Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] The following is a legacy recording from the archives of the C.S. lewis Institute. While the audio quality of these recordings may vary, the content remains vital to the mission of the Institute. To develop disciples who can articulate, defend, and live faith in Christ through personal and public life.
[00:00:28] And so the whole of our attitude in life today is that you can always buy professional help.
[00:00:38] And of course, tragically, the role of psychology today and the counselor in our society today has been hiring a friend.
[00:00:49] You pay for it.
[00:00:53] And so the result is that, on the one hand, we will also seek to do the same thing in the Christian life.
[00:01:02] We'll say, oh, yes, there's a tremendous need for spiritual direction. Therefore, we'll have new courses in our colleges, and we'll have new degrees and spiritual directions.
[00:01:13] And it's the in thing when people are desperately looking around for help.
[00:01:20] Now, there could at the same time, therefore, be a further blindness, a further darkness, if we are at the same time listening to the wisdom of wise people, but not going to the source of wisdom, who is God himself, as we have seen.
[00:01:42] And if we turn our back on all that Dr. Waltke has just been giving to us from the Book of Proverbs, we will be foolish indeed.
[00:01:52] And so really, we must never allow this interest in spiritual direction and spiritual tutelage that we all need to be a substitute for the Word of God.
[00:02:08] And I have recently been looking through Psalm 119, and as I read through it, I wept because I realized how there's a piety of the Torah, of the Word of God that I have neglected so profoundly in my own life, and a recognition that really there is all the reality of words that give life everlasting life.
[00:02:35] And we have the Bible so often as a closed book.
[00:02:41] And even from our pulpit today, you'll find that it's much easier to quote from psychology than it is from the Word of God.
[00:02:50] And it's much easier to make a sermon around current affairs than it is upon the Scriptures.
[00:02:57] And so there's a famine for the Word of God in our generation.
[00:03:02] And so spiritual direction is an index of that canon.
[00:03:07] And it's something that we have to bear in mind now. We want at the same time to give a ministry. And so there are many of you who are already involved in a. In a relational ministry that in. In a sense, should deepen into giving spiritual direction.
[00:03:28] And so it was that my much more nobler objective that we really are focusing now on what is the importance of spiritual direction, what objectives it should have, and in a sense, how we Ourselves should engage in such a ministry and recognize its importance in our lives.
[00:03:51] Now, for a biblical context of this, I want us to turn to numbers, chapter 22.
[00:03:59] And there we have the story of Balaam and Balak.
[00:04:07] And if you remember, it tells us in the context of the chapter, that the king of Moab was very troubled. He was threatened by the horde of the Israelites that were coming almost like locusts upon his land.
[00:04:25] And he really didn't know how to cope with the situation.
[00:04:28] It says, indeed, Moab was filled with dread because of the Israelites.
[00:04:35] And so the Moabite said to the elders of Midian, this hoard is going to lick up everything around us as an ox licks up the grass of the field.
[00:04:44] And so Balak the king sent messengers to summon Balaam son of Beor, who was in Mesopotamia at the time. And obviously he was a guru, he was a wise man, and his reputation was obviously in the ancient world, international.
[00:05:05] So he was being called from a far distant country to come to the aid and give wisdom to the Moabite.
[00:05:14] And so he summoned out of their distress.
[00:05:19] We can think of the situation like this.
[00:05:23] We are swamped with a whole horde of emotional conflicts.
[00:05:30] We have passions and desires and lust that we're incapable of controlling.
[00:05:38] They're going to destroy us unless something is done.
[00:05:42] And already we see in our society today, with the breakdown of marriage and with the breakup of the home and with the dissolution of our society, that people are desperately looking for help.
[00:05:57] And so our culture today is like Moab.
[00:06:01] It's threatening to be overwhelmed.
[00:06:03] And we're fearful of the consequences of that overwhelming force of emotional issues that we're facing.
[00:06:12] And so Balaam is called, and I think Balaam has had a bad press because of the act.
[00:06:21] We've assumed that he was such a stupid guy. And I was very stupid this morning because I didn't look at the program properly. I thought that my name wasn't on this morning, so I wasn't here to speak to you. So I'm really speaking to you, like Bill and Zachary.
[00:06:35] So there's a parable about standing up here in front of you.
[00:06:41] And I did tell you how my knees are trembling as I think of getting through this hour together.
[00:06:50] So I put myself in that position.
