Tuesday, May 18
What Is the Pattern of Spiritual Living?
WANTED: Respondents. I am writing a book on Ancient-Future Spirituality and desire to interact with Leaders of the church. This is a summary of the third chapter. Please interact with me. What do you think? Do you have an illustration? Do you disagree? Do you have a comment? If I quote you, I will give full credit, so include your position, church, and location. Thanks. Your input will make this a stronger book.
I was baptized at age 12. While standing in the water, my father, the minister, said, "Robert, do you renounce the devil and all his works?" Now, many years later, I am still "working out" this renunciation and the subsequent transformation of being resurrected into Christ.
It was baptism that revealed the pattern of spiritual living-dying daily to sin; rising daily to the life of the Spirit.
The pattern of spirituality which baptism reveals was misunderstood in the New Testament era and continues to be misunderstood today.
There are those who because they have been baptized, feel free to continue in sin (licentious Christians).There are those also who although they have been baptized, don't embrace God's grace and continue to try to be pleasing to God through works (legalists). But baptism puts both licentiousness and legalism to rest and call us into the freedom of dying to sin and rising to the Spirit.
In the New Testament and the early church we find clear teaching on the spirituality of "putting off and putting on."
The desert fathers of the ancient church regarded the desert as the archetypal symbol of the world that is hostile to God (i.e., the death of the desert). They went there to wrestle with the powers themselves and to learn the pattern of spirituality.
Most of us live in the "desert of the world." We need to allow the identity we have with God in baptism to inform the pattern of our dying to sin (not moral sin alone, but institutional sin as well) and rising to the Spirit (not personal alone, but also corporate forms of service in the world).
Response? Write me at: rwebber@northern.seminary.edu
Bob Webber
Myers Professor of Ministry
Director of M.A. in Worship and Spirituality
Northern Seminary—www.seminary.edu
(See Northern's M.A. in Worship and Spirituality and D.Min. in Worship by clicking on the website.)
