Faith Venture

I travel widely on business and wind up having dinners with a variety of people from diverse backgrounds. I find that discussions can often turn to either spiritual topics or difficulties that the other person is enduring. Sometimes in the midst of business or engineering talk, another issue comes up. I need to be ready to deal with the new reality. Dallas Willard said that the first act of love is the giving of attention. I’ve noticed that before the giving of attention, you must learn to shift your focus to the other person so that you can then concentrate your attention on them. How often do you talk with someone and you notice that their attention is somewhere else and only superficially on you?

Jesus had this knack. He could be busy going somewhere, attending to something else, preaching, and then he would be interrupted. He could quickly shift the focus of his attention on the person, take in their need or question, and then deal with it in an appropriate manner. When they talk about being Christ-like, this is surely one of the elements.

If the feeling of powerlessness pervades so many people in a country that the rest of the world looks to as powerful, how can people tap into the power of God? Preachers try to infuse the power of God through stirring, emotional sermons. This is not unlike the motivational speakers who tour the country speaking for up to high five figures for a talk. All of us who listen to any of these speakers–religious or secular–know that 99% of the time the feeling wears off before we get home. We all have heard of the unfortunate situations where charismatic leaders actually try to keep followers feeling powerless in order to enhance their own needs for power.

I have long thought that the problem with Christian churches is that we talk about things, but we don’t train on how to do things. Take prayer. There are many ways to pray. If you read the Bible closely (maybe even not that closely), you see where people went off by themselves to pray. Is there an instruction about what they did when they went off? No. Dallas Willard, when writing about Paul and his use of athletic training terms for following a spiritual life, feels that people who heard Paul speak knew what he was talking about. Two thousand years later, maybe we’re not so sure.

About ten years ago someone recommended Richard Foster and his Renovare Institute. Then I finally read Dallas Willard after hearing so much about him for years. Here are people who actually teach the way. They don’t speak about prayer and other disciplines, they teach them. The key is to know the spiritual disciplines and begin incorporating them in your life. Some of the disciplines include study, prayer, meditation, contemplation, fasting, worship, celebration.

It’s your focus and attention that matter. If you start the day with a time of focus and attention on God through study (read from the Bible or from spiritual writers) and prayer, then you will start to tap into the power that is there for you. Sorry, just like losing weight or quitting smoking, it involves work. God is there for you, but you must be there for God.

So, how do we change the world? By teaching one person at a time where to put their focus and attention and help them pursue the disciplines.

I’m currently teaching from Revelation. It can be a difficult and contentious book–if you let it. One of the major themes of the book is the relationship to the power of this world (evil, the Roman Empire, that sort of thing) to the power of God. “The saints” are continually praying for God’s justice to overcome the power of evil in this book–and the climax reveals who has the power.

There are two themes I want to braid while still thinking about the people in the last post who seem to need to vilify others. First, I think it is impossible to understand much of the New Testament unless you understand the worldview of the Romans. It was all about power. We got it–you don’t. It was a power based on brute force and military might. The Romans perfected a way of fighting that was superior to all for hundreds of years. Jesus’ message, on the other hand, was a power of a different sort. He overturned the Roman view of the world with a God view of the world. His view was that individuals filled with the power of God act differently from others. And he showed many examples of how people live when filled with God’s power rather than seeking power as the Romans saw it–or lived in fear of that power.

Let me pick up on that last idea for the second strand of the braid. When people feel powerless, they tend to react overly strongly. Often this reaction is verbal, but sometimes it is expressed in futile physical violence. There exist a large number of people in our society who feel that powerlessness. It is unfortunate that many call themselves Christian. That’s unfortunate because somewhere along the line their Christian teachers did not teach them the power of God within that makes you strong in the face of the Roman type of power. You’re strong enough to stand up to challenge and recognize who your real enemies are–and deal with them without taking it out on innocent people.

To drop a hint–God’s power won in John’s vision. Just as it won in Jesus’ resurrection. What we need to do is redouble our efforts to instill the Spiritual Disciplines in people so that they can live life within God’s power.