think about, “Should I go to church this week? Let me spend the next ten minutes thinking about whether I should go gather with God's people.” No, that should be a habit. Or first thing in the morning, when I get out of bed, should I try to go, “What should I do first this morning? Should I read the newspaper? Should I turn on the television?” No, no. I want to have a habit that says, “The first thing I should do this morning, after I get my coffee, is open up the Bible. I want to hear from God. I want God's voice to be the first voice I hear. And when I hear from Him in His Word, I don't want to then pause and think, “Hmm,” with my consciousness. “But what should I do next? Oh, I should pray.” I want to develop the habit that when I hear from God in His Word that I want to reply to Him in this amazing gift called prayer. And so I do think this habit function of the human mind is the kind of thing that we're seizing upon in the so-called spiritual disciplines. But I'm hoping to take the accent off our conscious doing and put it on our receiving of God's grace and then these non-conscious, instinctive habits that we cultivate in our lives, so that we aren't reconsidering over and over again whether we access God's grace or not. But we're living a life according to the ways God has revealed Himself to empower our lives in grace.

Well, so many different areas to go after, but I want our listeners to know. Your book is relatively concise, and it only zeroes in on three disciplines. So I'm thinking about Don Whitney's book and Dallas Willard's book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, and other books. And most of them have ten disciplines and twelve disciplines or more. Yours has three. So that makes it a shorter book and a more manageable book. And I know that was by your design. You say it in your intro, but you zero in on hear God's voice, the Bible, reading God's word, have His ear, praying, and then belong to His body, fellowship. Well, I don't think I need to ask why those three? I think they're almost self-evident. Again, it's one of those things like, “Oh, yeah, those are the three most important and foundational.” Now, there are others, sure, but they almost flow out of those three, don't they?

That's right. And what I found is, over the years, I would try to put together the list. What are the spiritual disciplines that I need to be doing in my life? I want to be spiritually healthy. I want to be obedient. I want to be holy. I want to glorify God with my life. What are the spiritual disciplines I should be doing? And so I'd have my list of ten or twelve or fifteen or twenty, and I-

I'm tired just thinking about that.

I was exhausted. I could never get all the boxes done in the same day or the same week or even the same month. So, over time, I wanted to ask, what are some principles here? And this may be one of the main reasons I was willing to do this book, because I was helped by this, and the students were helped by this, to try to think, what are the main principles at work here? Could we get a principled sense of the main things going on? So three loci, around which the disciplines cluster. So one way to put it, in talking about hearing God's voice, having His ear in prayer, belonging to His body, I wanted to be personal. I wanted to be relational. We're talking about knowing and enjoying God.

So when we open the Bible, this is not a dead book. This is not just ancient words. These are the living words of the living God, empowered by His Spirit. See that you do not neglect the One Who is speaking right now. Hebrews 12 says He continues to speak through His word, by His Spirit. I want to hear his voice. And hearing His voice is not going out in the woods until I talk to myself in my head. Hearing His voice means open.... He gave us this book! What more can He say than to you He has said? He has given this book. So hearing His voice is basic. It's first and foremost. All the other disciplines flow out of that.

And then the natural response, relationally, to hearing God's voice is—this is remarkable. The speaking God stops and stoops and wants to hear from us! I mean, prayer is an amazing reality that God would say, “Not only am I going to speak to you, first and foremost, but I want to hear back from you. I want to hear your praises, your confessions, your supplications. “And it's an amazing gift in reality. So there's a relationship there. I think what tipped me off to that was 1 Timothy 4:5, where he talks about making our life holy through the word of God in prayer. How do you make your life holy through the word of God and prayer? Well, interestingly, you do it in light of what God has said. That's what His word is. We can be so conditioned to think of His word as a published book, rather than as living words from the mouth of God. So it's made holy by His word, by his voice in the Word.

And prayer. And what's prayer? Prayer is speaking back to Him. It's God hearing us, because of the sacrifice of Christ and the access that we have in Jesus. But then one danger at that point is, “It’s just a me and God thing.”

But His word doesn't just create new life in those who hear with faith. His word creates a community. His word creates people. His word births the church. Sometimes we talk about the church as the creature of God's word. The church is created by His word. And so it's like there's a corporate dynamic here. This is not simply me and God. Even when I'm reading my Bible alone, I'm not alone, because I've been shaped by parents and teachers and friends and conversation and books and podcasts. And so that corporate dynamic is significant in Christian life, and that's one thing I did feel was often missing in some of the spiritual disciplines literature.

Oh, yes. Yes.

There was such a “me and God” focus. And so I felt like we need to put these in a corporate context. It doesn't mean that disciplines only happen in a corporate context immediately. But the nature of Christian worship is we are hearing from God, and then we're replying back to Him in our praises, and we're doing that in a corporate context. That's one reason that Sunday mornings that the corporate worship gathering, is... I talk about it being your single most important habit, because that is where we encounter together the word of God, and we speak back to Him in prayer and praise together and do that in the corporate context.