[00:06:55] But really what comes out of the picture is that Balaam is a very much nobler person than we've given credit to be.
[00:07:03] He really is for us a good exemplar of a spiritual director.
[00:07:09] And the reason why he is such a good exemplar is that a true spiritual director is someone who does not detract from the word of God, but who calls attention to the Word of God and who therefore reminds us that there is no wisdom without the word of God.
[00:07:32] You see, in the three oracles that are ensuing in the following chapters, we find that the thrust of each of these oracles is that if God has spoken, then we must listen. And so a key verse is, for example, in chapter 22, verse 38.
[00:07:51] Well, I have come to you now, Balaam replied, but can I say just anything?
[00:07:58] In other words, do you want me to simply be paid to give you some something that is tickling to your ears, something that you want to hear?
[00:08:09] Are you bribing me to put words in my mouth which are not true? I can't do it.
[00:08:15] I must speak only what God puts in my mouth.
[00:08:22] And so the nature of spiritual direction is simply seeking to listen to the word of God and communicate that word in the hearts of others.
[00:08:35] And so this is the thing that of course, is going to baffle and finally frustrate the King of Moab, because he doesn't want to hear the word of God.
[00:08:46] And so, because Balaam is listening to the word of God, he's a very unpopular messenger.
[00:08:54] And if somebody is going to be true and faithful as a friend, spiritual friend, you may hear some very unpopular things, but nevertheless, because they're true and because they are from God, therefore there will be healing, it will be preventative, perhaps of disaster.
[00:09:15] And that's how we should take these stories that we find now. Another element that we find in these stories is the contrast between man's religion and God's true revelation.
[00:09:31] Man's religion is wanting to make things magical happen.
[00:09:36] And we're living today not only with a great lust for lust in our culture, but a great lust for magic in our culture.
[00:09:48] One of the most popular movements now taking place in the church is signs and wonders.
[00:09:55] One of the things that you will find about the Christian life is the realism of the Christian life. It's far more than in our hearts at the first itself.
[00:10:06] And so today, the Christian faith and the Christian message, God's word, are being, in a sense, given deceptively and in a sense taught, first of all by the professionalizing of the Christian life, and secondly by the institutionalization of the Christian life.
[00:10:30] And thirdly, because we're impatient with the Word of God, we want quick results, and so we want something that's magical.
[00:10:40] So the king wanted something magical to happen.
[00:10:44] He wanted Balaam to use words. And here, of course, is a corroboration, just exactly what Dr. Walti has communicated to us this morning, that words are vital, words are powerful, words are life giving or death giving.
[00:11:03] And what Balak wanted Balaam to do was to curse God's people, to put a spell upon them with words that were destructive, words that were destroying.
[00:11:19] And the first thing that Balaam has to do is to say, oh, no, I can't do that.
[00:11:26] I can't put a curse on people that God has left.
[00:11:30] So that the people of God's word are protected from all spells, from all that could be destructive, negatively.
[00:11:41] And so this is the first stance that Balaam had.
[00:11:46] But you see, Balak's religion, which is magical, is also based on the properties of things. The idea that you can go to the various shrines. And so there's an amazing story here of how the king is guided round or guides Balaam round all the shrines of Moab, seven shrines.
[00:12:09] And they send to this mount and they ascend to that mount. And we make this sacrifice, do that sacrifice.
[00:12:15] And the idea is that because a place is a holy place and because the rights are holy, right, and everything is sacramentalized in that kind of way, that therefore the magic will happen.
[00:12:31] You know, one of the things that has so beset the Christian faith is the sac is the sacramentalism of the Christian faith is to make holy rites and holy days and holy offices and holy activities substitutes for a relationship with God.
[00:12:55] Sacramentalism is not a substitute for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
[00:13:02] And so those people who want to sacramentalize, and we find that this is so strongly developed in the country Reformation, it was almost as if the threat of the recovery of God's word in the reformation in the 16th century put the Counter Reformation in a kind of defensive poise of trying to over sacramentalize the contradiction.
[00:13:28] And so what was taking place in this extension of aggressor, what was taking place here?
[00:13:35] And behind it all, of course, there's the attitude that Balak is wanting to bribe Balaam, that money will pick, and that money really is the ultimate authority.
[00:13:52] And again, we find that Balon is irreproachable on this point.
[00:13:58] Jesus will not be bribed. How can he?
[00:14:02] What prevents us from bribery, professional bribery in the Christian work today?
