SPIRITUAL GRAMMAR
“Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?”
Life in the Spirit is a lot like proper punctuation. There are rules that have to be followed. The Bible often uses the analogy that our lives are like something written in a book. Having God write your name in His book is a very big deal. It’s the ultimate Who’s Who. If I think about it, this analogy expresses only one part of God’s intimate interaction with me. Some lessons that I can learn come from noticing the simple rules of punctuation. The first of these is the function of a period. A period marks the end of a thought – a stopping point before something else is added. Like having my name in God’s book – period. British English calls it a “full stop”. Full stops are essential to my communication with God too. I noticed the importance of these full stop periods just yesterday.
I live in the wonderful state of Florida. It is my habit to sit out by the pool in the sunshine and read those marvelously thick books that scholars carry around in libraries. Today I was working my way through Volume I of the Theological Dictionary of The New Testament, somewhere on page 156 when I realized that I was out of synch. The words were going in, but the thoughts were not coherent. The more I attempted to understand what the text was saying about the Greek word adikia, the more I became aware that God was trying to deal with me about something. I found my mind wandering back and forth. I was trying to intellectually understand that concept of sin (that’s what the Greek word means) while God was trying to teach me something about the experience of sin. I just had to stop. Putting down the text, I prayed out loud (no one else was at home so I could just talk to God without raising any eyebrows), “Lord, I know that You are putting a halt to this study because You and I have to clear up something that is coming between us. Just bring it to mind so that I can deal with it. I want to feel that clarity that You bring when I look deeply into Your word. And I know that as long as there is some area of resistance on my part, I won’t feel right about this. So, I’ll just wait for You.” Period.
Immediately I knew what God wanted me to address. Some small area of my life (small by my standards, of course) that I was trying to keep to myself needed to be put under His control. I could have decided not to let it go. Employing the logic of the adikios (there’s that word again – we will have a lot more to say about it), I could just say to God, “Hey, this is no big deal. Why are you bugging me about this? It’s not ruling my life. I have it under control”. Of course, that tiny admission is the whole reason that God brought it to my attention in the first place. You see, I am not the one who should have it under control. If I have it under control, then I am calling the shots on this particular part of my life. And that means that God is not having control. Even if I am doing a great job of keeping the rules in this area, even if I am technically correct in the way that I am behaving, the issue is not about external right action, it is about internal submission.
I had to let it go. If I am going to have God’s peace and presence in my life, moment by moment, then I have be aware of His prodding and be willing to follow it wherever it leads. When He prods me, I have to stop. I have to insert a period in my life. A place where one action ends, one thought is finished, before something else can begin. Spiritual grammar does not consist of run-on sentences. There is a point where I have to stop before God can begin again. Full stops are good. In fact, I could write my life in terms of full stops. Points where something about me made a change – where I didn’t just go on and on in the same way.
During the first years that I taught at the university, students in my New Testament classes came to me quite frequently about rule related questions. In class I tried to show them that the Jesus of the Gospels was not interested in rules. Rules governed the lives of the Pharisees and Jesus commented more than once that our righteousness needed to exceed the righteousness of the rule keepers. This was a difficult concept for my students to understand. After all, most of them grew up in rule-oriented households. They were expected to keep the rules at school. They knew a lot about rules, and about how to manage the rules while they were still disobeying them. It was the difference between rule keeping and ruler living. They usually came to me after class with their “technical” questions. With an embarrassed flush, they would say, “The Bible doesn’t say anything about oral sex, and I’m not like really doing it with my boyfriend, so I’m not sinning, am I?” I often think that skillful lawyers come from the households of religious technicians. Carefully dividing the Law into its tiniest parts in order to squeeze in an interpretation that would give consent to something you wanted to do anyway seemed to be a skill honed throughout childhood. They were after justification, not submission.
The Pharisees had plenty of rules, over 1800 of them, governing every aspect of living. They believed that if they kept the rules, God was obligated to accept and bless them. Jesus made it very clear that God was interested in something far more important than rules. God is interested in relationship. God wants me to put my life in His care, all the time. If the result is that I keep certain rules, it is not because I want to appease God, nor is it because I want to negotiate with God. It is because I can’t imagine living in a way that blocks my relationship with God. My students had a terrible time with this. They were so much more comfortable with a religious checklist. Do this and this. Don’t do that. Check off the rules and you will know that you’re good. And anything not specifically covered was fair game. How to keep the rules and cheat at the same time.
