Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Welcome back to The Pastor Next Door.

This is a podcast for honest conversations about faith, especially when faith feels complicated, uncertain, or worn down.

I’m not here to give you easy answers or to fix anything.

I’m here to sit with you for a bit, maybe ask a few good questions, try to make room for grace and honesty along the way.

Wherever you’re coming from today, I am really glad you’re here.

Now let’s get started.

Here in season one, we are going to be talking about spiritual fitness.

We are talking about this idea of trying to build a resilient faith.

These conversations about spiritual fitness are hopefully going to maybe change the way that we think about our faith, think about what it means for us to grow a resilient faith.

To get us rolling here, I want to talk about that phrase, spiritual fitness, because I think that it could potentially trigger for some of us maybe some negative things, some negative emotions, some negative feelings, because of our religious and spiritual backgrounds.

We’ve been in different situations where the idea of spirituality or being spiritually fit can be overwhelming.

It can be pressure.

It can ramp up in us just a sense of exhaustion or possibly guilt.

Maybe you start thinking about this and you’re like, this is just going to be another thing to fail at.

You know, I think if that phrase already makes you tired, you’re not wrong.

It’s okay.

It is okay to feel that.

It is okay to hear something like spiritual fitness and think, oh, one more podcast that is simply self-improvement disguised as spirituality.

I get it.

And that is absolutely not what we are going to be talking about.

This is hopefully not just self-improvement disguised as spirituality.

I hear those kinds of podcasts.

I read those kinds of books, and I get frustrated, and they exhaust me too.

So let’s think about what we usually mean by fitness.

We have the cultural understanding, right?

Fitness equals discipline, effort, and visible results.

We can see them.

You go to the gym, and if you go every day, and you eat the right things, and you lift the right weights, eventually your arms are going to be bigger, your shoulders are going to be bigger, you’re going to start forming muscles.

You are going to see the results of your physical fitness.

You measure your improvement by strength, performance, or appearance.

And so we then draw the parallel into our spiritual world often, right?

It just kind of gets imported in.

So quiet times become a metric.

It’s this whole, how’s your walk with God?

And you go back over your last week or two weeks, and you think, well, out of the last seven days, I had three quiet times.

That’s less than 50%.

I guess I’m failing.

We use our quiet times, use this intentional relational time with God as some sort of a metric that is supposed to communicate to people whether or not we are spiritually fit.

Or we use prayer.

We think of prayer in context of productivity, right?

I prayed for something, and either it happened or it didn’t happen.

And so there’s no performance there.

Or we start experiencing this kind of guilt-driven consistency, this whole thing of, well, I have to.

I have to have my quiet time, have to read my Bible, have to pray, have to go to church, have to, have to.

And it becomes this guilt and shame kind of thing that drives us into consistency.

This approach does not form people.

It exhausts them.

It exhausts them.

We are not going to be spiritually formed.

We are not going to grow and develop a resilient faith if we are thinking of quiet times as metrics, prayer as productivity, and if we are pursuing some sort of guilt-driven consistency.

All that is is a recipe for exhaustion.

You see, spiritual fitness is not about achievement.

It’s not about checking boxes.

It’s not about trying to somehow get the right spiritual recipe so that you’re super holy.

That is not what spiritual fitness is about.

Spiritual fitness ultimately is about capacity.

It is about building the capacity to have a resilient faith.

It’s about building this capacity to face an uncertain and difficult world with the kind of hope and love and grace that we see in the life of Jesus.

So what are some of these capacities that we want to build out?

Well, we want to build out the capacity to trust when answers are unclear.

How do we walk through an unclear and uncertain world?

Are we to do so with a sense of constant and unending cynicism?

Or are we supposed to always be walking through the world without any sense of confidence?

No, we have to build this capacity to trust, to trust that even when we can’t put our hands around things, even when we can’t quite wrap our minds around something, that our faith will help us through it.

