Meditations on the Christian Experience:
A Testimony

by Mark Powell

“...you [God] have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until
they find their peace in you.” – St. Augustine


A Pilgrim’s Arrested Development
I have been attempting to follow the Jesus-way since 1962, and I have a confession to make. (They say this is good for the soul and bad for the reputation, but I’m willing to take the risk) OK, here goes: When I first became a believer, I was never taught the most basic elements of what it really meant to follow Jesus. I mean, I was told to pray, but never really how; I was told to study the Scriptures, but was never coached with ways to do this; I was informed that I needed to fast, but never why; I was warned that the body was sinful, but not that it bore God’s image. In short, I was never discipled. So, over the years I‘ve had to unlearn many practices and ideas! Another way to say this is to say that my early spiritual experience in Christianity was marked by learning what did not work too well, and therefore, I often face roadblocks and dead-ends.

What is most remarkable to me is that somewhere along the way I didn’t just throw up my hands and say, “to hell with this!” or something like it. Believe me, the fact that I’m still at it speaks more about the grace and love of God than about my perseverance. God is good and He hangs with us all the way.

Anyway, two things began to change this mess of sputters and fits in my discipleship. (The term discipleship is weighted and is used, as I will show later, to denote other terms as well such as: the Christian Life, sanctification & filled with the Spirit.)

First, I was thrust into an inner city ministry, where I experienced a genuine need for Jesus to actually be alive (!) and to actually work in the real world. In fact, it turned out that my survival depended upon the real presence of the Lord!

As I lived that ministry effort I discovered the difficult needs of people. I also discovered that I was often at the thin edge of my ministry knowledge and practice. This meant I was deeply unsure of just how to assist the people who visited with me. They were the trapped, the brutalized, and the misled. In short, very quickly I realized that I was in way over my head. How to help? How to make a difference? How to live the Jesus-way in this urban sea of grief and death and disease?

But, at the moment of my deepest despair, grace spread like a smile in my conscience, a grace I didn’t deserve and a grace I couldn’t earn. This grace seeped into me as a new-found love. Somehow, someway, I began to really love the people I saw everyday, the people who were so very much different from me – different in color, in income and in world-view. This love flowed out of what I can only call an internal pool of mercy that the Lord welled in me. Fear and a judgmental heart were exchanged for love and acceptance and forgiveness. I say this to God’s credit.

I recall the time a local resident named Sam came to talk to me. It was in the late afternoon, after the Center had closed for the day. Sam, a some-time volunteer and probably thirty years my senior, asked very seriously, “What’s happen to you? You’re different?”

“I don’t know, really;” I said, “I don’t know what you mean…”

“Well you’re different; you’ve changed.” And then he made a request that I will never forget. It was a sacred moment, really, and I still use it as a sort of north star, even today. Sam asked, “Is it alright if I call you Pastor?”

In wonder and brokenness my spirit sensed the sacred work of God in me. Sam could see how far I had come, and I could see that too, but I could also see how I had so very far to go! Still it was a turning point.

Looking back, I realize that this opening to grace came as a result of asking myself two very simple questions that I had stumbled upon while reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison. Namely:
Who is Jesus for me?
What does it mean to follow Jesus in this religion-less time and place?

I had been using these questions as my daily spiritual practice. I meditated on them and allowed them to be my daily discipline and the grid through which I read and studied the New Testament. And what I discovered was a way of thought that opened me to the Holy, and eventually changed my ministry and my life.

The second adjustment came very subtly and over time. Grace again became active in me and I began to learn how to pray. (There is no sense of triumph in this statement. I’m still learning to pray, and I’m learning it just how I learned to love people -- through the initiative and grace)

Interestingly, the beginning of these prayer lessons were actually set in motion inside me long before I realized they were occurring. Many years before I had discovered Richard Foster’s book, Celebration of Discipline (this was nearly 30 years ago) and I remember thinking at the time that this writing might be OK for some, but I doubted that I could apply it. You see, I had just discovered the freedom found in Christ (Galatians 5:1), I had just left fundamentalism for evangelicalism, and I was determined never to return to that yoke of bondage again! So I read the book, but since it smelled of legalism, I shelved it.

Later, much later, though, through a book by Robert Webber entitled, Ancient-Future Faith, I was introduced to and began a considered study of Christian spirituality as understood from the past, that ancient legacy left us by both the church fathers and the desert fathers.

Part of this study unearthed a certain path to prayer about which I had never heard. This prayer has been variously called, but I especially found Father Thomas Keating’s work, Open Mind, Open Heart, to be trailblazing in this regard. Anyway, all of this led me full-circle back to Foster’s book, after years of neglect. To my surprise, I discovered that what he describes in his Celebration as the “disciplines,” were really only these ancient practices of spirituality that eventually served to give pattern to my prayer paths.

