For today's meeting, we read from Chapter 11 of John Ortberg's The Life You've Always Wanted, titled "An Undivided Life: The Practice of Reflection on Scripture." The problem, according to Ortberg, is double-mindedness. In spiritual terms, wanting to follow Jesus and wanting to follow the "world" too - to have it both ways. He quotes Jack Palance's character in the movie "City Slickers": "The secret of life is pursuing one thing." Similarly the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard defines our problem as "...the failure to achieve simplicity - to have a life that is integrated, that is focused on one thing." Or as Jesus said, "seeking first the Kingdom." Ortberg goes on to define multiplicity and duplicity, the enemies of simplicity. Multiplicity is being pulled in opposing directions, eg. we want to be generous but we want to hoard our money, we want to give our time to some charity but we want our time for ourselves. Duplicity, on the other hand, involves dishonesty. We say or do something with an overtly noble intent but in reality our motives are not so pure. What comes to mind is the story of Ananias and Sapphira. They intended to appear more generous than they really were for the sake of what others thought of them.
By contrast, in simplicity, "The motives we appear to have are the ones we really have." (Clifford Williams).
So how do we do it? Ortberg says one way is to have our minds re-formed by immersing them in scripture. This means meditating on it not just reading the words. This is how our minds are "washed by the water of the word" and purified.
Next week we will continue with The Life You've Always Wanted series. Same time, same place: Sat. 7AM (yes, that's AM) in the lounge in the old building.
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2 comments:
Sure I get excited about the idea of meditating on scripture but after a few weeks I can really get in a rut with it. Dare I say BORING? But I've found recently that memorizing scripture is helpful cause in the course of memorizing a scripture you have the option of meditating on what it means. I say "option" cause you can just blow through it without thinking about it at all. Also, you can carry the index cards with you and pull one out at odd times during the day. It helps you keep you mind on God as well as working on the memorization.
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