You see, this really is what a resilient faith does.

It gives us the capacity to trust when the world is unclear, when we can’t see the end, when we’re just not quite sure of the direction that we’re heading.

We can build this capacity to trust that God is going to help us get through there, that God is going to help us through the rough patch.

It is also the capacity to remain present in suffering.

This is another capacity we want to develop.

Because so often in our world, when we start walking through a season of suffering, a season of pain, a season of hardship, our response typically is to just try to escape it.

That’s oftentimes how Christianity has even framed and formed its own message, that if you follow Jesus, everything will be easy.

Everything will be great.

And yet, when we read His story, when we read the things that He said, what we find out is following Jesus is actually going to probably lead us into some seasons of suffering.

It’s not easy.

But if we follow Him, and if we pursue some sense of spiritual fitness, then what happens is we are able to remain present in the suffering.

We are able to really deal with it and to enter in and not just try to escape it.

It helps us to persevere through it so that that season of suffering, that season of hardship can become part of our story, and it can become a good part of our story.

It can be part of our story that gets redeemed and can then offer us a greater sense of meaning and purpose.

A third capacity that we’re going to seek to build and develop is the capacity to love without certainty.

You see, love requires risk.

Love requires us to experience some sense of self-sacrifice.

We have to struggle our way through love.

It’s not easy.

When you love, you are putting yourself out there, and you are risking, and you are putting yourself in a position where you could potentially experience pain and hardship because love says you are going to put yourself second, and you are going to put somebody else first.

You are going to seek the good of another as opposed to simply your good.

And there is nothing certain about that.

Now, I love my wife, and every day I wake up and I choose to love her, and, you know, that is what I can control.

I can’t control if she is going to do the same.

Now, after almost 30 years, well, I’m pretty sure that she loves me and is going to continue to love me, but there’s still, you know, the possibility, right, that something could change.

I don’t think it’s going to, but this is where love brings us.

Love, by definition, requires us to move forward without a full sense of certainty, and so we need to build the capacity, a resilient faith has the capacity to love without certainty.

A fourth capacity is the ability or the capacity to stay in relationship.

You see, we go through our lives, and there are going to be so many people that are going to hurt us.

They’re going to wound us.

The vast majority of those relationships, of those hurts, are going to be things that we can overcome.

They’re going to be things that we can engage with that person on, and we can say, hey, you wounded me.

Hey, you hurt me, or conversely, hey, I hurt you, and we can pursue forgiveness.

We can pursue reconciliation.

In that, it requires some repentance, right?

It’s going to require one or both parties to own their failings, own the places where they fell short in the relationship, but you see, a resilient faith, a spiritually fit faith helps us build the capacity to stay in those relationships.

Now, I want to be clear.

When we’re talking about this, I’m not talking about abusive relationships, and this is always where people want to go when we start talking about the capacity to stay in relationship through forgiveness.

Say, well, what about abuse?

Well, if somebody is abusing you, you need to remove yourself from the relationship.

You need to end that relationship.

The scriptures and a spiritual life does not demand you to stay in an abusive relationship.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that we’re not going to offer forgiveness because, you see, forgiveness goes from the one who is hurt to the one who did the hurting, and we offer forgiveness when we are hurt so that we do not become bitter, so that we do not become cynical, so that we do not begin to lose parts of our soul.

Just because we forgive somebody, potentially even from a distance because that’s the safe place to be, doesn’t mean that we have to reconcile a relationship.

It doesn’t mean that we have to restore a relationship, and it doesn’t mean that we have to renew a relationship.

And so I want you to be aware of that as we talk about this kind of thing so that you’re not always having in the back of your head, oh, well, my spouse or someone is abusing me, and Dan is saying that I need to stay in that relationship, or I’m not spiritually fit.

That is not what I’m saying.

I’m talking about the 99% of our relationships, the majority of our relationships, You know, Bible reading and prayer and all those things.

