Experiencing Spiritual Disciplines In Everyday Life

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The word discipline and the word discipleship, they share the same root meaning.

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Have you ever thought about that when you think of spiritual disciplines, that's connected to your discipleship, but if discipline in discipleship, Route, meaning then maybe our spiritual disciplines should be focused on helping us move from unbelief to belief in light of the Gospel in more and more areas of our life.

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Does that make sense?

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That's what you've heard me say.

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A million times, discipleship is this process in our lives and helping others move from unbelief to belief in light of the gospel in every area of life.

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So then our spiritual disciplines.

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There's that word discipleship kind of snuck in there would help us to do that.

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Would that make sense?

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Rightly practiced.

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The spiritual disciplines, take us deeper and deeper into the glories of the Gospel.

Announcer: 00:01:09

Welcome to the Everyday Disciple podcast where you learn how to live with greater intentionality and an integrated faith that naturally fits into every area of life.

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In other words, discipleship as a lifestyle, this is the stuff your parents, pastors in seminary.

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Professors probably forgot to tell you.

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And now here's your host Caesar.

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Kalinowski

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all right, we're rolling.

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Glad to be back with you.

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Thanks for being back.

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Joining me in the podcast.

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If you're brand new to this, I hope you'll dig around.

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There's so many episodes, we're hundreds and hundreds of episodes into this, talking about how the gospel applies to everyday life.

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And if you're a long-term listener we'll thank you so much.

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Well, I hope your week's been amazing.

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Mine's going pretty well.

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So far last night, we had a team K family birthday night for my son-in-law Daniel man.

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I love that guy hard to believe he's been part of the family.7, 8 years plus now crazy.

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Oh, anyway, one of the funnest things, maybe you do this in your family as well, but when it's your birthday and team K, you get to pick the meal.

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And Tina will make you whatever meal you want and whatever cake you want.

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And some people now are starting to, they're starting to kind of abuse that and they're like, I want two cakes, two kinds.

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Cause those are the, my favorites that you make.

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And so anyway, she does that.

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Daniel wanted a team K taco bar, which maybe doesn't sound that special, given how well my wife can cook.

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Like she is an amazing cook.

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Tina is actually a chef.

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Well, he picked taco bar because she doesn't just do up here a little bit of ground beef and a couple kinds of cheese and a few things.

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There's like a zillion kinds of meats and every kind of topping and multiple kinds of cheese.

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And she just went all out last night.

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It was amazing.

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And we had the red, your special plate, you know, it's really cool too.

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It's Tina does this special birthday.

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You get to pick the meal and the cake.

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And the red plate and all that.

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She does that for a lot of other people in our Oikos in our, our extended family of relationships.

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It's such a blessing.

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Maybe you do something like that to consider moving the rings out and doing it for other people as well.

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Not just your blood family, but the larger family.

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what do you think?.

Caesar: 00:03:13

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Now today's topic.

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You won't find a passage in scripture that gives a list of spiritual disciplines listed off.

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Like the fruits of the spirit are listed off and there's not one place I can find that says this, practice, this stuff.

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That's the spiritual discipline right there.

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That's your stuff.

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So why am I talking about spiritual discipline today?

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Well, partly it's because I think spiritual disciplines are very closely connected to discipleship.

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And I'll explain more on that here, just in a second and making mature disciples of Jesus that make more disciples includes passing on the healthy, spiritual disciplines.

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Life-giving Gospel, reminding practices and rhythms.

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I also want to talk about today because I think.

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In light of that.

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And maybe some of the ways we've all been taught, spiritual disciplines have often been given a bad rap in the ways that they've been taught or employed.

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What comes to mind for you when you hear that term or you think of spiritual disciplines?

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What are you, what are your spiritual disciplines and how are they going?

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What comes to mind when you hear that?

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Is it icky?

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do you think "ugh hard", or I should be doing it, or do you think I love it.

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My spiritual disciplines, best time of my day or week or, or fill in the blank throughout the years.

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Many, many philosophers and theologians and pastor types have suggested a number of practices.

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Might be considered spiritual disciplines and here these are broken down kind of in two ways.

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So here's what some of them are.

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Maybe you've heard of some of these.

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Maybe you practice some of these there's disciplines of engagement.

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In other words, the stuff you do.

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So like study study of the word worship celebration, service, pray.

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Fellowshipping confession, journaling.

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Yeah.

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Those are all common to some people and some strains of our family life here.

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Uh, those are common spiritual disciplines, and those are the, like I said, the disciplines of engagement stuff you do.