So What?
OK, so, why bring up my pilgrimage? Will my trail toward discipleship be your path? Hardly (and I hope not)! Of course, you must find your own way. Instead, I share this story to emphasis the importance of the inward-Spiritual experience for the Christian believer – especially in regards to prayer but also with all the ancient practices as well – for the growth of a robust, outward discipleship experience, one that displays the reality of the risen Jesus through our individual and corporate actions. Put another way, through prayer and the other ancient Christian practices, we find the path, the way, the gate (Matthew 7:13, 14) to the life of Jesus-risen in us, and in turn we discover our vocation in the world.

There are a number of terms that Christians have used over the years to describe what I am here discussing. I’ve already used discipleship, but others are similar in meaning: living the Christian Life, being sanctified, being filled with and controlled by the Holy Spirit and holiness before the Lord. What they have in common, I think, is the interiority of the spiritual experience, especially as it relates to the believer’s union with the living Jesus, the Christ. So, what I would like to do in the rest of this essay is to unroll several patterns I found in this internal presence of Jesus as a way to describe this experience.


Beginnings
To do this we begin with the most important question for us: Is Jesus really alive?

I don’t mean here to invoke the church-i-anity answer, a reply that comes by rote and unconcern, like the consent of a rather sleepy individual after having absorbed a rather bloated lunch on a warm summer day. Neither does this call for an automatic answer, dry, passionless and one framed from musty habits in the mind. No! Here’s the question again: Have I, have you, have we, really met the living, risen Jesus in our internal experience? Have we been changed? Has our view of the world been shattered, altered? Have we experienced His reality and given Him our allegiance? (Don’t go on without really thinking about this…)

Anatomy of a Christian Experience
New Testament, Luke Timothy Johnson, defines a religions experience as:
“A response to that which is perceived as ultimate, involving the whole person, characterized by peculiar intensity, and issuing in action.”( Luke Timothy Johnson, Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity, pages 60-67)

Notice, the religious experience to which we are responding means that the initiative for the experience comes from what Johnson calls, the Ultimate. That is, God moves first! It is we who are actually making reply to the actions and presence of the Ultimate.

For us, of course, the Ultimate is the Great I AM, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the one, true and living God (“Hear O Israel! The LORD is our God, and the LORD our God is one!).

Think of this another way. God has made us free, and in our freedom we can seek God. But God is free too, and in His freedom He has actually chosen to pursue us. We thirst to encounter God, but God has chosen to reveal himself to us! And He has chosen to do so through the Jesus, the risen one!

Listen to this TEXT from the New Testament book of Hebrews:
1 Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. 2 But now in these final days, he has spoken to us through his Son. God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance, and through the Son he made the universe and everything in it. 3 The Son reflects God's own glory, and everything about him represents God exactly. He sustains the universe by the mighty power of his command. After he died to cleanse us from the stain of sin, he sat down in the place of honor at the right hand of the majestic God of heaven. (Hebrews 1:1-3)

Take note of how this TEXT declares, in the starkest terms possible, how God now speaks to us through his Son! (remember: “This is my beloved son, Hear Ye Him!”) That is, through the enterprise of God we now perceive the Ultimate in the risen Jesus, who is the life-giving Spirit (1 Corinthians 15), and who opens to us the attendance of God in our lives.

Dr. Johnson’s definition also tells us that to experience the Ultimate results in an “issuing in action.” I take this to mean that the experience of uniting with Jesus changes us!

And how could it not?

How could we not respond to this intense experience of the Holy with heart-action? In short, how could we fail to declare that Jesus is really alive and to confess that we have met him. And this declaration and this confession is no idle statement! Rather, it is to pronounce something that cannot be proven; it is to assert something that is beyond both logic and the power of rational intellect. If anything, our response involves the recognition of a paradox, a call to personal decision, an iron-act of the will, an opening of the soul to the unknown, a commitment, a dedication, and an ongoing pledge, all based upon the enterprise of the Holy Spirit. To believe that Jesus is really alive means that we commit ourselves, all we are, all we have, all our past, our present and our future to the pursuit of this living person!

This initial spiritual experience has commonly been described with theological terms like justification, regeneration or salvation. (Technically, these terms are anything but the same. For an excellent, if rigid, work, that makes the distinctions between the specific definitions of these terms theologically, see John Murray’s classic book, Redemption Accomplished and Applied. For my purpose here, I am discussing the specific events/actions of regeneration and sanctification. ) And when this language is used to explain that first meeting between the human person and Jesus, it is recounting something that is based neither upon the sociological nor the psychological (although the meeting carries implications for both). Instead, meeting Jesus is based upon the personal. It is conversion. It is to be reoriented and altered. It is to be so changed that we are prompted, on our own and by our own account, to explain our history and our future around this internal experience that is steeped in mystery, power and transformation – “Once I was blind, but now I see.”

