Sacred Pathways

Nine Ways to Connect with God

Gary Thomas

• Éditeur: Zondervan
• Année: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780310361183
• Sujet: Teologia e religione
• Sous-sujet: Religione

Sacred Pathways reveals nine distinct spiritual temperaments--and their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies--to help you improve your spiritual life and deepen your personal walk with God.

It's time to strip away the frustration of a one-size-fits-all spirituality and discover a path of worship that frees you to be you. Experienced spiritual directors, pastors, and church leaders recognize that all of us engage with God differently, and it's about time we do too.

In this updated and expanded edition of Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomasdetails nine spiritual temperaments and--like the Enneagram and other tools do with personality--encourages you to investigate the ways you most naturally express yourself in your relationship with God. He encourages you to dig into the traits, strengths, and pitfalls in your devotional approach so you can eliminate the barriers that keep you locked into rigid methods of worship and praise.

Plus, as you begin to identify and understand your own temperament, you'll soon learn about the temperaments that aren't necessarily "you" but that may help you understand the spiritual tendencies of friends, family, and others around you.

Whatever temperament or blend of temperaments best describes you, rest assured it's not by accident. It's by the design of a Creator who knew what he was doing when he made you according to his own unique intentions. If your spiritual walk is not what you'd like it to be, you can change that, starting here. Sacred Pathways will show you the route you were made to travel, marked by growth and filled with the riches of a close walk with God.

A Sacred Pathways video Bible study is also available for group or individual use, sold separately.

PART 1

THE JOURNEY OF THE SOUL

CHAPTER 1

LOVING GOD

Valuable lessons about spirituality can come at the strangest times. An ear-popping flight from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Washington, taught me a lesson I’ll not soon forget. Just before I was about to embark on the trip, I came down with a severe head cold. My sinuses act up when I fly, even if I’m feeling well, so I knew I needed to get some help. Since I had just moved to Virginia, I hadn’t bothered to find a doctor, so a coworker recommended an outpatient care clinic.

Nothing about the clinic’s appearance looked professional or gave me peace of mind. I had serious reservations about the care I would receive, but I didn’t have time to go anywhere else, so I did my best to explain my dilemma to the doctor, waited for his prescription, and left.

When I got home, my wife asked me, “What did the doctor say?”

“I don’t know,” I responded. “I was so sick I couldn’t understand him.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Well, what did he prescribe?”

“I don’t know. I can’t read the writing.”

“What kind of clinic was this?”

“I don’t want to know,” I said. “I have to leave town tomorrow.”

The flight the next day was one of the most miserable flights of my life. It takes about five hours to fly from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, but I was certain that my then thirty-year-old body had turned forty-five by the time I landed. My head felt like it weighed about fifty pounds.

I dutifully took the medication as it was prescribed and expected my ears to clear a bit by the next day, but they didn’t. I wouldn’t even be able to speak clearly if I didn’t get some help, so after a day or two, I stopped in a Portland, Oregon, clinic, hoping to obtain more relief. The new doctor put me at ease. My head had cleared enough that I could understand what he was talking about. When he learned what had been prescribed for me in Virginia, his jaw dropped. “I don’t know what that doctor was thinking, but I can’t imagine prescribing this medicine for your ailment. Apparently this doctor knows just one or two medicines and is prescribing the same one for virtually everything.”

This experience taught me the folly of using one medicine to treat every malady. It took some time, however, for the spiritual analogy to become clear. Over and over again we give Christians the same spiritual prescription: “You want to grow as a Christian? All you have to do is develop a quiet time and come to church every weekend.”

Sometime in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the “quiet time” became a staple of most discipleship and church training programs. Usually consisting of thirty to sixty minutes, the quiet time was most commonly composed of a short period of personal worship, followed by some intercessory prayer (using a prayer notebook or intercessory prayer list), Bible study (according to a set method), and then a concluding prayer, followed by a commitment to share what we learned with at least one other person that day. This is something that’s easily taught and, for some circles, easy to hold people accountable to: “How many times this past week have you had your quiet time?” Anything less than seven was a wrong answer.

