Spiritual Disciplines 101: The Posture of Spiritual Growth

John Mark Comer once wrote, “An over busy, hurried life of speed is the new normal in the western world, and its toxic.” This toxicity of constant hurry and crazy busy is not innocuous - it will and does have an effect on our spiritual growth. Spiritual Disciplines 101: The Posture of Spiritual Growth will be the first of a two-part series where we will learn how to slow our lives down in order to rightly prioritize the spiritual disciplines in our faith walk. A full cup cannot be filled further. This series will focus on developing the posture for spiritual growth by addressing our idols of business and productivity that can so often compete with our spiritual disciplines. Our goal will be to learn how to slow down, eliminating the hurry that so often has a hold of us, and readying ourselves to pursue a life of spiritual growth.

All of the lessons and the corresponding notes can be found below.

Spiritual Disciplines 101, Part 1 - Introduction: The Problem of Hurry

There is a universal truth to the modern first-world human experience: We lead lives marked by hurry and filled with busyness. Because the modern American experience is to fill our lives to the brim so that we can be successful, significant, and satisfied, we are all crazy busy. And because we’ve become crazy busy, we don’t walk or even jog through our days. Rather, our waking moments tend to be marked by an ongoing sprint. Here in part 1 of Spiritual Disciplines 101, we begin a series that will be geared toward addressing the busy-crazed, hurry-sick lives we are prone to lead with the ultimate goal of eliminating hurry and learning a hurry-free kind of busyness – a busyness that is significantly less crazy.

Spiritual Disciplines 101, Part 2 - Hurry-Sick Belief

We fill our lives with busyness because we believe there is something good about it. And yet, as we learned in part 1, our crazy busy lives have produced a hurry sickness. So what’s going on? Simple. Society has indoctrinated not just a way of life and a standard for success. But what if this is the opposite of what God intended for us? What if God is more interested in how holy you are rather than how hurried you are? What we will in part 2 is that hurry sickness has its own system of belief built right in. The goal in this lesson is to pause and check our priorities. We need to slow down so we can recognize the lies indoctrinated into us by society. This lesson should serve to help us realize that Our priorities aren’t found in the pace of our lives, but in His place in our lives.

Spiritual Disciplines 101, Part 3 - Hurry-Sick Behavior

We behave according to what we believe. You may rightly diagnose your sickness, but if your beliefs remain unchallenged, your behaviors will remain unchanged. The wrong treatment for our hurry-sickness will not only fail to heal us, but will leave us drained, weakened, and spiritually dead. In part 3 of our series in Spiritual Disciplines, we’ll reflect on the hurry-sick beliefs from part 2, exposing the behaviors that come from those beliefs, and seeking ways we can fill our lives with “Bubbles” - to borrow from the illustration last week.

Spiritual Disciplines 101, Part 4 - The Easy Yoke: Hurry-Free Busyness

As Christians, our lives should be marked by a righteous busyness. Scripture itself attests to the reality that work predates the fall. Busyness was never the problem. The problem came when we removed God as number one in our lives. In our fourth and final part in Spiritual Disciplines 101, we will be looking at Matthew 11:28-30 as we seek to bear the easy yoke and understand what it means to live a life filled with Christ-centered busyness. What we will learn is that the cure to our hurry sickness comes not only by removing unhelpful hurry, but by filling our lives with a busyness centered on Jesus. At the end of our time together, the hope is that you would see that the cure of less hurry is more Christ.