Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Hey, welcome to The Pastor Next Door.

Glad you’re with me this week.

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

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

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

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

Let’s get started.

Now, when we talk about strength in the spiritual realm, I think we often imagine great intensity.

You know, we think about people with heroic prayer lives or folks who give some sort of radical sacrifice, you know, the Jim Elliot scenario, right, who went and gave his life preaching the gospel to an unreached people group.

And that ties into the next thing we often think about when we think about people who are spiritually strong, which are dramatic stories, God doing these huge big things in our lives.

But most of the strength that we need really is much quieter than that.

What we need is the strength to remain, you know, the strength to abide, as Jesus put it.

We need the strength to forgive because our lives inevitably are going to bump up against other people’s lives and they are going to hurt us and we are going to be hurt.

We are going to experience pain and sorrow and we may hurt others.

And so the strength to forgive is something else that we need.

We also need the strength to keep trusting when nothing changes.

You see, a resilient faith is one that is rooted in spiritual strength.

And I think the best way to define spiritual strength is the capacity to abide.

Spiritual strength is the capacity to abide.

And so one of the things, one of the passages that popped into my head is I was thinking about this idea of a spiritual strength and a strength that is quiet or subtle, a strength that helps us to have a resilient faith.

I was thinking about this story that Jesus tells in Matthew chapter 7, verses 24 through 27.

He says, Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall because it had its foundation on the rock.

But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.

The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.

Now Jesus told that story at the end of the Sermon on the Mount where he began with the Beatitudes and he ends with this story of the wise and foolish builders.

And so for us to have a strength that abides, I think we need to consider some practices that help build endurance, practices that will build a resilient faith, practices that will increase our capacity to abide.

So let’s start with what strength is not.

So there are some common distortions of what spiritual strength looks like.

And these are ones that I know I have struggled.

I’m sure there are many, many more.

But these are the ones that in particularly for me are ones that for various seasons of my life, I have leaned into.

The first spiritual strength distortion is emotional intensity.

It’s this idea that as we experience God, as we walk with God, that we are to have some sort of really intense emotional experience.

And that can be seen in prayer, but more often than not, I think we experience this in the context of corporate worship, right?

Where we see people weeping with tears every single Sunday.

We see people who are shouting and jumping in excitement every single Sunday.

It’s not that we aren’t going to have seasons or moments of emotional intensity.

Perhaps we will experience a worship time together where our emotions do overflow because of where we’re at in our lives.

So it’s not that we are not to have intense emotional responses at times.

That’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is this expectation that emotional intensity is the sign and symbol of what spiritual strength looks like.

And that’s when it goes too far.

A second distortion that I have leaned into probably more so than the emotional intensity aspect is moral superiority.

And this is one that I think we see everywhere.

We see all the time, don’t we?

This idea that I am holier than thou, that I am better than you.

I know things that you don’t.

I am the best and the rest of you need to get on my level kind of thing.

This is the idea of moral superiority, right?

That we have the truth, we have the moral truth, and everybody else needs to get on board with our morality.

Well, it doesn’t take long to read through the scriptures to find Jesus challenging moral superiority.

And I think in one of the most clearest ways that he does that is when he’s talking to some of the religious elite and he refers to them as whitewashed tombs.

In other words, the outside looks really, really good.

The inside is a mess.

The inside is dead.

And that is what happens when we lean into moral superiority as though that is the sign and symbol of what spiritual strength looks like.

Another one, and this is one that is all too common, and that’s busyness in church life, right?

We seem to think that if you are a really spiritual person, if you are really strong in your faith, then you are going to be super busy at church.

I remember sitting in a leadership meeting at a church and I asked the question, what does a successful member of the church look like?

And when we were real honest, it was basically someone who was busy with the church, someone who showed up every time the doors opened and were present.

That was success in the church.

And that is a far cry from spiritual strength.

That is a far cry from the development of a spiritual life that is resilient.

And then the last distortion, I think, that is prevalent is this idea or conception that we are to have no doubts, that we are to be in a state of constant certainty all the time.

And any time that I doubt, any time that I wrestle with my faith, that will lead me to a place where I’m failing spiritually, right?

If I have any doubt whatsoever, then I’m failing, that I have begun to fall away from the faith.

A spiritually strong life, someone who has a faith that is resilient, is one who has doubts and leans into them and struggles through them and embraces them.

And embracing doubt moves eventually, I think, to a place of greater confidence, a greater confidence in the love and grace of Christ.

I think that’s what we see in the story of Thomas, one of the patron saints of us doubters.

And he leaned into his doubt.

He embraced it.

And he wasn’t mocked for it.

He wasn’t set aside.

He wasn’t called weak.

No, he was given confidence to believe.

And confidence is so much better than certainty.

So if you walk away, as we lean into this conversation about spiritual strength and developing practices to increase our capacity to abide, I need you to hear two things.