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There's also disciplines of abstinence.

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Here's some stuff you stopped doing as a spiritual discipline.

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So you find times of solitude.

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I E you're not talking, you're stopping, talking and silence or fasting, stop eating or frugality, stop spending money in a certain category or for a certain period of time or whatever, chastity sacrifice.

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Those are all historically spiritual disciplines in the abstinence category.

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I know maybe you're thinking this.

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I liked the sound of a lot of these things, but be aware the do to be monster.

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The beast is lurking in there.

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If you're not careful, because anytime we're given a list of stuff to do or stop doing, wow, my heart wants to turn that into religion and check some boxes and.

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Really start looking good to who?

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I don't know, maybe just to myself, maybe ultimately that's what I'm trying to prove or whatever let's real quickly.

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I just want to point out a few lies that we may be believing about spiritual disciplines and see if any of these lurk in your heart.

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First one is when it comes to this, if it's a real spiritual discipline, then it must be kind of hard to stick to and not very enjoyable.

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Now you believe in that that's not true.

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Here's another thing, a lie that may have crept into your heart or rhythms is that spiritual disciplines are the point of being Christian.

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That's the whole point.

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So we can sin less and, and get that behavioral modification all nailed down.

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Do you believe that, is that what you were taught?

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When I was being raised in the church, it was like, you got to get up in the morning, you got to read your two chapters and you got to pray for 10 minutes and you should journal.

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And then there's these, here's the ways you pray.

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There's all these different categories and then confess your sin.

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And it was all, it was really about.

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Sort of sin management until Jesus got back.

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And this is part of how we accomplished that.

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Yeah.

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ick, here's another lie that we often believe about spiritual disciplines is I feel like a better Christian quote unquote, when I do these things consistently.

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And then I can tell others that I'm doing them consistently.

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Maybe it's my pastor or my spouse or people in my small group or whatever.

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I feel like a better Christian when I do these things.

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Meaning not necessarily I'm growing in Christ, but I feel like I'm more obedient Christian or something.

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Ah, no.

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Okay.

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And here's another lie you might be believing about spiritual disciplines.

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God loves me more when I do these things or I practice abstinence in these areas that he loves me.

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It's not true.

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God couldn't love you any more than he does right now.

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And he's proven it at the cross.

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Now, where does this idea of spiritual disciplines even come from?

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If there's not a list in scripture or we don't have here's Jesus' spiritual disciplines that he did with his disciples.

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So let's go ahead and adopt those.

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Well, the cornerstone verse on this is first Timothy four seven chapter four, verse seven.

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Here's what the NASB says.

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It's a stay away from worthless stories that are typical of old women, like wives tales.

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That's where that term comes from.

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Rather discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness.

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The NIV says it this way have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives tales.

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Rather train yourself to be godly.

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The translation called the message is pretty cool too.

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It says stay clear of silly stories that get dressed up as religion.

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Exercise daily in God, no spiritual.

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flabbiness no spiritual flabbiness please means crazy.

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Now the word translated exercise or discipline or train in the Greek.

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It's pronounced gymnazo okay.

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Then that's probably not great.

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Cause my Greek pronunciation is not super, but it's spelled check this out.

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G Y M N a Z O like gymnasium.

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You're right.

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See what I'm saying?

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So this word, exercise or train or discipline yourself in godliness.

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It sort of has that route from it, from like a gymnasium sort of exercise, couple of definitions given for this word, this original Greek word.

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gymnazo is to exercise naked.

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Yeah.

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And that's kind of like in a wrestling school or gymnasium back in the days, that's how the Olympics all started out.

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I do like the nakedness aspect of don't hide what you need to work on kind of thing.

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I like that aspect of it, but it also definition of that carries this idea to exercise vigorously in any way, either the body or the mind.

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So like physical exercise or discipline spiritual disciplines are means and not end.

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You know what I mean by that?

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The end that is the purpose of practicing spiritual disciplines is to live more and more like Jesus to discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness, which is living in light of the truth of who God is and who he now says you are.

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See it's the end at the spiritual disciplines are means not ends.

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And so we're not godly just because we practice spiritual.

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Maybe you experienced this in your own harder life, or you've seen this in others.

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Like they get up every morning.

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They are in the word.

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They are praying.

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Their journal in for the whole world are praying for everybody, but they're mean, and they don't seem to look a lot like Jesus, most of the time, see just doing the discipline.

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That's not the point.