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Well, that's what struck me when I opened up and saw the table of contents. First of all, “Okay, there's only three. He's going after only three.” And Bible, sure. Prayer, yeah. Fellowship, participation in the body of Christ. I thought, “Ooh. I bet if we would have polled a whole lot of people and said, ‘Okay, if you could only name the three most important, which would they be?’ I'm not so sure that fellowship, participation in the body, would make it to the top three,” and it didn't in some other books. So I immediately thought, “Okay, we need this.” And again, to put it in the category of a habit, okay, “Once a week I get up, go,” a gain before COVID, we would actually go.

Now I don't know if this is what you say. For me, it's this very regular, crucial reminder that I am not the center of the universe. That's what going to be part of a church does. It's like, “Oh, there are other people here. There are a lot of other people here, and some of them are like me, but most of them aren't. And they have different stages of life, different family situations. Some are single; some are married. Some are the same ethnicity as me; some are very, very different. And I hear about different concerns, “and the more... Okay, now I'm confessing sin. There's blatant sin here. The more I'm sitting there thinking, “This really doesn't relate to me,” is the more that I desperately need it. So when there's an announcement about, “Hey, we’ve got this thing for teenagers!” and I'm thinking, “I don't have any teenagers. I remember those days. I'm going to pray for those people.” That's exactly right. It’s lWelcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I'm your host,Randy Newman, and I am delighted to welcome, as my conversation partner today, David Mathis. David is the executive editor at desiringgod.org. He's one of several pastors at Cities Church in Minneapolis- St. Paul. He's also a writer, author, and adjunct professor. And I've known David for quite a while, and I'm really delighted to welcome him to the podcast. David, it’s so great to have you on our show.

Randy, what a joy to talk to you, dear friend, after all these years.

You know, this is a strange way to begin, but pretty much everything I do is kind of strange sometimes. For my listeners, David interviewed me years ago, when I had come out with this book, Bringing the Gospel Home, and I had done several different interviews and stuff. I thought, “This is the most thorough and best interview I've ever had.” I really mean it. Even still to this day. There was one point I remember thinking,“Okay, David knows my book better than I know my book. And so I've just been intimidated for being prepared for today's recording, because I don't know your book, David, as thoroughly as you knew mine. But there, we've gotten all my dirty laundry out in public.

David,  you've written a really,  really helpful book, Habits of Grace. Subtitle is “Enjoying Jesus Through the Spiritual Disciplines.” Let's just start with, what prompted you to write this book? Because there have been quite a few books on the spiritual disciplines.

Yeah, you know, Randy, I don't fancy myself an expert on the spiritual disciplines. The idea and dream was not birthed in my own heart. There were three different impetus moments of it, three different inspirations and streams that fed the river.

One is I was in college ministry for a while with Campus Outreach. It's similar to Campus Crusade or The Navigators. And one of the key things we did with students is we taught them how to study the Bible for themselves. We taught them the importance of the local church. We taught about the importance of prayer and of fasting and of evangelism. And so that was an important part of college ministry.

And then, at Bethlehem College and Seminary, I got the assignment, a few years later, to do spiritual disciplines, spiritual formation for the college juniors. And I reached for a book that was very helpful to me when I was a college junior, by Don Whitney, called Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life. And we used that book in the class. And as I taught the students, I would write some articles or sketch out some lectures, and I thought it would be helpful for them as they processed it.

And then—what year was this? I don't know if this was 2012. One of my colleagues at Desiring God—we're now pastors together at Cities Church. His name is Jonathan Parnell. He wrote me an email one day just saying, “I think you need to write a book on the spiritual disciplines.” We'd had some conversations, and there were some conversations at that time about sanctification that were in the air in terms of how justification, sinner, to sanctification and what's the role of the will and the role of discipline in Christian sanctification. And I had made some comments about those things, and he put that book in my head for the first time, and the guys at Desiring God kind of pushed me in that direction. And so it seemed that maybe there was a need there, that God had equipped me to do a book on this topic, even though it's not the thing I would have picked.

I don't typically wake up in the morning thinking about spiritual disciplines. I hope I wake up in the morning moving toward spiritual disciplines, but it seemed like, in some unique circumstances, God kind of shaped me in that direction. And it's still strange. I never sat down and just wrote this book from the beginning.

The Driving Force

Well, I've read a number of different books on the spiritual disciplines. I don't remember any of them having anything like the word “enjoying” in the title or the subtitle. And perhaps that was one of the first things that grabbed me. I think a lot of people think of spiritual disciplines, “Okay, these are things you need to do. These are practices.” They fit in the same category that for me is physical exercise. I know this is good for me, and I've experienced it, but let's just say, for me, physical exercise and the word joy do not occur in the same 48-hour period. But you put “enjoying” in your title, and I was intrigued when I saw that, and it flows all the way through the book. But that wasn't just an after thought, right? I mean, that was your really driving force, right?

That’s right, yeah. Not at all. That's at the heart of the book. And that's what I—knowing that there are many good books out there on the spiritual disciplines, and Don Whitney's book chief among them, which I think he originally wrote in the early ‘90s—to write the book, I felt like I needed to bring something, not as distinctive, but some particular emphasis that would perhaps fill in gaps, at least as I thought in my own soul as I looked at the different books. And that was a big piece, was seeing that the disciplines, as means of grace, are means to an end. That's been so critical in my own walk and in teaching students to think, “All right, we’ve got to talk about the end of the means.” We don't just do means for means. We do means for an end. And the spiritual disciplines are our “means.” The Puritans talked about them as the “means of grace.” That old term.