But we have to understand, those don’t earn us anything.

You don’t have to read your Bible.

You don’t have to read your Bible to be united with Christ.

You don’t have to pray to be united with Christ.

You don’t have to go to church to be united with Christ.

I know some of you are breaking out in hives right now, and maybe your palms are sweating or you’re rolling your eyes.

You’re like, wow, Dan’s a heretic.

You don’t have to do any of that to be united with Christ, because our union with Christ is in no way, shape, or form dependent on us.

Our union with Christ is 100% completely and utterly dependent on the faithful work of God through Christ.

What these practices do is they make space to receive grace.

As we spend time reading the scriptures, as we spend time in prayer, as we spend time in community with people, it expands us.

It expands our grace reservoir.

It helps us to receive more of it, because we gain an ever deeper understanding of what it means for God to grant us grace, for God to grant us mercy, for God, through Christ, to give us union with Christ, to seat us in the heavenly places.

We learn more about that, and so it gives us greater space in our lives to receive more grace.

That’s what it does.

We don’t earn it.

We’re just growing in capacity to receive more of it.

Formation in our lives, spiritual formation that builds a resilient, spiritually fit faith happens because God is faithful, not because we are consistent.

Formation happens because God is faithful, not because we are consistent.

Is it good for us to be consistent?

Yes, it is.

It is absolutely wonderful if we can be consistent.

Is it necessary?

No, we do our best.

There is grace everywhere, and none of this is dependent on us.

Should we give an effort to expand our capacities?

Yeah, I hope that’s why you’re here, because you want to expand your capacity to have a resilient faith.

But at the end of the day, our capacity for faith, our capacity for love, our capacity for grace, that is ultimately going to be grown because of God’s faithfulness, not because of our hard work.

So what spiritual fitness is not?

Spiritual fitness is not self-optimization.

It is not self-optimization.

When we are wrestling with our spiritual fitness, it is not so that we can become some sort of optimized Christian or some optimized human being to make us the best human we can be.

That is not it.

Spiritual fitness is not religious performance.

We don’t pursue spiritual fitness so that we can stand on a stage and say, look at how religious I am.

God is so greatly pleased with me.

You read through the Gospels and you find out that Jesus is not a big fan of that kind of thing.

He is way more interested in the Father who cries out, I believe, help me in my unbelief.

He’s way more interested in the tax collector who falls on his knees and says, I’m not worthy than he is with the religious elite who says, I am so holy and I am so glad I am not like that rotten, dirty tax collector.

Spiritual fitness is not moral scorekeeping.

We’re not keeping score to become holier than everybody else.

We’re not trying to close the rings on our morality sheet.

It’s not like our iPhone Apple Fitness is not going to have these moral scorekeeping rings that, oh, he prayed today, he read his Bible today, and he hung out and listened to Christian music today.

So all three rings closed.

Good job.

That’s not how this works.

That’s not how this works because it is rooted in grace.

It’s not rooted in our effort.

It is rooted in God’s faithfulness.

It is rooted in his love.

And so spiritual fitness is not moral scorekeeping.

And spiritual fitness is not certainty as maturity.

I think that’s really important for us to wrap our heads around.

To be spiritually fit does not mean certainty.

Certainty is not a sign of spiritual maturity.

A sign of spiritual maturity is really probably more rooted in the reality of being able to name our uncertainties, to be able to say, oh, yeah, yo, I don’t know.

Or like Paul says in Philippians, I haven’t arrived.

I’m just going to keep trying to move forward.

And maybe, maybe I can taste the resurrection.

I don’t know.

I’m going to keep giving it my best shot.

It is fascinating to read the Apostle Paul at the end of his life because it seems as though he is more confident in the grace and love of Christ.

But he does not exude some sort of arrogant certainty.

He really kind of points out this gentleness and this hope.

Hope is not certainty.

So spiritual fitness is not certainty as maturity.

So if you’re tired of trying to get faith right, you’re in the right place.

