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To live in the flow of the Spirit means doing what Jesus says. I will mess up a lot. I'm going to need his power. I know that, but I form the intention. I say to him, "God, with your help, as best I can, I will do what you say. I will give you my life, my time, my obedience." If that is not my settled intent, then it is best to be honest about it.
There is something else you need to know. At one point when we were driving, I was quite sure the lady was wrong. She said to go left, and I didn't go left. I went right because I knew she was wrong. Then, in a fascinating response, she said, "Recalculating route. When safe to do so, execute a U-turn."
I knew she was wrong … so I unplugged her. That's the beauty of that little box. You can unplug her.
And I got lost as a goose, which my wife enjoyed immensely. So we plugged that lady back in, and you know what she said?
"I told you so, you little idiot. You think I'm going to help you now? You rejected me. There is no way. You just find your way home by yourself."
No, she didn't say those things. She said, "Recalculating route. When safe to do so, execute a U-turn."
That's grace.
God will say to anybody: "Here is the way home. Execute a U-turn." As soon as you're ready to listen, as soon as you're ready to surrender, that's called repentance.
He'll say, "I'll bring you home." That is grace.
The right message is not simply how to get to heaven when you die. Nor is it simply human wisdom about how to be a better parent or more successful at work. The right message is that we grow to desire and follow God's Spirit each day of our life.
The right measure
It is a leadership axiom that we will seek to measure that which we are serious about. The default measures at a church are nickels and noses because, by definition, if we run out of those, I'm out of a job. But most of us want to go deeper than that. We'd like a sense of how we are doing at creating communities where saints can flourish. And we need to get our gauges as right as possible.
When I was growing up, if someone asked me, "How is your spiritual life going?" my mind immediately went to what we called "the quiet time." If my quiet times were regular and long, I would rate my spiritual life highly. I rated my spiritual life in terms of my devotional practice.
Churches sometimes do the same thing. In an attempt to take spiritual growth seriously, they may try to calculate how many people are reading the Bible or writing in a journal.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. But devotional practices are not the ultimate criteria for spiritual growth. In Jesus' day, the people who would have rated highest on devotional practices would have been the scribes and the Pharisees ("I thank you, God … that I fast twice a week; I give tithes on all I get"). But they were not examples of spiritual maturity.
How do you measure spiritual maturity so that the Pharisees don't win?
Sometimes churches measure spiritual progress in terms of commitment. Often we see scales that look something like Scale 1 (below). Where would the Pharisees be by this scale? Far right. They win. Commitment was not the problem.