And the “means” language made me ask, “What's the end? Why do I read my Bible? Why pray? Why be a committed part of a covenant community in the local church? Why fast?”And the answer, again and again, both in my experience and most importantly biblically, was to know God. “I will be your God; you will be My people.” “The surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” Paul says in Philippians 3:8. Or like the language of Hosea 6:“Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord.

And so I think my first answer to that question was “knowing God,” but that can be so big and vague. It says something about God being living and about my knowing Him in a personal way. But the word enjoying, I felt, really put the accent on where I wanted to put it as, at Desiring God, we talk about being Christian hedonists. Not regular old hedonists. We are Christian hedonists. We believe that the Bible commands us to pursue our joy in God. And that is what I have found to be so powerful in the spiritual disciplines, that when I take up my Bible, when I take up prayer, when I think about the life of the local church, I am pursuing my joy in God, which is not at odds with love for others, but feeds and inspires lovefor others.

Now, every so often, someone will say something, and then once it is said, it's just so obvious. And yet, before it was said, we didn't think of it. So I'm struck with—okay, I've heard the expression “means of grace” many times, and I'm going to ask you actually to unpack that in a second. But “means of grace.” Okay, this is something that moves towards, and it's of grace. But I don't remember ever thinking or asking the question, “Means toward what?” And you're right. When the word “means” is used, it should immediately spark “end” or “ends.” And so if the means are for the end of enjoying God, that just totally changes the perspective from, “Oh, these are some things I should do,” but they enable me so that I can do something much bigger.

By the way, this is terribly convicting, because I make all these jokes about physical exercise, which I really don't like. But this would help me tremendously if I thought,“Well, physical exercise is so that I can take long walks and hikes to places that I couldn't get to if I'm not in shape. And when I get to these really beautiful vistas and see things that I just love to see,” and I really do love. Well, see, no I don’t. I like to get to the end of a hike and take pictures. So if I could have someone helicopter me there to that spot, that would be great. But I haven't met that person with a helicopter yet. But if I can exercise and be in great shape, then I can do those hikes and get to those places and enjoy. So you're really helping us shift the focus from the means to the end. 

Randy, is looking forward to the reward. Which is an amazing correspondence. This word reward? Amazing overlap between the teaching of Jesus and theNew Testament and really recent neurological research as to how habits are formed and preserved, that the reward function is so critical. That dopamine hit from pursuing a certain activity that creates the habit to move toward that reward. So it felt like Jesus talks about rewards, and Jesus himself went to the cross. Hebrews 12:2 says, “For the joy that was set before him.” And even though Immanuel Kant taught very differently, that you are not to seek the reward, that you ruin the act of virtue if you pursue some reward in it. And then a lot of 20th century Christianity was weighed down with this sense of, “I better not pursue my own joy because my own joy ruins the act.” That is not the way Jesus talks. Jesus said “It's more blessed to give than to receive.” Remember the reward. Remember it's more blessed.

I'm appealing to you saying it's more blessed to give than to receive. I'm bringing into your consciousness the pursuit of joy. I'm reminding you of the reward, and so that's a link here between the way Jesus talked about accessing grace and how modern research of neurology has talked about the habit and habit creation just in the last generation.

I love it. You're talking about “blessed,” and so we think of the beatitudes and the fact that Matthew places that early on in Jesus's earthly ministry. Here's the start of the earthly ministry: Blessed are those who, blessed are those who, blessed.... And, of course, it has to ring a memory of Psalm 1: “Blessed is the one who does not, does not....”but he delights in. I just don't think we're hearing a whole lot about delighting and desiring and blessedness, being this fulfillment of the very reason we were created. So I love that whole flavor of your approach.

You know, I think there was a time where blessedness, in English, carried those richer, deeper connotations of happiness, delight, joy, thrill. But I wonder how much it was emptied of that with the kind of Kantian ethics, and so nowadays, to get at that biblical word, makarios in the Greek, which is.... We translate it blessed. But sometimes we talk so much about “hashtag blessed” and “bless this” and “bless that” and “bless you” when you sneeze, and all this blessing. Do we lose the meaning of it? In terms of happy is a very good synonym for blessed. So when, you think about the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus goes through and says happy are those, happy are those. Those who do this thrive in what they're created to be, in the satisfaction of their soul, in their relationships around them. They are in blessedness, happiness, on God's terms.

And the old theologians, in their systematic theologies, they would often have a section on the blessedness of God, which is essentially just talking about God's intra-trinitarian happiness. His bliss of the Godhead in is God’s blessedness. And so the creature's blessing comes from God's sharing, God's grace of sharing the blessedness of the very Godhead, the happiness of God Himself, and that is a reward worth pursuing.

Oh, man. Now, I said a few seconds ago, I'm going to ask you to unpack. And so some people might say, come on, get back to that. “Means of grace.” Can you give us a working definition? Or an explanation?

Yeah, let me put it this way: Who first put me on to “means of grace” is actually the forward to Don Whitney's spiritual disciplines book. It was written by J.I. Packer. And Packer says there: Spiritual disciplines, that’s a relatively new term. Richard Foster's book in the late1970s. So there's a lot of talk today about spiritual disciplines. Frankly, I'm not wild about the term. It's not a battle I'm going to fight, like, “We change it to ‘means of grace!’” Spiritual disciplines gives the wrong impression. I think it does. Don Carson agrees with that. Spiritual discipline is probably not the best term. However, we kind of have the term. That's not my crusade.