[00:14:08] Well, a key verse is in chapter 23, verse 21.
[00:14:14] You see, the Lord, their God is with them.
[00:14:17] The sight of a king is among them.
[00:14:21] There's a divine sovereignty, there is the authority of the kingship of God.
[00:14:29] That is with God's people and with God's servants.
[00:14:34] And so it's that prerogative of a king to which they are obedient.
[00:14:40] This is the voice of God, it's the voice of a king that speaks.
[00:14:45] And consequently, right through the Old Testament, the one was to seek to really say what is the most focal emphasis that is given in the Old Testament theology.
[00:14:54] I have to say it's the kingship of God.
[00:14:58] That is why we praise him, that's why we worship him.
[00:15:04] It's the kingship of God that is a source of all well being and of all gratitude and of all worship to our God.
[00:15:16] And so it's this that is so pivotal in the mind of Balaam.
[00:15:24] So the Lord puts a message in his mouth and again we find him in his second article, recognizing the significance of this, and then we find that on it goes through four oracles, through five oracles in fact.
[00:15:42] And the consequence is that Balaam returns home as a faithful servant.
[00:15:48] Well, that story is, I think, a prelude to what I want to talk about this morning, about the significance of being true soul friends to each other and of the way that we can help each other to gain wisdom in the ways of God's Word.
[00:16:06] So the ultimate goal of all spiritual direction is simply to have a developing, a deepening fellowship with God in Jesus Christ.
[00:16:19] So the primary task of spiritual direction is ultimately to facilitate the contemplation of God, of recognizing the work of God in our lives, of recognizing that. Therefore what, what is primal to our life is prayerfulness.
[00:16:44] It's the whole exercise of a life that's lived before God in prayer under his Word.
[00:16:53] You see, we want the Lord to be real in our lives.
[00:16:57] We want to live as gospel people.
[00:17:02] That is to say that we want a lifestyle that is determined only by the gospel.
[00:17:10] And to find that life, we certainly need help.
[00:17:14] And why do we need help?
[00:17:16] Well, because sin is always self deluding.
[00:17:22] John Owen in his great classes on the treatise on temptation and also his treatise on sin, indwelling sin in the life of the believer that we translated or rewrote for in our classics, I find that very powerful because if you read John Owen on indwelling sin in the life of the believer, you'll find that because of this nature of sin, always to deceive ourselves, we always need the help of other people.
[00:17:49] Not to be self deluded.
[00:17:52] We can be self deluded in our spirituality just as much as we can be deluded in many other things. Well, and so if God has made us Relational people.
[00:18:03] He's made us for the other, and he's made us as persons then in interpersonal communion and relationship with each other.
[00:18:12] We need the help of someone else to guide us through the pitfalls of the self delusion of sin.
[00:18:22] We can never be a and I went unto ourselves.
[00:18:28] And so consequently is this ontological, that's to say it's basic to our whole creation, basic to our lives is that we need the other.
[00:18:41] When Paul teached in Ephesians chapter four about mature manhood, about coming to the fullness of the measure of Christly, he indicates that this is always in the plural.
[00:18:52] We who have mature Christian life.
[00:18:56] It's never I who have mature Christian life.
[00:19:00] And so it's as we are in the other, as we relate to each other with our maturity is a corporate reality, never a personal reality.
[00:19:13] And so if that is true and indwelling, sin is also at the same time part of the deception of our own personal lives.
[00:19:21] You can see how it's reinforced by the fact that we need others to guide us, others to accompany us on the way in our programming.
[00:19:32] Now, one of the other objectives of spiritual direction which relates to all of this is that it's specifying the Christian life, telling it us in terms of our own uniqueness, that as we realize that your journey and my journey are very different journeys, yet at the same time there has to be this awareness that it's a specific journey.
[00:20:04] One of the elements of the world is its abstraction.
[00:20:11] One of the tyrannies of scholarship is likewise abstraction.
[00:20:16] We love to be able to generalize, we love to be able to see things in a kind of foggy, universal views of category.
[00:20:27] And it's so easy for us to talk about the Christian life in the same way.
[00:20:33] There's a sense in which our relationship with God must be like co, where this specific need that I have of God has to be met and dealt with, this specific barrier has to be removed, this specific phobia that I have that is confusing me has to be dealt with.
[00:20:56] And it's that interlocking of the relevance of God in every insight of our own needs that enables us to grow in Christ.
