by Justin Schaeffer

I have the humbling honor of teaching a class on the Spiritual Disciplines this coming quarter from Oct. 8th - Nov. 26th during our Praxis Wednesday night gatherings.  I taught the class last Spring on Sundays and it was a wonderful learning experience for me as we worked through many of the avenues of grace that God gives us to know Him more fully and to experience Him in relationship.  However…one BIG revelation I’ve had since teaching the class last spring and now, is that there is great danger in simply instructing individuals in a class.  What do I mean by that?

We have a tendency as modern, western-minded Christians to think of our journeys with God from a very individual mindset.  We can look at classes as an opportunity to fill our minds with more knowledge about God or Christian living that will somehow advance us forward in the ranks of Christianity.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t reflect Jesus’ prayer for us in John 17…

Jesus prays not only that we’d be sanctified by God’s word (biblical instruction/ taking classes), but also that we’d be unified with other Christians as the trinity is unified AND that we’d be sent into the world, not removed from the world.

The community/ unity portion is essential for receiving the full blessing of Biblical instruction and for glorifying Jesus as His body.  God gives us the entire body of Christ with its different gifts and measures of faith in order for it to work properly and to build us up in love (Ephesians 4:15-16).  We must seek to learn together and to speak truth into others’ lives while also receiving truth from one another.

1st we are blessed through God’s truth to bless one another while learning as disciples in community. 2nd we are blessed as a community to be a blessing to the world (or sent). This idea of being blessed to be a blessing is a mega theme of the Bible as you see Abraham receiving the promise that the nations will be blessed through his offspring and then throughout the Old Testament as Israel is expected to be a light to the gentiles, and of course ultimately culminating with Jesus receiving the blessing of His ministry through the Holy Spirit to be THE blessing to the world through His death and resurrection.  Then…after His resurrection Jesus gives His disciples the great CO-mission, not the great mono-mission.  So he is sending, but still in community, not as individuals.

After Jesus’ commission to the disciples all of the teaching they had received took on a new importance.  The disciples had listened to Jesus’ teaching all along, but had most likely stored it in that same convenient, abstract, “that was some good teaching” part of their brains that we all do after a Pastor Mark sermon as we leave the Sunday gathering to go about our day with little or no immediate affect from the truth that was preached.  However… now that Jesus was leaving and these guys were being pushed out of the nest to ‘fly on their own’, they became desperate for the help of the Holy Spirit and desperate to recall Jesus’ teaching and God’s word.   In community they anxiously sought the Holy Spirit together in the upper room, waiting for His power, because they knew they could never accomplish what Jesus had sent them to do without His help. This is my hope for Praxis.

Praxis means to put theory into practical application.  It is our intent as campus shepherds to push you all out of the nest in community to be a blessing to your neighborhoods.  We hope to have each community group leaving our classes with concrete plans in place to continue to seek equipping in the word of God, live together in community, and share their blessings with the world.  It is necessary that these plans be somewhat daunting or even scary just as Jesus’ commission to His disciples must’ve been.  It is only in trying to practically live out what we learn that we will realize our great incompetence and develop a true hunger to be equipped.  In the sending of our community groups, it is our hope that you will all develop an insatiable hunger to be equipped because your equipping is necessary for the work Jesus has given you in your neighborhoods.

To bring it all back around to my class, Spiritual Disciplines, I think of Jesus.  He spends entire nights with God without sleeping, goes off alone into the dessert to fast and seek communion with God, takes off early in the morning to be alone with God, memorizes scripture, prays all the time, serves, evangelizes, meditates on God’s word, etc… throughout his ministry.  Why?  Because He valued His relationship with His Father more than anything this earth had to offer while He also was given the most daunting task that any human on earth has ever been given.  In His human frailty He was desperate enough to discipline Himself to seek God in everything He did.  That is the vision I have for my class, that we’d be desperate for God because of His surpassing value and because of the daunting mission He’s sent us on.