I do think “means of grace,” as Packer talked about that, is very helpful, because it sets up a picture in which I, as the creature and not the primary actor doing, achieving, exerting effort, so that I might obtain and reach out to receive. Rather, “means of grace” implies a picture, atleast the way I'm going to develop it, is our God is the God of all grace. He is lavishly, in Christ Jesus, bestowing His grace on His people. Sometimes it's apart from our actions and efforts and patterns and practices, and He just gives us a grace that we didn't even expect. But you know what? He's given us a big book, and He’s revealed to us how He most often loves to distribute His grace, His means, His channels of grace. What are His paths or avenues?

One illustration would be in the life of Jesus. If Zacchaeus wanted to encounter Jesus and receive grace from Jesus, it wasn't best for Zacchaeus to walk around in the wilderness. He needed to position himself along the path of grace. He heard Jesus was coming this way. Jesus is coming. He's coming along this path. Position yourself along the path. Or blind Bartimaeus. Same thing. “Lord, have mercy on me.” How's he going to encounter Jesus? He needs to come to the path, and he has heard a word, Jesus will come down this path. We have heard a word, in God's word, that He wants to meet us in particular avenues. And so if we can shape our lives around these means of grace—that's why I'm talking about habits of grace. If we can build habits in our lives that give our lives access to God's revealed means of grace, so that we can go on receiving His grace as power in the Christian life.

I'll return to my conversation on Questions That Matter in just a second. But I would like to invite each and every one of you to prayerfully consider becoming a ministry partner with the C.S. Lewis Institute. Our ministry is about discipleship, discipleship of the heart and mind, helping people love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, strength and mind. But as you might guess, a ministry of discipleship is not always the most exciting thing that people consider, but we believe that your tuning into this podcast probably indicates that you've had very positive experiences and have benefited from the institute over the years. So please click the button that says donate and become a ministry partner with us.

Well, yeah, I think that word in your title is really important, “habits.” And it just has, I don't know, a more... I hate to say user friendly, may be user friendly... than disciplines. So habits, things you do regularly, so that you then are able to experience and enjoy and delight in these things. We do have illustrations in scripture about comparing living the Christian life and spiritual growth to the way an athlete prepares.

Right.

And there’s so many times when you're watching professional athletes, they do these incredible things with their body, and you think, “How in the world did they do that? That was like a magic trick!” Well, if you ever get to the court or the field or whatever early or can somehow watch a practice, their discipline of throwing the ball over and over and over and over, so that then, in the game, they're doing something. But their body and their mind and their eye sight have been conditioned by habits. There was a time when we were able to go out of our house, before this plague, and I would like to go to baseball games, and I like to go early and watch them warm up, because I was just so intrigued with these guys who would throw these pinpoint shots with the baseball, back and forth to each other. I mean it was amazing, and it looked so calm and just very, very focused. Then, in the game, they would do it, but it had to be instantaneous without warning. And anyway, I'm going on and on. I should let you do the talking. You wrote the book on this. Go ahead.

One think I can say on that is the human body, when you start comparing humans to the animal kingdom, it is amazing what the human body can do. I mean these big brains we have; comparatively to other animals, our brains are huge. And the kind of movements that we can do. You can teach a computer to beat you in chess, but what you can't teach a computer to do is to move chess pieces like a six year old can, because the human brain is so amazing in its ability to move with precision, the hands, the feet, like no other animals. There's no other animals we watch in dance or gymnastics, like the Olympics, or baseball. And I've heard that's the fastest that the human body moves on its own is the fingertips when a pitcher releases a baseball. So what the human body can do, from ballerinas to linebackers, is amazing. However, that doesn't happen overnight. The difference between the linebacker and the male dancer is what they did with their life every day for the last 20 years.

There's probably a lot of guys who had similar or even better natural abilities than Tom Brady thirty years ago, but they haven't worked like Tom Brady has for the last thirty years. And that's a significant way, that's getting at the habit function that God has given to humans as a gift, so that.... Our bodies have a logic and have an intelligence beyond our consciousness. This is weird to think about. Our bodies are doing all sorts of things we're not conscious of, and when our limited amount of consciousness can focus on areas where we need to give thought, rather than all the habitual areas of our lives that we just need to do. Putting a seatbelt on when you get in a car, you don't need to think about that.

Or Sunday morning, you don't need to think about, “Should I go to church this week? Let me spend the next ten minutes thinking about whether I should go gather with God's people.” No, that should be a habit. Or first thing in the morning, when I get out of bed, should I try to go,“What should I do first this morning? Should I read the newspaper? Should I turn on the television?” No, no. I want to have a habit that says, “The first thing I should do this morning, after I get my coffee, is open up the Bible. I want to hear from God. I want God's voice to be the first voice I hear. And when I hear from Him in His Word, I don't want to then pause and think, “Hmm,” with my consciousness. “But what should I do next? Oh, I should pray.” I want to develop the habit that when I hear from God in His Word that I want to reply to Him in this amazing gift called prayer. And so I do think this habit function of the human mind is the kind of thing that we're seizing upon in the so-called spiritual disciplines. But I'm hopingto take the accent off our conscious doing and put it on our receiving of God's grace and then these non-conscious, instinctive habits that we cultivate in our lives, so that we aren't reconsidering over and over again whether we access God's grace or not. But we're living a life according to the ways God has revealed Himself to empower our lives in grace.