[00:21:06] So it's not in terms of universal principles, abstract thought, but the specification that is so important for us in our lives.
[00:21:18] And so it therefore means that although we mustn't make an absolute of it, nevertheless there's a sense in which Christian experience must be of central importance.
[00:21:30] But it's not based on hearsay, it's not based on secondhand faith God has no grandchildren.
[00:21:40] All of us are either the children of God or we're not.
[00:21:46] One of the weaknesses that there has been in the church was the idea, the assumption that within the christening of children, that therefore, you know, there's no problem.
[00:21:59] They're members of the church.
[00:22:01] And so one of the problems that we do face today is the amount of hearsay, secondhand faith that there is in so much church life.
[00:22:14] And so we need to recognize the importance then of this for our lives.
[00:22:31] The second question I want to raise then is what does a spiritual friend, a spiritual director, do for us?
[00:22:43] Primarily, it's to give us growth, to facilitate growth in response to the Spirit of God in our hearts.
[00:22:57] So we look for friends who have a willing ear, who have wise advice to give warnings, to alert us, to provide guidance in personal companionship, the purpose of which is very specific.
[00:23:20] The purpose is not for congeniality, not for convivial companionship, but primarily because of a desire to grow in Jesus Christ.
[00:23:36] But the result of that relationship will certainly relieve us of anxiety, will certainly intensify an observance of the Word of God in our hearts, and will enable us to cultivate a devout spirit under the Word of God.
[00:24:02] So the primary goal is really cultivating the garden of the Lord.
[00:24:08] If one sees the distinction between Christian counseling and Christian spiritual direction, I would say the difference is that in counseling, you're weeding the garden.
[00:24:18] In spiritual direction, you're cultivating the garden, cultivating the plants and the fruits of the garden.
[00:24:26] And we've already seen.
[00:24:28] And already Dr. Walter's talk this morning is a lesson. Need to go through the Book of Proverbs and see how many times the wise lips are associated with the Tree of Life. I think it occurs many times in the book.
[00:24:44] And so this is primarily what spiritual direction is about, is really cultivating the garden that is so beautifully depicted in Psalm 1, which is the key to all the Tolkien.
[00:25:01] A wise man who is obedient to the Word of God is like a tree that's planted by rivers of living water, bears forth its fruit in due season.
[00:25:14] And so this is the primary objective.
[00:25:17] And this is therefore what we're seeking to do to encourage each other in this area.
[00:25:24] When you're cultivating, you can think in terms of the strength of the plant, or you can think of the weaknesses of the plant. And likewise, when we are in spiritual direction, relating with each other, do we major on somebody else's abilities, or do we major in terms of looking at their weaknesses?
[00:25:49] This is a very important and discuss a question that you may want to raise in discussion afterwards.
[00:25:58] But I have come through experience to believe that primarily our interest in spiritual direction should be to pay special attention to the weaknesses of other people.
[00:26:13] Why is that?
[00:26:16] Well, because if you look at our secular culture, our culture in education is always focusing upon people's abilities, people's strengths.
[00:26:30] So if you get a straight A in a particular subject, then it's obvious that that is what you should choose for your honours subject for your degree.
[00:26:40] It's obvious that that then puts you accidentally onto that road to being what you become.
[00:26:46] When I went to university, I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I read history and geography in English. Well, I got my best marks in geography, so accidentally I became a geographer.
[00:26:56] And I'm sure many of us do the same thing.
[00:27:00] My sister hadn't a clue what she wanted to do, except she wanted to do something unusual as a woman. And so she went to the dean and she said she wanted to read Sanskrit. And he looked at her and very wisely said, oh, that's very interesting, why don't you read law?
[00:27:15] She read law and it was unusual for a woman at that time to do it. And it was very wise that she read law, not Sanskrit, as far as the practicality of society is concerned.
[00:27:27] But that's the way our culture operates.
[00:27:30] Major on your abilities, major on your natural talents.
[00:27:36] Well, what happens in the Christian community when we major on our natural talents is that we also major on atheism.
[00:27:45] Because in my abilities, where I'm self sufficient, I really don't need God.
[00:27:52] And so one of the problems that we have in theological education has become so bizarre today is that there's so much more evidence of natural talent in the grace of God, in theological education.
[00:28:07] And so one of the problems that we're facing in the church today is that we secularize our faith when we major on our natural abilities.
[00:28:18] Now I'm not saying we've got to deny our abilities and we'll come to that in a minute, but what I'm saying is of primary consequence is that if we're going to be a gospel person.