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That was the problem with the Pharisees.

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They thought by strictly doing a bunch of religious stuff that made them godly rightly motivated by the Gospel and in light of understanding what discipleship really is and what it's all about.

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Those are the means to godliness that Gospel.

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Ultimately, here's the thing, the word discipline and the word discipleship they share the same root meaning.

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Have you ever thought about that?

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We think of spiritual disciplines that's connected to your Discipleship.

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But if discipline in discipleship share the same root meaning, then maybe our spiritual disciplines should be focused on helping us move from unbelief to belief in light of the Gospel and more and more areas of our life.

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Does that make sense?

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That's what you've heard me say.

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A million times, discipleship is this process in our lives and helping others move from unbelief to.

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In light of the gospel in every area of life.

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So then our spiritual disciplines, there's that word discipleship kind of snuck in there would help us to do that.

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Would that make sense?

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Rightly practiced.

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The spiritual disciplines, take us deeper and deeper into the glories of the gospel of Jesus's not away from it as though we've sort of moved on to some advanced level of Christian.

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And we may often think, well, the gospels about the ABCs, it's sort of how you become a Christian, but now let's get into the really deep things of God, the spiritual disciplines.

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No, ah, no, the spiritual disciplines are derived from the Gospel, not divorced from it.

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And they only take us deeper into an understanding of the Gospel or that's what we'd hope.

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We're not just doing them for the sake of doing them or that's what once mature Christians do, I guess now that I'm in I'm past that Gospel?

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No, our spiritual disciplines are discipleship is moving from unbelief to belief and going deeper into the Gospel all the time.

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I love this quote by Thomas Merton.

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He was an American monk.

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Yeah.

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Travis monk.

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He says, ask me not where I live and what I like to eat.

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Ask me what I'm living for.

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And what I think is keeping me from living fully for that.

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That's what I want my spiritual disciplines to produce.

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That's the kind of fruit we're looking for.

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A Gospel.

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So I want to broaden our minds and even thinking about what spiritual disciplines are there.

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Again, keeping it in mind that it's intrinsically linked to discipleship, discipline, discipleship, that movement from unbelief about who God is in all that various areas of our life to belief deeper belief in the Gospel.

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What might be some new spiritual disciplines slash discipleship for you/.

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Could be something you already do on a regular or daily basis.

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What if you up the Gospel intentionality while you do that?

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Yeah.

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Few years ago, I had a job where I had to commute about 25, 30 minutes each direction to get to the office.

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And the spirit of God kind of moved me to turn off talk radio or whatever I was listening to normally, and just be silent during that time and listen to God.

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It was a listening discipline and boy, oh boy, did God speak to my heart in those times.

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And as I began to look forward to that and embrace that, that became a rich time sort of at the beginning of my day, right before I went into the Workday.

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And then on my way home, as I was sort of re-entering into life in the family and community, you know, it was a beautiful spiritual discipline.

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You ever think of something like that as a spiritual discipline, you get to.

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And by the way, if our spiritual disciplines are meant to help us move from unbelief to belief in light of the Gospel, then those disciplines are probably going to change over our lifetime.

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As the spirit is working on areas of unbelief in our hearts.

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So it's not like here's the three things I've always done them.

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And that's that.

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But you're growing, you're changing.

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You're being conformed to Christ and in God, by his spirit and by the truth of the gospel is rooting out your unbelief in new areas all the time.

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And so therefore your disciplines, your spiritual disciplines, discipleship is going to change to meet those needs.

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Here's another idea maybe for some people it's gardening.

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I read something recently says, no, it's, gardening's not a spiritual discipline.

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It can't be.

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I'm like, well, Hmm, wait a second.

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With Gospel intentionality.

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It can be, if it's something you do regularly and you already look forward to it and you find joy in it, what if you upped your Gospel intentionality?

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Within those times for my wife, Tina, it has become one of her favorite spiritual disciplines.

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And the more she shares with others, how God is speaking to her.

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Teaching her in those times, the more she's attuned to his voice when gardening.

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Yeah.

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That's how it's been working for her this summer.

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She's been gardening for a while, but this is starting to change.

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How about this?

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Could this be a spiritual discipline, maybe your family dinner night or your nightly dinner table time spent together where you're rehearsing.

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God's generosity, his grace with one another.

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Love preference for each other, all that.

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What if that daily meal or that special family dinner night that you do once a week becomes a spiritual discipline?

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I'm not talking about because it's a big Bible study at the table.