Well, so many different areas to go after, but I want our listeners to know. Your book is relatively concise, and it only zeroes in on three disciplines. So I'm thinking about Don Whitney's book and Dallas Willard's book, The Spirit of the Disciplines, and other books. And most of them have ten disciplines and twelve disciplines or more. Yours has three. So that makes it a shorter book and a more manageable book. And I know that was by your design. You say it in your intro, but you zero in on hear God's voice, the Bible, reading God's word, have His ear, praying, and then belong to His body, fellowship. Well, I don't think I need to ask why those three? I think they're almost self evident. Again, it's one of those things like, “Oh, yeah, those are the three most important and foundational.” Now, there are others, sure, but they almost flow out of those three, don't they?

That's right. And what I found is, over the years, I would try to put together the list. What are the spiritual disciplines that I need to be doing in my life? I want to be spiritually healthy. I want to be obedient. I want to be holy. I want to glorify God with my life. What are the spiritual disciplines I should be doing? And so I'd have my list of ten or twelve or fifteen ortwenty, and I-

I'm tired just thinking about that.

I was exhausted. I could never get all the boxes done in the same day or the same week or even the same month. So, over time, I wanted to ask, what are some principles here? And this may be one of the main reasons I was willing to do this book, because I was helped by this, and the students were helped by this, to try to think, what are the main principles at work here? Could we get a principled sense of the main things going on? So three loci, around which the disciplines cluster. So one way to put it, in talking about hearing God's voice, having His ear in prayer, belonging to His body, I wanted to be personal. I wanted to be relational. We're talking about knowing and enjoying God.

So when we open the Bible, this is not a dead book. This is not just ancient words. These are the living words of the living God, empowered by His Spirit. See that you do not neglect the One Who is speaking right now. Hebrews 12 says He continues to speak through His word, by His Spirit. I want to hear his voice. And hearing His voice is not going out in the woods until I talk to myself in my head. Hearing His voice means open.... He gave us this book! What more can He say than to you He has said? He has given this book. So hearing His voiceis basic. It's first and foremost. All the other disciplines flow out of that.

And then the natural response, relationally, to hearing God's voice is—this is remarkable. The speaking God stops and stoops and wants to hear from us! I mean, prayer is an amazing reality, that God would say, “Not only am I going to speak to you, first and foremost, but Iwant to hear back from you. I want to hear your praises, your confessions, your supplications.”And it's an amazing gift in reality. So there's a relationship there. I think what tipped me off to that was 1 Timothy 4:5, where he talks about making our life holy through the word of God in prayer. How do you make your life holy through the word of God and prayer? Well, interestingly, you do it in light of what God has said. That's what His word is. We can be so conditioned to think of His word as a published book, rather than as living words from the mouth of God. So it's made holy by His word, by his voice in the Word.

And prayer. And what's prayer? Prayer is speaking back to Him. It's God hearing us, because of the sacrifice of Christ and the access that we have in Jesus. But then one danger at that point is, “It’s just a me and God thing.”

But His word doesn't just create new life in those who hear with faith. His word creates a community. His word creates people. His word births the church. Sometimes we talk about the church as the creature of God's word. The church is created by His word. And so it's like there's a corporate dynamic here. This is not simply me and God. Even when I'm reading my Bible alone, I'm not alone, because I've been shaped by parents and teachers and friends and conversation and books and podcasts. And so that corporate dynamic is significant in Christian life, and that's one thing I did feel was often missing in some of the spiritual disciplines literature.

Oh, yes. Yes.

There was such a “me and God” focus. And so I felt like we need to put these in a corporate context. It doesn't mean that disciplines only happen in a corporate context immediately. But the nature of Christian worship is we are hearing from God, and then we're replying back to Him in our praises, and we're doing that in a corporate context. That's one reason that Sunday mornings, that the corporate worship gathering, is... I talk about it being your single most important habit, because that is where we encounter together the word of God, and we speak back to Him in prayer and praise together and do that in the corporate context.

I hope you're benefiting from listening to these podcasts, and I hope you're also availing yourself to the many resources we have at our website, cslewisinstitute.org. I do want to say the C.S. Lewis Institute ministry is, by definition, by design, not a terribly flashy ministry. We don't have spectacular results to report. If we're successful and fruitful,the results of our ministry are usually second and third hand. We disciple people, and then other people go do pretty flashy and amazing things. So I hope you'll keep that in mind as perhaps you pray and think about becoming a ministry partner with us. We're seeing God do some great things through the people who get discipled through our fellows programs and different resources. I hope you'll consider that and visit our website and click the appropriate buttons that say things like “donate.”

Well, that's what struck me when I opened up and saw the table of contents. First of all, “Okay, there's only three. He's going after only three.” And Bible, sure. Prayer, yeah. Fellowship, participation in the body of Christ. I thought, “Ooh. I bet if we would have polled a whole lot of people and said, ‘Okay, if you could only name the three most important, which would they be?’ I'm not so sure that fellowship, participation in the body, would make it to the top three,” and it didn't in some other books. So I immediately thought, “Okay, we need this.” And again, to put it in the category of a habit, okay, “Once a week I get up, go,” a gain before COVID, we would actually go.