With perhaps good intentions (who would oppose regular personal worship, prayer, and Bible study?), we reduced the devotional life to rote exercise. A. W. Tozer warned us about this: “The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. We have almost forgotten that God is a person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can.”¹ The casualties of “mechanized religion” are many. It’s one thing to witness spiritually empty people outside the church; it’s even sadder to see Christians inside the church who suffer this same spiritual emptiness.

Ultimately, it’s a matter of spiritual nutrition. Many Christians have found the traditional quiet time to be somewhat helpful in starting up a life of devotion but rather restrictive and inadequate to build an ongoing, life-giving relationship with God. Since the quiet time is all that was taught, many have simply let the quiet time lapse without finding a substitute, having never been taught any other way to “feed” themselves spiritually. They thus live on a starvation diet and then are surprised that they always seem so “hungry.”

Others have labored on but admit that the routine of their devotions has made them seem more like an obligation than a delight. This is because helpful, even delightful, routines can grow stale over time. There are certain foods I really like—but I don’t want to eat them every day. I have certain running routes and workouts that I earnestly look forward to, but I wouldn’t want to run the same route, at the same speed, the same length, every time I run.

Just getting out of our routines can often generate new enthusiasm. One of the most refreshing things that happened to my marriage some years ago was breaking my wrist. It was a serious break, requiring surgery, and it thrust Lisa and me out of our routine. We did most everything together, in part because I needed so much help. Since my exercise was limited to walking, we took near-daily walks. We shopped together. We answered email together (initially, I couldn’t type). For a while, Lisa even helped me get dressed. (OK, you try tying your shoe with one hand!) Being out of our routine, Lisa and I discovered a deeper and newer love. The romance was always there; it had just been buried under the accretions of always doing the same thing.

I’ve found that many people face the same dilemma in their walk with God. Their love for God has not dimmed; they’ve just fallen into a soul-numbing rut. Their devotions seem like nothing more than shadows of what they’ve been doing for years. They’ve been involved in the same ministry for so long they could practically do it in their sleep. It seems as if nobody in their small groups has had an original thought for three years. They finally wake up one morning and ask, “Is this really all there is to knowing God?”

Quiet Time Collides with Reality

Several years after I graduated from college, I realized my spiritual life had to adapt to a new schedule. I was leaving the house between 5:00 and 5:30 a.m. and getting back home around 5:30 p.m. That left an hour to have dinner with my family, an hour to spend some time with my children, half an hour to get the kids in bed, and about another hour to pay the bills, take out the garbage, catch up on my wife’s day, and take phone calls. If we had an evening meeting, everything was crunched even tighter.

To have a sixty-minute quiet time, which had been a cherished staple of my spiritual diet, I would have had to get up at 4:00 a.m.! I was able to fit in some daily Bible reading before I left the house and a time of prayer during my morning commute, but I felt I was cheating. Vacations and weekends offered the opportunity to resume this discipline, but the workweek demanded something else.

This struggle to find a new “spiritual prescription” became a great blessing because I began to find new ways to nurture my soul. Perhaps the primary lesson I learned was that certain parts of me are never touched by a standardized quiet time. My discipline of quiet times was (and is) helpful; however, I came to realize it was not sufficient. Other parts of my spiritual being lay dormant.

I also began to realize other people shared my frustration. For some people, the formulaic quiet time seems too cerebral. Others simply grow bored sitting at a desk alone in a room just reading and thinking. And why should everybody be expected to love God the same way, anyway? We would think it absurd to insist that newly evangelized Christians in Moravia create an identical worship service to Presbyterians in Boston or Baptists in Georgia. Yet we prescribe the same type of spirituality for both the farmer in Iowa and the lawyer in Washington, D.C.

Beware of Narrowing Your Approach to God

Expecting all Christians to have a certain type of quiet time can wreak havoc in a church or small group. Excited about meaningful (to us) approaches to the Christian life, we sometimes assume that if others do not experience the same thing, something must be wrong with their faith. Please don’t be intimidated by others’ expectations. God wants to know the real you, not a caricature of what somebody else wants you to be. He created you with a certain personality and a certain spiritual temperament. God wants your worship, according to the way he made you. Your worship may differ somewhat from the worship of the person who brought you to Christ or the person who leads your Bible study or church.

