All living things grow. This is how God designed life. Yet in the Christian community, growth is not the norm. This is not the norm because our approach to our life with Jesus is fundamentally flawed. 

I grew up in church. I was born in the pews. My first word was “Halleluiah.” Well, not exactly, but it feels like that. I was raised in a Christian home by parents who loved Jesus and modeled that love for me. As I’ve grown older, I have learned how rare that experience is. But with that, I found myself struggling. I can count on one hand the number of times I missed church on a Sunday morning in my childhood. I knew all the secret handshakes. I knew what to say and what to do. 

The message I got was always the same: good Christians don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t swear and don’t dance, because you know, if you are dancing and you fall over and your clothes fall off, you’re having sex, so dancing is a big no-no. That’s what it was to me: faith in Jesus was a list of rules. Do this, don’t do that. Say this, don’t say that. While I understood that following Jesus was supposed to make us different, these religious regulations always felt empty to me. There had to be something more, right?

For a long time, I thought the answer was no, because the message was always the same. Here’s how to be a good Christian: read your Bible more, pray more, go to church more. Everything was expressed as an expectation, a duty; “if you love Jesus, here’s what you’re going to do.” We even have a term for it: spiritual disciplines. Thus, we arrive at the core of the problem: discipline. 

Discipline is a bad thing? No. But discipline by itself is not enough. Consider this: Do you need discipline to watch a movie, eat chocolate cake or hang out with friends? No. Why? You desire to do them. Discipline is used to supplement motivation when your short-term desires are inconsistent with your long-term goals. 

Like fitness. When I started exercising, I had goals I wanted to accomplish. Some days, I was excited to get to work. Other days, I felt more like sitting on the couch and eating an entire sleeve of Oreos. That is where discipline is important. The problem with our approach to our spiritual lives is that we often try to build them solely around discipline. It’s forced. It’s empty. It doesn’t work. No matter how hard you try, you cannot foster a healthy, growing relationship with Jesus on sheer force of will. Relationships don’t work that way. 

The nature of love is that it is driven far more by desire than by duty. This is why when Jesus is asked, “What is the greatest commandment in the law?” (I.e., What is the most important duty for us to follow/ obey?) He responds with this in Luke 10:27: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself” (ESV).

God’s desire for us, is not that we would follow all His rules like a bunch of emotionless robots. His desire is that our pursuit of and obedience to Him would come from our desire for Him. Obedience, rule following, life-transformation, surrender, all the things that we are called to do to belong to Jesus can’t be fueled by duty alone. 

When you find yourself stuck, struggling or just stagnant in your growth, it is possible that what you need is some good old-fashioned discipline. Grit your teeth and do the work because the problem is just spiritual laziness. However, the fact that you’re reading an article like this suggests that this is not the struggle you’re having. The struggle is, you’re just not feeling it. No amount of disciplined, dutiful work is going to magically fix that. 

What you need, what we all need, is desire. Psalm 37:4 says: “Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (ESV).

This isn’t saying, desire God and He will give you everything else you want like some magical genie in a bottle. What this means, is that if you delight yourself in God, He will give you what you desire (more of Him). When you find yourself stuck in that rut, perhaps the best solution is look at what will stir your affection for God and focus on your love for Him.

for further study

How To Delight Yourself in the Lord:

• Remind yourself of the incredible gift of grace that God has given to you by reading some passages like: Titus 3:5, Romans 5:1-11, Ephesians 2:1-10, Romans 8:26-36. 
• Remember how God has worked in your past. It’s easy in our struggles to lose sight of God. Don’t just look at what’s in front of you. Look back at how God has worked and what He done.
• Pray asking God to stir your affection for Him. Speak to Him honestly and openly (Psalm 22). Be real with God and express your desire for more of Him.

Read:

• The Imperfect Disciple by Jared C. Wilson
• Radical by David Platt

This article was originally titled “Desired Duty” in the March 2023 issue of Peer.