Now I don't know if this is what you say. For me, it's this very regular, crucial reminder that I am not the center of the universe. That's what going to be part of a church does. It's like, “Oh, there are other people here. There are a lot of other people here, and some of them are like me, but most of them aren't. And they have different stages of life, different family situations. Some are single; some are married. Some are the same ethnicity as me; some are very, very different. And I hear about different concerns,”and the more... Okay, now I'm confessing sin. There's blatant sin here. The more I'm sitting there thinking, “This really doesn't relate to me,” is the more that I desperately need it. So when there's anannouncement about, “Hey, we’ve got this thing forteenagers!” and I'm thinking, “I don't have any teenagers. I remember those days. I'm going to pray for those people.” That's exactly right. It’s like, “Oh, that’s right. There are people who... I’m part of this body. I want to pray for them. I want to encourage them. I want to hear about what's important to them.” So I'm sorry, I'm doing too much talking.

Absolutely. That is a key part of the corporate worship gathering. And as well as there's that daily humbling function, when we start our day by, instead of just sitting there and thinking, “How can I make myself great today?” To start with, “How do I submit myself to the word of Almighty God to start my day? That His voice would be the first I would hear.” There's that daily humbling function with me and the Bible open. And then there's that corporate function to say, “You know what? The most important reality in the universe is God Almighty in Jesus Christ. And he is gathering a people together. I am not going to belly ache like Elijah. Woe is me. I'm the only one here. There are 7000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal, and we gather in worship,” and that is so vital for the health of our soul.

I was in a card store, and I saw this card, and it said something like, “The key to life is not to find yourself, but to make yourself.” And I thought, “Oh, what a tragedy that would be if I made myself.” Like, “Am I allowed to ask them to hide these cards?” That's like the worst news. And it was on this whole rack of all of these very inspirational things to make you feel good. And I looked at that one, and I thought, “That doesn't make me feel good.”

That's what we're up against. That's the spirit of the age. And these habits of grace that we're talking about, frankly, they're counter cultural. When the message that passes on a greeting card is making yourself, that is not what we're talking about when we’re talking about habitsof grace. We're talking about being made, being shaped by God, finding who He’s called us to be, finding truth in Jesus Christ. And if we don't get it from the Scriptures, what we hear on the news, what we hear in conversation, if we're engaged in this world, we're going to be getting a different message. And so that's one function of the spiritual disciplines, of the habits of grace, is they keep us spiritually sane in a world that is relentlessly giving us subtle and overt messages that seriously undermine that.

Well, I want to read for our listeners the way you start this book. I just think this is just a brilliant first couple of sentences. You’ve given the introduction the title, “Grace Gone Wild,” which I had to shake my head there. So here’s what you write: “The grace of God is on the loose. Contrary to our expectations, counter to our assumptions, frustrating our judicial sentiments, and mocking our craving for control, the grace of God is turning the world upside down.” I love that! Man, that’s several paragraphs all in one sentence. But go after any one of those and just unpack it a little bit for us. Why did you want to hit us with that? And you do right at the start of your book.

Well, it goes back to the whole conception of, “I don't want to put myself at the center of this self - actualization project,” if that is what the spiritual disciplines might imply to somebody. I want God at the center, and He’s the God of all grace. We want to start with the grace of God, and a thorny issue, as it comes to God's grace and my effort, is we can kind of lock into this one track thinking, of, “ Well, of course, I've got to obey. I've got to do it,” or, “Jesus did it. I don't have to.” Those two realities, of justification and sanctification, are dual realities. Both are true, and they are both manifestations of God's grace. And so I felt like, in a book on the spiritual disciplines, we have to talk about what we are going to do, our habits, our exertions, how we get ourselves to the place where God is distributing His grace. And we are not the most important actor. God is the most important actor.

And so it can be easy to see, like, “Oh, the justification aspect, that's grace. But sanctification, it’s my doing.” No, no, no. Not if we're talking about biblical sanctification. Calvin talked about the duplex gratia, the double grace, that there is grace of justification by faith alone, that you have been declared righteous in Christ on the basis of His perfect life, through faith alone, apart from anything you've done. And that is grace. And God is more gracious than to just leave you in your sin. He actually gives a greater grace, another grace. His grace keeps going. That's what Grace Gone Wild is about. It's how the grace of God keeps going to change us, to give us new hearts, to give us the spiritual taste buds and palate to enjoy Jesus, which is contrary to our sin nature. And so justification is the manifestation of His grace and sanctification, doing the spiritual disciplines in faith, is the manifestation of His grace. And so people who love grace, real grace, not cheap grace, people who love the real grace of God and God Himself at the center of His grace, we want all the grace of justification and all the grace of sanctification. I don't want to only be rescued from the penalty of my sin and then left in the misery of it. I want to be freed from the penalty, and I want to be freed from the daily misery of living a life that is settling for less than God Himself.