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I'm saying because of the Gospel intentionality of inclusion, and there's always a place for more people and we're full of grace and it's generous and it's fun and it's life giving.

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That sounds like a pretty good spiritual discipline to me.

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Maybe it could be your neighborhood open table, you know, like an open table where you set a night of the week, where you just have a simple meal and anybody can come and it's high invitation, low challenge, meaning, Hey, step on in, we're not trying to bait and switch anybody.

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We're just loving people, building relationships.

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What if your open table became one of your spiritual disciplines?

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Could it be?

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Yeah.

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If you start to make that a weekly, predictable pattern so that you're consistently opening your life and your calendar and your time and your home to others, for the sake of finding people at Peace and who's God brain into our lives to Disciple and introduce them to Jesus, that sounds like a beautiful spiritual discipline.

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Could it be living in an intentional rhythm of blessing others, either in word action or gift.

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So as to rehearse and be reminded of yours, our servant identity, that flows right from God and how Jesus has served you.

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What if a regular rhythm of blessing others was built in to your life and your schedule with the intentionality of not only blessing others, but being reminded of how much we've been blessed by.

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You see, see now where I'm going with this, that I think that our spiritual disciplines, when thought of in the light of discipleship and moving from unbelief to belief, open up all kinds of opportunities for us to have them, not just this sort of hidden away in quite close, closed door room in the morning sometimes.

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And speaking of that rhythm of blessing, that's actually one of our six discipleship rhythms.

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Maybe you've heard me talk about that before.

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I've gone through those.

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You can just go back just the handful of episodes and you'll see a whole episode on discipleship rhythms, but those rhythms are story being story formed regularly, rehearsing God's story, the whole redemptive arc of scripture in your life and in community with others.

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That's a beautiful spiritual discipline.

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Listen is another one of those rhythms and that's a listening prayer.

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Type of posture or maybe it's praying what next Lord for your People of Peace.

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And you're going to do that as a spiritual discipline.

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So I want to be praying regularly for my People of Peace and asking the father what's next with them, relationally.

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What's next in their life.

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What's the next thing I need to expose them to with the Gospel or proclaim to them or speak.

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The celebrate rhythm, living in a rhythm of throwing parties or weekly, barbecue, or happy hour there again, so that we can build relationships with consistency.

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So have you ever thought about a spiritual discipline of celebration of partying?

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Yeah, it could be.

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Yeah, it's all about the heart.

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It's all about our intentionality eat.

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That's a rhythm.

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We talked about family dinner nights and having meals with people.

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Bless.

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And then there's the discipleship rhythm of recreate this idea of resting and Christ's completed work.

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And out of that, we create beauty and work.

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So that's our Sabbath.

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Are you Sabbathing, are you building in times of refreshment where you're deeply connecting your heart to God and there again for like Tina that's, her gardening time is part of her recreate rhythm.

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You get the idea.

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and, by the way, we cannot get away from learning, growing soaking into the word of God.

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And that happens in the story, but that also happens in a lot of other ways, how many different ways are there to be in the word of God as a spiritual discipline in rhythm, in Community versus just alone, which kind of brings this up.

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Don't just think that a spiritual discipline is something you have to do alone.

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Why, where, where do we see that example?

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Jesus did all of his discipleship in Community, and this is long as we're kind of going there worship by the way, which is a spiritual discipline is not just singing songs, worship or worth ship is a heart issue and attitude, a posture, a belief it's a Gospel issue.

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What are some of the ways that you might be able to build worth ship worship of God into your rhythms of life as a spiritual discipline, I'm going to, I'm going to do this regularly for some people.

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It's as simple as when I'm doing this in the morning, instead of watching the news, I'm, you know, maybe I'm on the treadmill instead of watching the news.

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Listen to some worship music.

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Okay.

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It's not just seeing the songs, but it might be that, or it might be.

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I'm going to meditate on scripture while I go for a walk for 30 minutes to get my steps in today, that's worth ship.

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I'm meditating on God.

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I'm thinking about who he is, his glory, who he is, is worth my time.

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My attention.

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That's what worship is all about.

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Expand your thinking about these things.

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I think you're going to find that spiritual disciplines then become easier, more normalized.

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Beautiful.

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I really, I want to encourage you expand your view of things.

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Start to think of your spiritual disciplines, which are clearly connected to discipleship.

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I want you to think of them now more woven into the normal rhythms of everyday life, but with greater Gospel intention.

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Try some different things out.