Once we decide not be remain deaf to God, things change. Of course, God might have to shout pretty loudly to get our attention, but after that He usually whispers. Since I firmly believe that He actually does speak to me in those subtle whispers, I try to be as attentive to them as I can be. If I miss once or twice, He seems to know all about it, and He turns up the volume.
“Hey’, you say to me, “that’s way too mystical. How do you know it’s really God? Maybe it’s just your upbringing or your culture or even last night’s lasagna? You can’t expect me to just listen to every inner voice that happens to find its way into my mind, can you?”
The answer to this objection is found in a little story related by Jesus. In the tenth chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus talks about the relationship between a shepherd and his sheep. He says that every one of the sheep of a particular shepherd knows the voice of that shepherd and they are trained to follow his voice even through the distractions of other competing sounds. This story was not just make believe. In Jesus day shepherds actually herded their flocks exactly like this. Just as our dogs or horses know us by voice, we need to be able to hear and follow the voice of our Shepherd. Let me give you another example. If you have children, you know that even if they are playing among a crowd of people, you have a built-in detection alarm for the sound of their voices. How often have you been sitting with other adults when suddenly, in spite of all the commotion and volume around you, you hear your child in trouble as clearly as though her voice was the only one making noise. Do you ever stop and question this signal? “Oh, it’s not really her. I just made it up. I’ll just ignore it and it will go away.” No, you jump up and go to her. She needs you. You just know it.
This sort of knowledge is called tacit knowledge. It is just something that you know. You can’t really explain it but your lack of explanation does not make it any less real. It’s like your grandmother’s recipe for apple pie. She could never write it down. In fact, when she is forced to, it doesn’t come out the same. She just knows how to make apple pie. It’s just built-in.
God is the perfect parent. He never misses a single cry for help, a single miss-step, a single wandering thought. If I were a perfect parent, I would always know when my children were about to get into trouble and I would be there to nudge them back to safety. That is exactly what God does. He gives us a little nudge. He brings a little twinge to our conscience. He voices a little objection to our thinking. It is up to me to recognize when my communication with Him is faltering. Oswald Chambers said that whenever there is doubt, stop immediately. When it comes to our relationship with God, there is no room for doubt. God is not the author of confusion. Staying sensitive to my constant connection with Him takes a life-long practice, but every time I just stop and say, “OK, God, something isn’t right here. I feel out of synch. What do I need to do?” I will learn a bit more about hearing the Shepherd’s voice. It will get easier and easier to hear it because I will know what it sounds like.
It’s instructive that the Greek word for “doubt” comes from the root word for “discuss”. Are you in doubt about something? Well, let’s talk about it, says God. Let’s discuss the matter, debate it if you like, ponder it and see if we can’t come to a resolution. If you have a hard time hearing me, I could get a little louder. When God shouts His warnings that usually means some sort of crisis in my life. I could avoid some of those spiritual detonations if I learned to respond to the much quieter reminders. Suppose that I began to practice the art of stopping. Suppose that I actually stopped doing what I was doing whenever I felt this tacit out-of-synch feeling. That sort of practice is not so easy. I might be in the middle of a crowd, at a party, in traffic, at my desk loaded with today’s list of things to do. I might be having a little fight with my spouse or child. I might be trying to repair the weed-whacker. Distractions, social obligations, personal confrontations all work against my receptivity. But they don’t excuse deafness. What would happen it you just stopped, and let God say His piece? Do you think He would refuse to speak to you? Do you think He would say it was too late and walk out of the room? When children misbehave, we often give them a “time-out”. I wonder if we realize how important “time-outs” are for us?
The more I pay attention to my feelings of serenity, the more attentive I am to disturbances. The more I ask God to help me hear Him, the more I am aware of His interaction with me. But my receptivity won’t grow unless I act on what He says. I need to pay attention to the ruler instead of the rules. Checklist religion is like keeping an appointment calendar for your marriage. Do these things today, these things tomorrow. Complete all the assignments. Buy the gifts. Send the cards. Visit them at lunchtime. Make it home for dinner at least three times a week. And when you’re all done, ask your spouse if she feels loved. Before we too long we are reading the words “Irreconcilable differences” on a piece of paper we never wanted to see. We realize too late that what mattered most was not the rule keeping but the “time outs” together.