One, strength is not pretending you’re fine.

To pretend, to act like you’re good, to act like you’re okay, to fake it, that’s not strength.

And then secondly, strength, spiritual strength, is not spiritual adrenaline.

When we are strong spiritually, it doesn’t mean that we are going to just have some sort of hyper relationship with God.

No, it looks much more like a foundation of a house.

This thing that nobody sees, nobody pays any attention to, nobody even notices.

Nobody walks up to your new home and says to you, wow, your foundation is beautiful.

Because endurance, an enduring faith, a resilient faith, a strong faith, is an ordinary faith.

It is a faith that is faithful.

It is a faith that doesn’t draw huge moments of attention.

It is a faith that is oftentimes quiet.

So how do we increase our capacity?

What are some practices that we can engage with?

Well, in the Reformed tradition, in a covenantal Reformed tradition that I come out of, the way we talk about this at a most fundamental level, at kind of the principal level, is what we call the means of grace.

And so from my tradition, that’s word, so spending time in the scriptures, prayer, it’s pretty self-explanatory, right?

We pray, sacrament, and the sacrament that we can experience on a regular basis from the Reformed tradition is communion, and then community, connecting deeply with other people of faith.

And what’s important to understand here is that these are not techniques.

These are not free throws.

These are not stick-handling drills.

These are not infield practice.

These are a means of grace.

These are the places where we believe and we want to learn to trust that God will meet us.

I think this is where God has promised to meet us, that he will meet us where two or three are gathered.

He will meet us in the act of taking communion together.

He meets us as we go to him in prayer.

He meets us as we open up the scriptures and read the word of God.

These are not ladders to climb, right?

It’s not like you keep a scorecard of who has the most, who’s done the most with word, prayer, sacrament, and community.

That’s not it.

So it’s not a ladder to climb.

It’s not like we’re working our way through the company.

We’re working our way through the church to get to the top, to sit at God’s right and left hand because we won the deal of word, prayer, sacrament, and community.

It’s not leverage, right?

These are not things that we leverage against God where we say, you know, hey, God, look, I’ve done the four things.

I’ve engaged the means of grace.

Now you’re going to do this thing for that if we engage in grace, if we engage in these means of grace, then life is going to be easy.

But that’s not it.

As we engage in the means of grace, we’re going to be drawn further into the story of God’s kingdom, which means we’re going to meet resistance.

We’re going to become more aware of the difficulties of life.

We’re going to become more aware of the heartache and the heartbreak out in the world.

And we may even face resistance from the world as we seek to love well, because we live in a world where loving well is not a value.

We live in a world where dominance and power over is a value, not loving your enemy as yourself, not loving the people who are different from you, not extending grace and forgiveness.

Those are not values in our world.

And so as we seek to live that out, because we’ve been practicing the means of grace, we are going to bump into resistance.

When we bump into resistance, it is going to demand from us an endurance, an endurance that is built through repetition, an endurance that is built through entering into the means of grace.

Do you see how this whole thing begins to build upon itself?

And then we need time.

We need time in our spiritual lives.

We are not going to have everything squared away tomorrow.

We are not going to become a people who are holy, who are looking just like Jesus overnight.

It is going to take our whole lives.

As we walk with Jesus, we are going to become more like Jesus, but that is going to take significant time.

And so we need to give ourselves grace to let time do its work.

And so physically, I am much stronger two years down the road now than I was two years ago, right?

Because time has passed, and I’ve entered into repetition, and I’ve increased the resistance.

Spiritually, I am a much different person spiritually than I was 20 years ago.

And God willing, I will be a much different person 20 years from now spiritually.

I will hopefully be more loving, more gracious, that my life will be more marked by the fruit of the Spirit, of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

You see, these practices, these means of grace, what they build in us are stability.

They build a stability, a foundation, just like that foundation of stone.

It is the putting into practice of Jesus’s words, right?

So they build stability.

They help us to not get too high.

They help us to not get too low.

They help us to remain pretty stable, which is another word we might use for that is faithful.

They help us to increase our memory.

We remember more the grace of God, the compassion of God, the empathy of God, the love of God, the grace of God, the mercy of God.

We remember more of how we see that played out in our lives.

And as a result of that, then, what it does is it begins to build in us a reflex of trust.

And I think that might be one of the most important things that we can lean into as we seek to build a resilient faith, as we seek to build a greater capacity to abide with God, to have a reflex of trust, that when we face resistance, when we face those moments of suffering, pain, and hardship that are inevitably going to come, that because we have engaged in the means of grace, that our reflex will not be one where we necessarily question God in some negative way, but we will trust that God in His goodness, in His sovereign goodness, will bring good to us in the end.

And that reflex of trust gets built by engaging in repetition, resistance, and time through the means of grace.

You see, the Scripture begins to train our imagination as the transforming of our mind.

