“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness...” 2 Timothy 3:16
One of the final events of the Olympics is tomorrow: the marathon. Could you run a marathon right now? If your answer is no, then what if you tried really, really hard? Could you then run a marathon? The answer is probably the same. There’s a difference between trying and training. Trying is important, for sure. But training is everything.
The same is true in the spiritual life. Trying hard doesn’t suddenly, in a moment of crisis, give us deep trust in God. That comes through practice and building trust over time. Even then, it's not easy, but it is easier.
Nathan Foster, in his book Ordinary Saint, tells about John Paxson, guard for the Chicago Bulls, hitting the game-winning shot in the 1993 NBA Finals. Afterward, he said, “I just caught the ball and shot it as I have my whole life. I’ve been playing basketball since I was eight years old, and I’ve shot like that in my driveway hundreds of thousands of times. It was just reaction.”
When we do something regularly, then in clutch moments (or crisis!), we aren’t grasping in desperation as much as we are doing what has become a natural reaction. This comes from spiritual habits or disciplines. These are things like regular prayer, practicing silence and meditation, reading scripture, worship, and connecting with others for spiritual growth, to name a few. The fruit of such practice is that it develops trust in God and the freedom not to get our way and still be okay. Engaging in such practices regularly enough starts to move us from effort on our part to experiencing God’s effort working in us. As Dallas Willard says, “Spiritual disciplines are activities in our power that we engage in to do what we cannot do by direct effort.”
In other words, there are some things that trying hard can’t produce. And there are some things we experience through spiritual training that we also can’t produce. They simply open us to God’s work in us. Trying is important. Training is everything. We’ll think more about this on Sunday.
See you then,
Rob