You’re in the right place.

So why does all of this matter?

It matters because we are in a time where so many people who have grown up going to church are completely and utterly burned out.

We’re whipped.

We are tired.

We are tired of all the stuff.

We’re tired of the list of do’s and don’ts.

We’re tired of being a part of churches that are just asking more and more and more of us, sucking more and more of our energy and our life.

We need more volunteers.

We need you to do this.

We need you to do that.

We are burned out from being considered a resource for a church.

We’re living in a moment of deconstruction where the inner workings, the underpinnings, the assumptions of American Christianity are crumbling.

They are falling apart.

So many of the things that American Christianity were built on have been found to be sand feet.

They are just being obliterated left and right.

American Christianity has been co-opted.

It has been taken and it has been used by people to gain power and influence and to control people as well.

And so there is an entire generation of us that are deconstructing, that are saying, you know what?

This doesn’t work anymore.

I’m out.

Tied with that is the loss of trust in institutions.

It seems like every other church has something really, really wrong with it.

Every day there is another pastor who falls.

Every day another pastor has broken the trust of the church.

And on top of that, so many churches and denominations are covering up and hiding things.

They’re not owning it.

And then there’s those of us in this day and age that are just experiencing a quiet spiritual exhaustion.

We’re not leaving the church.

We’re not walking away.

We’re just tired.

We are spiritually empty.

Our tanks are empty, and we just don’t know how to keep moving forward.

It is just this sense of spiritual exhaustion.

And so we don’t need a more intense faith.

We don’t need a faith where we are gritting our teeth and bearing it and white knuckling this bar of faith.

That is not what we need more of.

What we need is a more durable faith.

We need a faith that is enduring.

We need a faith that is not brittle.

We need a faith that can bend without breaking.

We need a faith that has the ability to survive unanswered questions, a faith that stays rooted over time.

This is how we build a resilient and enduring faith.

When we begin to understand that it is about grace, it is about love, it is about God’s faithfulness, not our own.

When we begin to understand that we are accepted and loved by this divine being who models for us what self-sacrificial love looks like, who models for us what unconditional love looks like, this allows us to have a faith that can bend without breaking, a faith that survives unanswered questions, and a faith that stays rooted over time.

So, as we move on from this initial episode in this series or this season of spiritual fitness, we’re going to talk a little bit about attention and formation.

Then we’re going to talk about the ordinary practices of grace.

We’re going to wrestle through doubt, flexibility, and rest.

And then we’re going to conclude this season with a rule of life for real people.

There’s a historic kind of way of thinking about things where your early monasteries and early spiritual movements, they would develop a rule of life to say, hey, these are the commitments that we’re going to go by.

These are the commitments that we’re going to try to live out.

And so we’re going to talk about what does a rule of life for real people look like.

We’re going to go slow.

There’s no pressure.

I am not asking you to consider a radical faith.

We’re not talking about doing anything extreme or heroic.

Don’t need any of that radical anything.

Just a slow, welcoming, grace-centered, resilient faith.

As we go through this season, I want you to realize you don’t have to do all of this.

You don’t have to do any of it.

Some of it, you just might listen to and sit with it.

Some of it, you might want to try.

Whatever it is, wherever you’re at in your journey, that’s great.

There is no pressure.

There’s no expectation.

What I want to give you, hopefully, is a gift from me to you, something that potentially you can keep coming back to as you seek to build out your capacity of faith so that you can have a resilient faith in a hard and difficult world.

Spiritual fitness is not about trying harder.

It is about forming the capacity to trust, love, and remain rooted in grace over time.

So as we move through this season, my hope isn’t that you become more impressively spiritual.

My hope is that you become more grounded, more honest, and more able to stay present with God and with your own life.

So in the next episode, we’re going to talk about attention, about how what we give our attention to is quietly shaping us for better or worse.

For now, just notice where you feel pressure around faith and where you