[00:28:29] How do you define the profile of a gospel person?
[00:28:34] You define a gospel person by someone who is risen from the dead, someone who bears witness to the resurrection of their life, someone who can say, I was dead, but I'm alive again.
[00:28:52] I was blind, but now I see.
[00:28:56] I was weak, but in my weakness he made me strong. Wrong.
[00:29:01] I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me. Why?
[00:29:06] Because I went head on in my weakness into the situation and as I groaned it out and sweated it out, because it's a very painful thing to realize that it's only the grace of God that makes us who we are.
[00:29:21] And so in spiritual directions, when people are brought to this point, we do so of course with truthfulness.
[00:29:33] But it has to be in love. Otherwise truth is not truth, because truth and love are connected in scripture.
[00:29:41] But there has ever to be great hope. I love the words of the Apostle Paul when he says seeing, then we have such hope. We use great plainness of speech.
[00:29:50] It's the hope of the gospel that gives us this plainness of facing the Lord in his word and responding to it.
[00:30:05] The effect then is that we don't any longer focus upon those things that in a sense were a substitute for God in our lives.
[00:30:18] For some of us, our intelligence can be a substitute for God's sovereignty.
[00:30:24] For others of us, it can be our physical strength.
[00:30:28] For others of us it may be our natural beauty.
[00:30:32] For others of us it may be some particular ability that is poetic or creative or musical.
[00:30:42] But what you recognize is that we are going through a different gateway than these natural abilities.
[00:30:50] What is that narrow gate that we go through?
[00:30:54] It's primarily the gate of prayer.
[00:30:58] You'll find in your life that if you're operating on your natural abilities, you're not prayerful because you don't need God.
[00:31:08] But it's when you are confronted by your weakness and realize that this is the only way in which you can really face the reality of the grace and the resources of the gospel, then your life becomes prayerful.
[00:31:25] Now, at the same time, we need to be warned against the fascination with our weaknesses.
[00:31:32] So when I say that we major on our weaknesses, we we don't over major on our weaknesses.
[00:31:40] That is to say that today, with all the probing and the analytical skills of psychology, we can all have a neurotic fascination with our weaknesses.
[00:31:53] We can indulge in them.
[00:31:56] In fact, I believe that the paralytic on the Pool of Siloam had been so preoccupied by his paralysis, Jesus had really to say, yes, you've been lying here for 38 years. You have been fascinated by your neurotic weaknesses.
[00:32:12] Are you really wanting to be healed or is that too radical for you to accept?
[00:32:18] And so there is a radicalism about health that many of us are not prepared to accept.
[00:32:26] And so we need to get out of that pit.
[00:32:29] And so the last thing a spiritual director should do is to dig the pit deeper. For us by psychoanalyzing us to the mc, because all that that does is to simply dig it deeper and deeper and we welter in it more and more and we're not going to get out of it.
[00:32:46] So one of the things that we find about Jesus as our spiritual director is that what he does is to give us a sense insight about our weakness.
[00:32:59] Leave it there.
[00:33:02] You see, he confronted the rich young ruler and he said, this is your weakness, your possession, one thing you lack.
[00:33:11] Now, Jesus didn't go on to psychoanalyze what that meant. He just left him. Confronted with the insight and the way that God blesses us in our lives, he confronts us with a central insight and then says, there it is.
[00:33:30] Now, in the con, in the confrontation that this now brings us into, we have the option of going on living, repressing our weakness and majoring on our natural talents, which is another way of saying that we do without God.
[00:33:49] Or on the other hand, we are given new assurance that our lives in our weakness are lived in his strength.
[00:34:02] So are we the kind of person that is a person whose life is strength from the Lord, or are we a natural person that lives without the relevance of the log in our houses?
[00:34:18] And that is really the question for our growth in Christ, whether we are one or the other.
[00:34:26] And then we will discover that if our life is strength from the Lord, then there is a place for our natural talent.
[00:34:35] Then we begin to also discover that our natural abilities together with strength, strength from the experience of the Lord, come together, coalesce into a new integration of our person.
[00:34:48] Then we begin to see that our talents can form a constellation of our person, of a new awareness, that these are gifts from God too.
[00:35:00] The gift of his grace and the gift of what he's given us naturally in birth and through the circumstances of our education and the nurturing of the home background that we may have had all of those come together in a new integration and provide us with a new hope and a new realism for our life.