Oh, man. You have shown a light on and opened up our eyes to this really, really beautiful and enjoyable aspect of the Christian life. There's so much more we could talk about, but I'm going to let it stay here. I'm going to let you have the last word. Well, no, I'm going to let you have the next to last word, because I always have to have the last word because that's what a podcaster does. But to set you up, if there's any other thoughts you really want us to grasp about this topic and your book—let me just read your prayer in the beginning of your book. You say, “My prayer for you as you read this is that you would find the means of grace to be practical, realistic, and desirable in your pursuit of the joy in Christ. That is just really, really wonderful. So any last thoughts for us before we go?

Yes, I mentioned earlier, in simplifying it down to word, prayer, fellowship, hearing His voice, having His ear, belonging to His body. So much of that grows out of our grounding in His word. And, in particular, I think something that was significant for me before writing the book, and probably the area that I feel like I have learned the most and grown the most since writing the book, is related to this old word called meditation. And it's more common in the Old Testament. The New Testament talks about setting your mind on various things. There’s some correlation\in the New Testament, and nowadays there's the influences of Eastern meditation and, “empty your head and hum.” That is not biblical meditation. Biblical meditation is filling your mind with truth, not emptying your head of thoughts. It's filling your mind with the truth that God is revealed in His word and then lingering over it, savoring it.

Randy, our lives can be so fast paced that we read the Bible with the same unreasonable pace that we do the rest of our lives. And ancient books.... It wasn't easy to publish books in the ancient world. So ancient books were carefully written and reconsidered. And then, for abook to be copied, that's a lot of work, a book to be copied and distributed. Ancient books are meant to be read slowly and repeatedly. Read it again and again and again. See the depths and shades of meaning. And so one of the most important things I do in all my life is read the Bible in an unhurried, almost leisurely way. If I can carve out enough time that I am not rushing through Bible reading to check boxes, but that I can pause and linger, and that doesn't mean it needs to be hours a day. Ten minutes is usually too short for me. It takes more like a half an hour, 40 minutes, where I can just feel like I can lose track of time, put my phone away. No notifications. No sense of time. If I can lose myself in the biblical text and hear what God has to say and then be able to linger over His Word, may be pick up on a particular verse or phrase and try to feel a little bit, feel the significance of what God is saying. I'm on the lookout for His goodness, and I want to linger over some glimpse of his glory and goodness and have that be felt in my soul and not just rush on, finish the passage, rush on to the next thing.

That practice of meditation is very significant for me, and I think that the daily reward of lingering like that and the long-term reward of lingering in God's word like that make it far worth the extra few minutes.

Well, that is a great exclamation point at the end. David, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts about this. I want to tell our listeners: Check out the website of the ministry that David Mathis is a part of, desiringgod.org. Just a wealth of resources there, of enjoying God and pursuing God with a desire to know Him and be blessed by Him. We also hope you'll check out our website, cslewisinstitute.org. We've got some resources there, both written and audio and visual, and like all of our materials, we hope and pray that these will help you love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength and mind.

Like, “Oh, that’s right. There are people who... I’m part of this body. I want to pray for them. I want to encourage them. I want to hear about what's important to them.” So I'm sorry, I'm doing too much talking.

Absolutely. That is a key part of the corporate worship gathering. And as well as there's that daily humbling function, when we start our day by, instead of just sitting there and thinking, “How can I make myself great today?” To start with, “How do I submit myself to the word of Almighty God to start my day? That His voice would be the first I would hear.” There's that daily humbling function with me and the Bible open. And then there's that corporate function to say, “You know what? The most important reality in the universe is God Almighty in Jesus Christ. And he is gathering a people together. I am not going to belly ache like Elijah. Woe is me. I'm the only one here. There are 7000 who have not bowed the knee to Baal, and we gather in worship,” and that is so vital for the health of our soul.

I was in a card store, and I saw this card, and it said something like, “The key to life is not to find yourself, but to make yourself.” And I thought, “Oh, what a tragedy that would be if I made myself.” Like, “Am I allowed to ask them to hide these cards?” That's like the worst news. And it was on this whole rack of all of these very inspirational things to make you feel good. And I looked at that one, and I thought, “That doesn't make me feel good.”

That's what we're up against. That's the spirit of the age. And these habits of grace that we're talking about, frankly, they're counter cultural. When the message that passes on a greeting card is making yourself that is not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about habits of grace. We're talking about being made, being shaped by God, finding who He’s called us to be, finding truth in Jesus Christ. And if we don't get it from the Scriptures, what we hear on the news, what we hear in conversation, if we're engaged in this world, we're going to be getting a different message. And so that's one function of the spiritual disciplines, of the habits of grace, is they keep us spiritually sane in a world that is relentlessly giving us subtle and overt messages that seriously undermine that.

Well, I want to read for our listeners the way you start this book. I just think this is just a brilliant first couple of sentences. You’ve given the introduction the title, “Grace Gone Wild,” which I had to shake my head there. So here’s what you write: “The grace of God is on the loose. Contrary to our expectations, counter to our assumptions, frustrating our judicial sentiments, and mocking our craving for control, the grace of God is turning the world upside down.” I love that! Man, that’s several paragraphs all in one sentence. But go after any one of those and just unpack it a little bit for us. Why did you want to hit us with that? And you do right at the start of your book.

