We're Talking About Practice

Putting on the Christian Life

If I may channel Pilgrim’s Progress for a moment, consider two people:

Sloth and Practice are both new Christians who begin to feel that they should pray. Neither have a strong desire to pray; just the sense that they should.

Sloth shares this conviction with a friend, and then says, “well, thank goodness I’m saved by grace, and not by my own effort,” and makes no changes in his life.

Practice also shares his conviction with a friend and thanks God for saving him by grace; but Practice then makes a prayer plan and tries to pray at least five minutes each day.

Fast forward five years: who is more likely to have a thriving prayer life?

I became a Christian in what’s called by some the “gospel-centered” movement, which Trevin Wax summarizes:

The goal was to pull the church back to the center of the Christian faith so the main message—grace and mercy through the cross and resurrection of Jesus—wouldn’t be eclipsed by moralistic behavioral improvements or political causes.

I am genuinely thankful for the formation I got through this movement, which deepened my love for Jesus and helped me work through some anxiety and shame around sin struggles that persisted after I became a Christian. I’d still consider myself more a part of that movement than any other.

But there was a tendency in the movement, which tried hard to avoid putting “moralistic behavioral improvement” as the main goal of Christianity, to downplay all moral striving as creeping legalism. To imply that any effort at self-improvement that feels like “work” is flirting with becoming a Pharisee. The result of that was nudging people toward becoming Sloths: lazy Christians who can confess sin and wax eloquent on the grace of God, but pray as little and get drunk as often as they did when they first became Christians. This was because in excess, the movement lost sight of the importance of practicing the life of Christianity.

Practicing vs pretending

In the sequence on spiritual growth we’ve been studying in Colossians, Paul writes:

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness,  humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3:12-14, emphasis added)

We tend to associate “put on” with pretending. We put on a friendly face for the meeting with the person we loathe; we put on a front to seem more confident than we are. Jesus’ harshest words were for hypocrites, who put on a mask of righteousness to hide pride and evil. (Did you know “hypocrite” was originally a word for an actor in a mask?) Jesus hated spiritual pretending, which is acting out a role I have no intention of wanting.

But when Paul says “put on,” he means something more like practicing a life we want, even if we don’t feel it yet. I love the Band of Brothers series, which follows a company of Army paratroopers in World War II. In the first episode, we see new recruits who are in one sense already soldiers – they’ve enlisted – and in another sense not soldiers yet. They’re unfit, they don’t know how to jump out of an airplane, and they don’t know how to work together as a unit. But we see them practice the new role they’ve been given, even when they don’t want to do it. And the rest of the series shows the fruit of that practice: not only their growing skills as soldiers, but also their growing friendships with one another.

It's the same with sports, music, academic learning, and even parenting. We grow by “putting on” our role even when we don’t feel like it. And there’s a sense in which Christian growth works the same way.  If we practice the life we see in the Word, while also confessing our failures and being restored by God’s grace, we will grow in living the Word more faithfully. We’ll find loving God, loving others, and loving the gospel come more and more naturally.

Practice makes … better

I’d love to tell you “practice makes perfect.” Unfortunately, on this side of eternity, nothing makes perfect. You won’t become perfect until Jesus makes you complete as a new creation.

But by God’s grace, you can become better.

You can become more gracious to your family. You can stop gossiping or looking at porn. You can be more courageous in living and sharing your faith. You can become wiser and more prayerful. By God’s grace, with the help of a community, you can put on a better life and see it change your soul.

In our next piece, we’ll look at some specific ways we might “put on” what we see in the Word, that we might be changed by it.