[00:35:23] Well, you asked how are we to sometimes distinguish between our weaknesses and our strength? Because sometimes our weaknesses are concealed. I mean, there are things that we limp with like an Achilles heel, that we are obviously only too painfully reminded of its woundedness.
[00:35:40] And so we don't need a reminder of that. But there are other weaknesses that we perhaps are not aware of.
[00:35:48] These are some indices of weakness in our pattern and our character shallowness, so that we are superficial in our relationship, in our communication, in insight narrowness.
[00:36:08] The bigot is a weak person, the Fanatic is a weak person.
[00:36:17] So a narrowness, and it can be a narrowness of faith that is dogmatic.
[00:36:26] There are people who perspire a lot because they lack inspiration.
[00:36:35] And of course, there's a lack of creativity.
[00:36:40] And creativity is not just simply artistic.
[00:36:46] It's also social, relational, it's moral.
[00:36:53] So these are elements of weakness that have to be replaced by the alternatives, which are bread and debt and true creativity.
[00:37:09] Where is the strength of the Christian?
[00:37:15] Where is that death?
[00:37:17] Where's that creativity?
[00:37:20] It's no less than the fellowship of the divine Trinity.
[00:37:26] Can you think of anything more profoundly deep than the relationship that we can have with God the Father and God the Son, God the Holy Spirit?
[00:37:36] Can there be anything that is broader than the love of God?
[00:37:42] That can all fill our hearts?
[00:37:46] So we discover that as we grow in Christ, we're given bread that we never thought possible, and our minds expand accordingly. I had the arrogance when I left Oxford to think that I was turning my back on all the richness of a very sophisticated culture, and I was coming to this Mickey Mouse place called Regent College, and I would have to forfeit all that.
[00:38:11] And then I realized what an arrogant fool I was.
[00:38:16] Because I discovered that if you are really seeking the ways of God, your mind is stretched as it never was set before, and you find yourself caught up in challenges which are deeper than you ever thought possible.
[00:38:32] You find yourself really entering into what Paul prays about when he prays that we may know the length and the breadth and the depth and the height and to know the love of Christ that passes knowledge.
[00:38:46] So we discover that our lives become the lives of deep people and of rich people, creative people.
[00:38:55] And we are the people of God.
[00:38:58] And instead of being countercultural or anticultural, yes, we may be countercultural, but certainly not anticultural.
[00:39:09] In other words, we begin to realize that God intends us to be more culturally creative in our lives as a consequence.
[00:39:20] And so then true strength will be a growing integration of our lives.
[00:39:27] Where before weakness is a scatter of the forces of our life.
[00:39:33] We talk about people being a strong character. What we mean by character is basically that effective integration of person.
[00:39:43] And of course, the Christian character is the strongest character.
[00:39:47] It's the authentic character.
[00:39:50] It's the character that God intends us to have, which is to be made into the image and likeness of each person. Done.
[00:39:59] But as I said, if we are to grow, then we have to look at our own weaknesses critically and realistically, and yet redemptively and hopefully.
[00:40:12] The purpose of looking at ourselves critically and Accept the advice of other people is in order that we may grow more realistically and hopefully and redemptively in Christ.
[00:40:27] Dr. Wolke this morning emphasized the importance of gentleness. I believe that gentleness is one of the most significant elements of the environment of a Christian and that there are so many different aspects to it. Perhaps in our next talk, we'll talk more about gentleness and we'll leave it at this moment. But one of the things that we know is about gentleness is that it's related to intimacy.
[00:40:53] And in the intimacy of God, we can be most gentle because we're most confident, because we're most hopeful of the redemptive processes of what God is doing in our lives.
[00:41:09] So gentleness is the attitude of true confidence.
[00:41:15] It doesn't need to use the male fist because of the power greater than ourselves. The voice of a king is with us.
[00:41:24] We're gentle people.
[00:41:27] And that confidence in him is what gives us forbearance from being violent before others.
[00:41:37] And of course, gentleness is also cosmic in its expectation of all the things that God will do in the new creation.
[00:41:48] We don't need to feel utterly frustrated if we don't get our own way in the Lord's work in this earth. Because God has a plan that's bigger than our thoughts, and he's got ways that are greater than our ways.
[00:42:00] And he's orchestrating it, not we.
[00:42:04] And so we live in the light of eternity. And. And we are witnesses of the eternal dimension.