I must admit, there is a limit to the individual approach to spirituality. It is neither wise nor scriptural to pursue God apart from the community of faith. Our individual expressions of faith must be joined to corporate worship with the body of Christ. Fortunately, over its nearly two thousand years of history, the church has provided us with rich and varied traditions of loving God.

Jesus accepted the worship of Peter’s mother-in-law as she served him, but he refused to force Mary, the sister of Martha, to also worship in that way. Mary was allowed to express her worship in the silence of adoration, not in the hustle and bustle of active service. Good spiritual directors understand that people have different spiritual temperaments, that what feeds one doesn’t feed all. Giving the same spiritual prescription to every struggling Christian is no less irresponsible than a doctor prescribing penicillin to combat every illness.

As I read the classics of the Christian faith and shared my journey with others, I discovered various ways in which people find intimacy with God: by studying church history or theology, by singing or reading hymns, by dancing, by walking in the woods. Each practice awakened different people to a new sense of spiritual vitality, and something was touched in them that had never been touched before.

This discovery put me on the path of searching out various “spiritual temperaments” as a way to explain how we each love God differently. Our spiritual temperament should be distinguished from our personality temperament, about which so much has been written. Knowing our personal temperaments, whether we are sanguine or melancholy, for instance, will tell us how we relate to others or how we can choose a suitable spouse or vocation. But it doesn’t necessarily tell us how we relate to God. The focus on spiritual temperaments is an attempt to help us understand how we best relate to God so we can develop new ways of drawing near to him. My search was most influenced by biblical figures, who lived out these temperaments on the pages of Scripture, and second by historical movements within the Christian church.

One God, Many Relationships

Scripture tells us that the same God is present from Genesis through Revelation—though people worshiped that one God in many ways: Abraham had a religious bent, building altars everywhere he went. Moses and Elijah revealed an activist’s streak in their various confrontations with forces of evil and in their conversations with God. David celebrated God with an enthusiastic style of worship, while his son Solomon expressed his love for God by offering generous sacrifices. Ezekiel and John described loud and colorful images of God, stunning in sensuous brilliance. Mordecai demonstrated his love for God by caring for others, beginning with the orphaned Esther. Mary of Bethany is the classic contemplative, sitting at Jesus’ feet.

These and other biblical figures of the Old and New Testaments confirmed to me that within the Christian faith there are many different and acceptable ways of demonstrating our love for God. Our temperaments will cause us to be more comfortable in some of these expressions than others—and that is perfectly acceptable to God. In fact, by worshiping God according to the way he made us, we are affirming his work as Creator.

Historic Movements within the Church

The second area I researched as I sought to label these spiritual temperaments was the church’s historical separation into groups that agree on many larger issues but often vehemently disagree on smaller ones. I looked into several controversies in Christian history and found that a different way of relating to God—a way hinted at through a spiritual temperament—was behind many of them. It would be simplistic to suggest that such differences were the sole or even primary cause of many church splits and denominations, but they did have some effect.

Let’s take just the last five hundred years of church history. In the Middle Ages, the Western branch of the church, Roman Catholicism, was steeped in the mystery of sacramental rites; Roman Catholic worship focused on the altar. When Luther theologically broke with Rome, worship was altered considerably. Luther stressed sola scriptura (the sufficiency of Scripture), so he elevated the pulpit to show the importance of preaching the Word. Thus in a Reformation church, your eye would be drawn to a majestic-looking pulpit, not to an ornate altar. This change created two different styles of worship—one emphasizing a ritual reenactment of the crucifixion, the other emphasizing intellectual discourse in knowing, understanding, and explaining the existence of God.

The Reformers differed among themselves, however. Lutherans tended to keep many of Rome’s elements of worship unless those elements were overtly rejected by Scripture. Calvinists tended to get rid of every element unless it was prescribed in Scripture.

The different ways of loving God extended even to how that love was expressed in the world. Calvinists rejected the ...