Ultimate Spiritual Life

An outline for the sixth and final session of Spirituality for Thinkers and Seekers.
Friday night, November 18, 2011
North Hill Adventist Fellowship

The Adventist religion prescribes a number of behaviors:

Obey the Ten Commandments

Keep Sabbath

Pray

Read/study/memorize/contemplate the words in the Bible

Eat well

Exercise

Practice forgiveness

Get baptized

Take communion

Go to church

What is the purpose of all these practices? They are intended to help people live out the ideals of our religion. And what are the ideals of our religion?

Micah 6:8. “to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

Mark 12:28-34. A religious expert asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” Hearing Jesus' answer, the expert agreed. “Well said, teacher,” the mane replied. “you are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

Paul writes, after giving all sorts of specific rules,“He who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.”

So one way to answer the question, what is the purpose of religious practices, is this:

Religious practices are to help us love God and love people.

What does it mean to “love” someone? To feel affection for them. To seek their well-being. To desire them. To value them. To honor them. To claim them as yours.

We can appropriately evaluate our religious practices by measuring their usefulness in helping us love. Especially religious practices may be – and I would say, ought to be – evaluated using the yardstick of effectiveness in helping us love. Studying the Bible, praying, going to church, keeping Sabbath, reading Ellen White's books are not ultimate goals. They are methods for cultivating love. If your involvement with these practices is not increasing your experience of love, then the practice ought to be revised or abandoned.

You will notice that I've given a twist to the usual Adventist approach. I have not described the point of religion as knowing, believing and obeying the Bible. The Bible is a tool, a valuable, powerful tool. When we think of the Bible as a tool, this highlights the importance of the user. A chainsaw is a fantastic aid to someone living in the forest who heats his house with wood. It is a diabolical instrument of death in horror movies.

So the Bible served Aaron, a meth addict here at North Hill, as an instrument of release from addiction. In the South I grew up in it was constantly used as an instrument of oppression. (Southern Protestant churches dogmatically defended all sorts of racial oppression on the basis of the Bible.) Also in the South, Blacks found in the Bible hope and sustenance in dealing with the oppression heaped on them by White Christians.

Vibrant, healthy spiritual life requires cultivation. Religious practices are indispensable for vital spirituality. They are most potent when they are practiced regularly and are deliberately put in the service of love.

The Bible does not “make things true.” Something is not true “because the Bible says it.” Rather the Bible, like the apostles bears witness to the truth. Our focus must be beyond the Bible on the truth toward which it points. And the greatest truth is God and his, just as the greatest obligation and accomplishment for us is loving God and other people.

The Bible testifies that Jesus is the light that lightens every human (John 1:9), that God is light and in him is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5) and that both Jesus and Jesus' disciples are the light of the world (Matthew 5:14, John 8:12; 9:5).

The light that is in us allows us to read the Bible with wise lenses. Because Jesus is our light, we see light in the words of the Bible. We join Jesus in opposing the darkness that some people extract from the words of the Bible (Matthew 5:21ff, John 8:5, 11; Mark 2:25). We join Jesus in receiving and transmitting the light of God that shines from the Bible (Matthew 9:13; 12:7).