Put another way, I am arguing that what the first century, second generation believer experienced – Jesus, risen, alive, and powerfully at work in their life and the life of the church – is exactly what we experience when we meet Jesus risen as the Christ, too, which results in our being born into the family of God! Like those ancient ones, we too are given the new ability (the power for change) to call Jesus Lord and to call God abba (daddy). (1 Corinthians 12:3; and Romans 8:14,15, respectively, cf also Romans 10:8,9)

Not Far Away
But this doesn’t go far enough, not if we are discussing discipleship.

What cannot be overemphasized is that this initial experience of the power of the risen Jesus in us is not the only encounter we have with Him. Far from it. And while we need not meet the Lord Jesus again as Savior (once done, never redone), we do need to continue tracking with him for our discipleship. What I mean to say is that we will never find the path to intimacy with the Ultimate, or the way of discipleship, or the holy convergence of calling and vocation, without the Christ’s daily and ongoing initiative toward us, and ours toward him. This is the reason for the often heard inner invitations, urgings and wooing prompted by the Christ, calling us for a meeting.

But do we respond?

I know, I know, you’ve heard it all before! But, really, this is the key to following faith and to following hard after Jesus, the Christ. Why do we rage and languish in bitterness? Why do we sputter and slump under the same sins, the same strife and the same wounds? Why are we prayer-less? Why do we talk and talk about life changes but see them just beyond our grasp? Why is the witness of the church so anemic and brittle? I am convinced that the only way to really bring lasting change to our lives and the lives of others is the moving presence of the Christ. With spits and stutters, this has been my experience.

Let me say it again – To daily meet with the Christ is to be changed, really changed, changed to the depths of the soul and back again! (2 Corinthians 5:17) Jesus, the risen one, desires this meeting, urges us to himself; calls us and opens to us numerous opportunities for such connections. Are we listening? And just how do we listen? I have found the answer to be in the ancient Christian disciplines.

You see, the ancient disciplines of daily prayers (both contemplation and intercession), of the sacred reading of the Scripture (Lectio Divina), of fasting, simplicity, solitude, worship and detachment are not magic formulas that, if practiced properly, make us holy and upright. On the contrary, the daily practice of the disciplines, performed without the grace of God, leads not to spirituality at all, but rather to pride and extreme legalism. If they become outward works without inward calling, unction, or presence, then they are as filthy rags.

But we need not attempt the disciplines on our own. The Christ is not far away. In fact, he is as close as the air we breathe! And we are able to experience Him through the initiative (power) of the Spirit (Christian spirituality is thus Trinitarian) and through the ancient practices of the church. When we succumb to the overtures of the Ultimate and eternally present One – which we experience as being drawn to Him and being enable to do what we could not do before – then we are taken to the heart of discipleship.

These ancient practices, found in the subterranean wisdom of the primeval church, simply clear clutter from our spirit and make space for us to experience Him who is our heart of hearts. Put another way, when we practice the ancient disciplines, under the energy of the internal dimension of grace, room is cleared for the Jesus, the risen one, the Christ, to touch us, to change us and to make of us that new creation. I these practices we open ourselves to the life-giving Spirit of Jesus, who is no myth, but who instead lives and works, and sees in us who we really are!

Put still another way, to spend time in silence before the Ultimate one in prayer is not to do nothing! It is the supreme act of faith. It is to believe that Jesus is truly alive, whether we feel anything happens or not. It is to stand in soundless faith and soul-nakedness, with openness, stillness and waiting in our heart, knowing that Jesus, the Christ is there. (Again: Do you believe that Jesus really is alive?) It is to believe that Jesus is very close, reaching his scarred hand into our gnarly heart – pitted and spotted by anger, grief, hate, sadness and depression. It is to allow, in our freedom, a moment with the Holy to transform (metamorphosis) us into what we were intended to be in the first place. And, as this transformation occurs, we become His work in progress, a work that opens as a window for others to see that the Christ is real and truly alive, and that Jesus is at work, that Jesus heals.

Augustine got it right, are hearts are restless, but we can find rest in the living God, really we can. This is how we are changed. This is Christian spirituality.

Old Sam said it: “What happened? You’re different!”

That’s right Sam…I’m not all I should be, but I’m not what I used to be…I’m changing daily…Or better put, I’m being changed by grace day by day.