Prayer trains dependence.

It helps us to rest in God.

It helps us to trust God outside of ourselves.

Communion trains gratitude.

It is a regular, ongoing reminder of God’s good grace to us.

And so we grow in gratitude.

Community trains humility.

We realize that we need other people, and that we need people to come alongside us, and we need to come alongside others.

We need to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice.

And all of that begins to train humility in us.

Now, here’s the thing, and this is really important.

This is slow, and it is oftentimes invisible.

But ultimately, it is real.

You see, the slow, invisible work that takes place as we engage with the means of grace over time builds these things, trains these things.

But man, nobody notices.

And that can be really hard because this work is done in the quiet places where nobody sees.

But that is where real change happens.

It doesn’t change on a stage.

It doesn’t change out in the limelight.

It changes in these quiet, hidden places where only you and God know.

Only you and God know the hard work that you are putting in, in growing your capacity to abide with God.

And so, because this is slow and invisible, oftentimes invisible work, it becomes real easy to quit, right?

And I got to tell you, I am a quitter.

I am like one of the biggest quitters there is.

I can’t tell you how many Bible reading plans I’ve started and failed.

I can’t tell you how many times I have started some sort of spiritual routine or regimen only to give up after a short period of time because I don’t feel or see the immediate results.

I don’t see myself changing as quickly as I want to.

And so, I get bored with it and I walk away.

And because I get bored with it, I sometimes just don’t think I’m growing at all because I confuse feelings with growth.

I’m not seeing any kind of new emotional response within me to different things spiritually.

And so, I don’t think I’m growing.

And if I’m not growing, why am I doing this?

Growth is going to happen first.

Feelings are going to follow.

Feelings are important.

God has given us our feelings.

So, I’m not trying to set those aside.

I’m not trying to minimize our feelings.

Our emotional life is incredibly important.

And I think as we practice the means of grace, our emotional life is going to grow as well.

But we can’t tie those things to growth as the primary evidence of our spiritual growth or the primary evidence of our growing a capacity to abide.

And then the last thing, at least for me, I really expect transformation to be dramatic, right?

I expect my spiritual transformation to be kind of almost an overnight kind of thing where it’s just like, boom! I’ve taken the next step, right?

I’ve leveled up.

And yeah, again, that’s not how this works.

God comes to us in a still, small voice, and we grow slow.

Our spiritual lives are much more like an oak tree than a mustard tree.

We are going to grow over years.

We are not growing up overnight like a plant, right?

We’re a tree, not a plant spiritually.

You see, much of spiritual growth develops below the surface.

It is this development of an intricate root system.

It is the foundation.

It is this foundation of rock that our lives are built on.

And because of that, as we engage in the means of grace, we are probably growing much more than we realize.

We just don’t even see it because roots grow underground first, right?

The root system goes in and gets developed.

And as that root system gets strong, the external grows, the outside grows.

But the outside can only grow to the extent that the roots can support it.

Otherwise, the whole thing comes crashing down.

And so these means of grace help us to grow our spiritual root system.

And so to do this, what I would encourage you to consider is developing a simple rhythm in your life.

A simple rhythm of daily, weekly, and then, let’s say, occasionally.

So daily, daily small attention.

Set aside 5 to 10 minutes to read the scripture or to pray, or maybe a little bit of both, right?

Just 5 to 10.

And if that’s too long, 2 to 3.

Start small, because here’s the thing.

It is about consistency, not intensity.

It is about your faithfulness in this, not about your grandiose plans.

Consistency over intensity.

Faithfulness over ambition.

Weekly, I would encourage you to participate in a gathered community.

And if you need help finding one, reach out to me.

Send me an email.

And I will be happy to help direct you to a good, what I would hope will be a healthy, gathered community of followers of Jesus.

And then on an occasional basis, take some extended reflection or a retreat.

Maybe once a quarter or once every 6 months.

Just to get away, maybe for a day.

And if you could spare it, maybe a few days.

To just reflect.

Because just think, small faithfulness over time builds durable strength.

Small faithfulness over time builds durable strength.

If we can remember that, then what we will see happen is a resilient faith being grown up in us.

And we will indeed be able to endure.

So you see, if you’ve ever felt like your faith isn’t strong enough, let me just say this.

Strength isn’t loud.

It’s not dramatic.

It’s built in quiet repetition.

In returning again.

In showing up imperfectly.

In summary, spiritual strength is not intensity but endurance.

Built slowly through ordinary practices that make space for God’s grace over time.

It is engaging in the means of grace.

These invitations to meet God so that our capacity to abide with God can grow.

Now in the next episode, we are going to talk about flexibility.

About how doubt and change don’t have to mean collapse.

So for now, as you walk away, I would encourage you to choose one small ordinary practice.

Not to prove anything, but just to abide.

To remain.

To meet God