[00:42:10] We're not just simply frustrated because we don't get our own way in Christian ministry here and with that at this moment.
[00:42:18] And so that gives us, therefore, a very different approach to these things.
[00:42:27] And finally, as we think of all of this, we realize that therefore the great need for us too, is to recognize, and we'll talk about this in our next talk more fully.
[00:42:44] We need to recognize that in spiritual direction, we are living in the communion of saints.
[00:42:54] There's a whole army of those who go before us, as we're reminded in the epistle to the Hebrews.
[00:43:01] And therefore, one of the great needs of our lives today is to recover the quality of that fellowship.
[00:43:11] And we do so when we read widely through the history of the church.
[00:43:35] Brothers who communicated this week.
[00:43:38] You know, I just feel very sad that I pass every week the home where Dr. Walker lives, and he's no longer there of all of an apostle.
[00:43:51] But this is how we should feel about all God's saints.
[00:43:57] How foolish we are not to enter into the communion, how we rob ourselves of riches and opportunities and privileges of those who walk with God.
[00:44:17] And so I urge you that as you take spiritual direction in your life, you'll also take spiritual reading, more spiritual in your life.
[00:44:28] And you'll find that the more the instincts of God inspire you, the more authentically they point you back to the Word that inspires them.
[00:44:39] So that's what I want to close with just now, that the whole object is not to take away from the Word of God its central and proper role in our lives, which is a vital role.
[00:44:52] But unless we are living on the Word of God, conceiving on the Word of God, and dwelling on the Word of God, we cannot be like that man in Psalm 1.
[00:45:03] But the man of Psalm 1 is the one who in the desert is in an oasis, who in the oasis has its root in that living water.
[00:45:16] And all the secret of patundicism is precisely because of that.
[00:45:23] Now there's a double play as we conclude with the words of the story that we saw this morning in the story of Balaam and Balaam.
[00:45:34] The primary focus in the story is that Balak wanted Balaam to curse the people of God.
[00:45:43] How could people, when their lives were blessed?
[00:45:48] And what is blessing in Scripture?
[00:45:53] Blessing in Scripture is not just simply living a pleasurable life, not just simply saying, as he sometimes paraphrases the attitude, happy is the man does this, that and the other. True, there is happiness, but blessing is literally being in touch with the fecundity of the Creator Himself.
[00:46:15] Out of his eternal science he fought and brought all things into being with art.
[00:46:24] And out of the fecundity of His Word he speaks through art and speak to us and speak in us to produce that fecundity of life. The blessed life is the life that is so touched by the Word of God, so controlled by the Word of God, that that Word which brought all things into being, brings into being that harmony in our lives that removes the chaos and bring structure and fruitfulness into being in our own existence.
[00:47:00] So the evidence of a fruitful Christian is the way in which our words touch the hearts of others and are life giving.
[00:47:11] Blessed then is that man.
[00:47:13] And such a man can't be cursed.
[00:47:17] Such a man cannot be chited.
[00:47:22] Such a man cannot be destroyed if his words go on living.
[00:47:30] Many of our martyrs, saints did die.
[00:47:34] Their words were apparently stifled, but their words are still with us.
[00:47:42] And so thank God for this fecundity expulsion that there is in the Word of God.
[00:47:50] So spiritual direction should have that focus and provide that life. Giving fertility for all our needs.
[00:48:01] Let me just close in prayer as we think about this.
[00:48:07] Dear Father, we long to reach out to others in our generation with the words of the Gospel, with the life that it gives.
[00:48:18] But we realize that for many have ears that cannot hear, eyes that cannot see, hearts that are hardened against thy word.
[00:48:32] And so we pray that you will give us wisdom and therefore that you will give us willingness to be changed by you to have that wisdom so that we may be able to be spiritual friends, guide counselors to many around us who need your help.
[00:48:54] But Lord, we need also to have the willingness to be conscious, to be docile under your feet, to be aware of our own inner needs, so that in interdependence we may more manifestly demonstrate the reality of the body of Christ, of whom you are the head and we think of your members.
[00:49:20] Give us, we pray to you, O Lord, these visions and desires through Christ our Lord.
[00:49:29] The proceeding was presentation of the C.S. lewis Institute in the legacy of C.S. lewis, the institute endeavors to develop disciples who can articulate, defend and live faith in Christ through personal and public life. For more information please visit our website at www.cslewisinstitute.org. thank.
[00:49:57] You.
