We are in a series of lessons over the next month or so focusing on the practices of Jesus and his early followers and how those practices shape us into people of love, joy, and peace. Sometime around the fourth century, these practices started being called a “Rule of Life.” Don’t hear “rules” for life like, “Don’t handle. Don’t taste. Don’t touch.” (Colossians 2:20-23). “Rule of Life” as it was used in the ancient church was the same word and concept of a trellis and the background of establishing a need for a Rule of Life is based out of Jesus’s call to “Abide in him” in John 15. A trellis provides structure for a vine to grow and produce fruit. If you plant a vineyard and do not provide structures for it to grow, you will still have some fruit produced but largely it’ll rot on the ground, be eaten by animals and bugs, and become diseased. If you want to bear fruit in Jesus, you must create a structure in your life that’ll help you grow.
A disclaimer or two is needed.
There are a lot of practices Jesus spoke against when speaking to the Pharisees. He was not negating the practices but their celebration and worship of the practices. The practices and habits we build in our lives are intended to produce the fruit of the Spirit in us. The Pharisees knew Scripture exceptionally well. They flawlessly kept the Sabbath. They prayed regularly. They kept the purity codes. They fasted regularly. I can go one. These are all life giving and fruit producing practices unless you’re too focused on the structure you’ve built and worship it. They had beautiful structures in place that should be life giving but their soil was terrible, and they were disconnected from God. If you have established spiritually formative practices and you cannot point to changes in your life where you have grown in your love for others, your peace towards the chaos of the world, and your joy that is not dependent on good circumstances, then you need to pause and examine the other habits of your life to see what might be choking out the fruit you’re called to produce.
The structure you create in your life is not you “earning your salvation.” Any focus on the hard work of developing disciplines of spiritual formation has brought about debates of “works based salvation” and “Jesus died so I don’t have to do these things to earn my salvation.” To be very clear, developing disciplines (habits or rhythms) in your life is in no way earning your salvation. You are grafted into the vine of Christ by grace (Romans 11). Christ brings you into him, not because of anything you’ve done to earn a place in his body, but because he wants to give you life and see you live it to the fullest. The work you’re called to do is to “abide in him.” This takes work on your part, but grace is shown in that Christ accepts you as you are and where you are. But you are called to produce love, joy, and peace in your life (just to name a few) through being connected to him.
Final disclaimer. Establishing a structure in your life is less about what is universally “right and wrong” for a Christian to do or say but more so about being serious about what kind of person you are becoming through the practices you engage in regularly. There are things you engage in that are not “wrong” per se, but who are they shaping you to be? The devil shapes us through the smallest of movements away from God and even uses seemingly righteous actions to shape us for his purposes.
Jesus began his ministry with forty days of fasting and prayer. He regularly went off to places of solitude for prayer. He readily had scripture available and knew the Jewish story well through the celebration of the festivals. He gave his followers practices to shape their life together around: public reading of scripture, confession, fasting, prayer, the Lord’s Supper, fellowship, etc. These are not simply events in which the early church took part. These were the rhythms which shaped the life of followers of Christ.
There are a lot more practices in which to look. Over the next month and a half or so we will be looking to scripture for life shaping practices and this summer I will teach a class on establishing a “Rule of Life” for spiritual growth. If you have some particular practices you would like to know more about, please feel free to reach out to me and let me know – ryan@nodachurch.com