By Hunter Greene
A couple of weeks ago, I got the chance to visit a monastic community in St. Meinrad, Indiana. One of my classes took a weekend trip to spend time at the monastery and see what it is like to live as a Benedictine monk. Living in East Tennessee my whole life, there was never really anything that made sense about monasticism. I didn’t understand why they had chosen to live the life that they had, but after our visit, I truly found their way of life to be beautiful. We often operate under the assumption that people who worship and follow Jesus differently than we do could never teach us anything about being more faithful to Christ. However, I am finding that we get in our own way far too often, because as it turns out… the monks have a lot to teach us “evangelicals” who claim to value Scripture and prayer.
Much of my life, I have been able to experience some powerful services in which tears and verbal praises were the only appropriate response for what we were feeling. While I am thankful for these experiences, I have not been able to figure out why these experiences were not able to be sustained on Monday morning. I have never assumed that people were faking it on Sunday, but I have noticed that the thickness of God’s presence on Sunday just seemed to be absent when we left the building. For instance, it never made much sense to me how we could weep before God in praise and then ruin a waitress’s day with a puny tip at Sunday lunch. And it never made sense how we could praise God with our lips and then turn around and demean the very people we had just been with in worship. There is certainly nothing wrong with emotional worship (in my opinion), but I would argue that there is something really flawed about leaving the presence of God in our pew.
I think that a metaphor of a river would best serve us to contrast how differing degrees of intentionality permeates a monk’s walk with Christ as opposed to our own. Ironically, this metaphor has been quite noticeable in our lives the past week. God desires that we become “Rivers of Living Water.” John 7:37-39 reads, “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. (But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.)’”
If you are like me, I don’t feel like a river of living water most of the time. Rather, I usually feel like a puddle of stagnant water. I accumulate all the rain of God’s presence on Sunday morning, but because my relationship with Him is so surface level and unintentional, my faith tends to get pretty dry come Monday afternoon. The thing with puddles is that they can’t go any deeper than the surface, and therefore, the least bit of heat will dry them up. The problem with many of us is that our relationship with Christ is nothing more than our surface level church attendance, and the first bit of trouble on Monday will dry up any Spirit-filled life we intended to live.
The good news is that there are people in the world that are living examples of Spirit-filled rivers. The order and discipline in which monks live may freak many of us out, but their commitment and intentionality to Scripture is what makes them like a river. Rivers dig into the earth and create depth, but they are also guided along by the banks that give it form. This is exactly what we need in the Christian life. We need to start developing depth in our relationship with Christ so that when the heat comes our lives will continue to pour out streams of living water. However, in order to do that, we must first establish some boundaries in our lives that will give our Christian life form.
Monks have worship services five times per day, and the amazing thing is that when the bells ring indicating they are to gather, they immediately leave whatever they were working on to go pray. We often operate on the opposite spectrum. We put off our prayer and time with Scripture until our work is done, but they put off their work in order to pray and read. They told us that they do this because it reminds them what is really important in life.
I know that we have busy lives, but I do think that we need to be reminded of what truly matters in life, and it isn’t our work, our money, or our comfort. If we want a more intimate communion with God, then we must learn to discipline our scattered minds by ordering our days according to our spiritual priorities. May we learn how to set specific times during the day where we will pray, read Scripture, and be still in silence to listen for God. For in doing so, I believe that we will invite the presence of God into our work, our play, and our rest. God deserves more than our spontaneity and our occasional worship on Sundays. God desires that He be the very center of our existence in which His love flows out of our lives.
(The Solution Column is provided by Pastor Brandon Young of Harmony Free Will Baptist Church of Hampton and his associate pastor, Hunter Greene)