Well, it goes back to the whole conception of, “I don't want to put myself at the center of this self - actualization project,” if that is what the spiritual disciplines might imply to somebody. I want God at the center, and He’s the God of all grace. We want to start with the grace of God, and a thorny issue, as it comes to God's grace and my effort, is we can kind of lock into this one track thinking, of, “ Well, of course, I've got to obey. I've got to do it,” or, “Jesus did it. I don't have to.” Those two realities, of justification and sanctification, are dual realities. Both are true, and they are both manifestations of God's grace. And so I felt like, in a book on the spiritual disciplines, we have to talk about what we are going to do, our habits, our exertions, how we get ourselves to the place where God is distributing His grace. And we are not the most important actor. God is the most important actor.

And so it can be easy to see, like, “Oh, the justification aspect, that's grace. But sanctification, it’s my doing.” No, no, no. Not if we're talking about biblical sanctification. Calvin talked about the duplex gratia, the double grace, that there is grace of justification by faith alone, that you have been declared righteous in Christ on the basis of His perfect life, through faith alone, apart from anything you've done. And that is grace. And God is more gracious than to just leave you in your sin. He actually gives a greater grace, another grace. His grace keeps going. That's what Grace Gone Wild is about. Its how the grace of God keeps going to change us, to give us new hearts, to give us the spiritual taste buds and palate to enjoy Jesus, which is contrary to our sin nature. And so justification is the manifestation of His grace and sanctification, doing the spiritual disciplines in faith, is the manifestation of His grace. And so people who love grace, real grace, not cheap grace, people who love the real grace of God and God Himself at the center of His grace, we want all the grace of justification and all the grace of sanctification. I don't want to only be rescued from the penalty of my sin and then left in the misery of it. I want to be freed from the penalty, and I want to be freed from the daily misery of living a life that is settling for less than God Himself.

Oh, man. You have shown a light on and opened up our eyes to this really, really beautiful and enjoyable aspect of the Christian life. There's so much more we could talk about, but I'm going to let it stay here. I'm going to let you have the last word. Well, no, I'm going to let you have the next to last word, because I always have to have the last word because that's what a podcaster does. But to set you up, if there's any other thoughts you really want us to grasp about this topic and your book—
let me just read your prayer in the beginning of your book. You say, “My prayer for you as you read this is that you would find the means of grace to be practical, realistic, and desirable in your pursuit of the joy in Christ. That is just really, really wonderful. So any last thoughts for us before we go?

Yes, I mentioned earlier, in simplifying it down to word, prayer, fellowship, hearing His voice, having His ear, belonging to His body. So much of that grows out of our grounding in His word. And, in particular, I think something that was significant for me before writing the book, and probably the area that I feel like I have learned the most and grown the most since writing the book, is related to this old word called meditation. And it's more common in the Old Testament. The New Testament talks about setting your mind on various things. There’s some correlation\in the New Testament, and nowadays there's the influences of Eastern meditation and, “empty your head and hum.” That is not biblical meditation. Biblical meditation is filling your mind with truth, not emptying your head of thoughts. It's filling your mind with the truth that God is revealed in His word and then lingering over it, savoring it.

Randy, our lives can be so fast paced that we read the Bible with the same unreasonable pace that we do the rest of our lives. And ancient books.... It wasn't easy to publish books in the ancient world. So ancient books were carefully written and reconsidered. And then, for a book to be copied, that's a lot of work, a book to be copied and distributed. Ancient books are meant to be read slowly and repeatedly. Read it again and again and again. See the depths and shades of meaning. And so one of the most important things I do in all my life is read the Bible in an unhurried, almost leisurely way. If I can carve out enough time that I am not rushing through Bible reading to check boxes, but that I can pause and linger, and that doesn't mean it needs to be hours a day. Ten minutes is usually too short for me. It takes more like a half an hour, 40 minutes, where I can just feel like I can lose track of time, put my phone away. No notifications. No sense of time. If I can lose myself in the biblical text and hear what God has to say and then be able to linger over His Word, may be pick up on a particular verse or phrase and try to feel a little bit, feel the significance of what God is saying. I'm on the lookout for His goodness, and I want to linger over some glimpse of his glory and goodness and have that be felt in my soul and not just rush on, finish the passage, rush on to the next thing.

That practice of meditation is very significant for me, and I think that the daily reward of lingering like that and the long-term reward of lingering in God's word like that make it far worth the extra few minutes.

Well, that is a great exclamation point at the end. David, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts about this. I want to tell our listeners: Check out the website of the ministry that David Mathis is a part of, desiringgod.org. Just a wealth of resources there, of enjoying God and pursuing God with a desire to know Him and be blessed by Him. We also hope you'll check out our website, cslewisinstitute.org. We've got some resources there, both written and audio and visual, and like all of our materials, we hope and pray that these will help you love the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength and mind.

 

Brought to you by the C.S. Lewis Institute and the Questions That Matter Podcast with Randy Newman.

COPYRIGHT: This publication is published by C.S. Lewis Institute; 8001 Braddock Road, Suite 301; Springfield, VA 22151. Portions of the publication may be reproduced for noncommercial, local church or ministry use without prior permission. Electronic copies of the PDF files may be duplicated and transmitted via e-mail for personal and church use. Articles may not be modified without prior written permission of the Institute. For questions, contact the Institute: 703.914.5602 or email us.

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