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You're not pouring cement, build a rhythm, a discipline brings some new Gospel intentionality to it don't necessarily think alone, but how could you do this with others?

Caesar: 00:23:25

See how that goes.

Caesar: 00:23:26

See what the fruit of that is.

Caesar: 00:23:28

So instead of only some rituals that you perform by yourself, You know, when you remember, and usually apart from others, think about how more of what you consider a spiritual disciplines can be woven into your life in everyday rhythms and Community.

Caesar: 00:23:42

Yeah.

Caesar: 00:23:43

That's what I wanted to do.

Caesar: 00:23:44

Try to expose you to some new ways of thinking of these and maybe redeeming this idea of our spiritual disciplines, because it is a big part of discipleship, ours, and those that were discipling and if you want help with this kind of thinking and building this into your own life and Community, seeing the seated into life in your church, if you'd like a whole framework for discipleship and mission in everyday life, I'd like to invite you to join T and I in an upcoming coaching cohort.

Caesar: 00:24:13

We'll share our 25 30 years of doing this and live in this way in Community.

Caesar: 00:24:18

And I'd love to set up a short zoom call.

Caesar: 00:24:20

Get to know you better answer any questions you have about it.

Caesar: 00:24:23

Now's your time.

Caesar: 00:24:24

You've probably heard me mention this before and think that could be cool sometime let's at least hop on a call.

Caesar: 00:24:29

I can tell you a little bit more about it and answer any questions you have and maybe we can get you started real soon to learn more about that.

Caesar: 00:24:35

Just go to Everyday Disciple dot com forward slash coaching.

Caesar: 00:24:40

And there's a bunch of information there and a little form you can fill out and then we can set up a zoom call.

Caesar: 00:24:45

Awesome.

Caesar: 00:24:47

Well now it's time for the big three, the big three takeaways from today's topic.

Caesar: 00:24:51

If nothing else, you don't want to miss this.

Caesar: 00:24:54

And by the way, you can as always get a printable PDF of this week's big three sort of summarized.

Caesar: 00:25:00

Maybe helps you remember some of these things or share it with someone else.

Caesar: 00:25:03

You can get that as a free download or print out what I'm about to say here, by going to Everyday Disciple dot com forward slash big three.

Caesar: 00:25:12

So here are the big three for this week.

Caesar: 00:25:14

First spiritual disciplines are a means, not an end.

Caesar: 00:25:19

The disciplines themselves are never the goal think discipleship.

Caesar: 00:25:23

When you think disciplines are spiritual disciplines should be focused on helping us move from unbelief to belief in light the Gospel in more and more areas of life.

Caesar: 00:25:33

And that's going to change throughout our life.

Caesar: 00:25:36

So your spiritual disciplines probably will to.Number two rightly practice, the spiritual disciplines.

Caesar: 00:25:42

Take us deeper into the Gospel and deeper into our love for Jesus.

Caesar: 00:25:47

Not away from it as though we've moved on to some advanced level of our Christianity, and certainly they would never lead us to try to earn God's love or prove ourselves to him.

Caesar: 00:25:59

And remember healthy, spiritual disciplines are life-giving and will be something you look forward to as you're refreshed by the gospel.

Caesar: 00:26:07

If you're not, if your spiritual disciplines, aren't something you look forward to, but like something like, oh, I'm supposed to, and you might want to rethink them.

Caesar: 00:26:15

And number three, look at your current spiritual disciplines and rhythms.

Caesar: 00:26:19

Are you pleased with the fruit that they're producing in your heart and life?

Caesar: 00:26:24

Could these rhythms be shared with others as a way of Disciple?

Caesar: 00:26:28

What new perspective or new practices can you bring to all of this so that your spiritual disciplines are much more woven into normal life?

Caesar: 00:26:38

And with others.

Caesar: 00:26:40

All right.

Caesar: 00:26:40

I trust that this has been helpful.

Caesar: 00:26:42

I hope as you rethink and through all of this, you remember to ask the holy spirit to guide you in that.

Caesar: 00:26:47

I hope it has you thinking in some new directions and gives you hope.

Caesar: 00:26:51

And speaking of hope, I hope you'll join me next week.

Caesar: 00:26:54

I have a pretty special guest joining me.

Caesar: 00:26:56

Who will it be?

Caesar: 00:26:58

Well, you'll have to listen in to find out.

Caesar: 00:27:00

All right, I'll talk to you soon.

Announcer: 00:27:03

Thanks for joining us today for more information on this show and to get loads of free discipleship resources, visit Everyday Disciple dot com.