Seeking a Life that Matches Your Convictions

Welcome to the kickoff of my Friends and Fellowship Serenity Summer Soiree. Each week during the months of June, July, and August plan to enjoy meeting some of my favorite writing friends and fellowship around the goodness of the Lord. This week, we are encouraged by my sweet friend, Michele Morin, in seeking a life that matches your convictions.

Welcome Michele!

I settled down to work in my usual spot. The dining room table always provides a welcoming space for all my books and notes and an open Bible. With fingers on the keyboard, I was ready to write when a ping sounded from my phone, a reminder from an app that I hadn’t done a Spanish lesson yet.

That could certainly wait but look! There was also a social media notification. And there were emails cluttering up my inbox.

“I’ll just answer a few blog comments and…”

Forty-five minutes later, I looked at the empty, untouched Word document on my laptop in dismay. Valuable writing minutes had been frittered away. Mind you, this is all happening to the woman who used to denounce social media as “fake living” and always set a strict timer for her sons’ highly regulated minutes on our big, clunky family computer.

Ironically, my convictions haven’t changed. I still believe that real-life commitments and relationships take priority over my online presence, and I applaud my adult sons’ faithful governance of my grandkids’ screen time. Even so, on that morning at the dining room table, I detected some dissonance between my convictions and my lived reality.

One measure of a healthy Christian life is alignment between one’s confessional theology (what she says she believes) and one’s practical theology (what her life looks like to the casual observer).

Doing the Truth

James, the brother of Jesus takes aim and fires at our tendency to wander into lazy patterns of unorthodox living:

“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.” James 1:22-25

Do you ever sense that your life has slipped into unhealthy or unhelpful patterns? Paying attention to my life and my own “prone to wander” heart has yielded three strategies for aligning my everyday life with the convictions I cherish:

• Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to. Like dry leaves along a stream bed, the rushing current of distraction sweeps our time and attention into patterns of trivial thinking and meaningless activities. Internet giants pay big money for your attention. In fact, it may well be your most valuable asset, so don’t squander it.

If you sense that your attention is compromised, start noticing where your minutes are going. If necessary, keep a log of your daily tasks or enable the screen time monitoring feature on your device. Put some distance between you and your phone when you’re working on tasks or interacting with precious people that deserve your undivided attention 

• Commit yourself to one new spiritual practice. There’s a good reason we refer to disciplines of prayer, Bible study, fasting, memorization (and others, too!) as “practices!” It’s clear–we’ll never get beyond the trying stage. We keep working at our relationship with God, fully aware that this is one instance that reveals the lie of “practice makes perfect.”

Instead, let’s aim for “practice makes progress!” The purpose of spiritual practices is to make room in our lives for grace. We put bookends around a moment and wait for the voice of God. This is especially important if we’ve wandered away from core convictions because the means of grace God has provided will draw us and then hold us close to the truth.

Thomas Chalmers’s logic from The Expulsive Power of a New Affection applies to the formation of strong habits of holiness. He claimed that the believer can remove the snares and tangles of sin, not by legalism or self-help strategies, but rather “by setting forth another object, even God, as more worthy of [our hearts’] attachment.”

What if our love for God, our trust in God, our praise of God, and our thanks to God crowded out the distractions, the worrying, the complaining, and the discontentment that occupy so much of our time and our brain space?

• Beware of trying to earn God’s favor. James assures us that we will be “blessed in our doing,” and it’s true that it is only as we act upon our convictions that we fully inhabit them.

Paul chimes in on four different occasions with the image of a “worthy” walk, a life that pleases God, bears fruit, and puts the glory of God on display. (See Ephesians 4:1; Philippians 1:27; Colossians 1:10; 1 Thessalonians 2:12.) Consistent with Paul’s affirmation of salvation by faith alone, we see the purpose that drives a life of consistency and conviction is NOT to earn God’s favor or somehow become worthy of God’s love. We are “blessed in our doing,” we “walk worthy of God” when we walk by faith, leaning into habits of holiness because we are already mightily loved by God—not because we expect to earn God’s approval through them.

Commit to the Adjacent Possible

One word of caution:  Staying true to our convictions can become an end in itself, a legalistic dead end that places an obstacle in our following life. Instead, choose just one wobbly conviction and commit to the next, logical step in shoring it up.

The concept of “The Adjacent Possible” has changed the way I approach adding spiritual disciplines and healthful practices to my life. Adjacent means “in close proximity.”

If I am looking for The Adjacent Possible, I stop scanning the horizon for a eureka moment and begin looking close by for a small positive step in the right direction.

I first heard the term The Adjacent Possible in reference to the iPhone. There was no way the iPhone could have come into being in 1977. The technology just did not exist. However, advancements in computer design and improvements in mobile phones paved the way for Apple to roll out its world-changing invention in 2007. But not before!

The Adjacent Possible means that people, no matter how well-intentioned, make forward progress in certain prescribed ways. One step leads to another more advanced step.

• If you’re struggling with internet distraction, put reasonable guardrails in your life.
• If you affirm the importance of church attendance and fellowship with other believers but have become complacent about actually showing up with your gifts, set your alarm on Sunday morning and ask God for grace to make it happen.
• What harmful habits do you want to expel from your life?
• What strong habits could crowd them out?
  
  

Look into the mirror of God’s Word and trust God to reveal your true face. Then persevere as a doer of the truth. By grace, we really can live in a way that matches our convictions!

Michele Morin is a Bible teacher, writer, reader, and gardener committed to the truth that women can become confident Christ-followers and students of God’s Word. She has been married to an unreasonably patient husband for thirty-plus years, and together they have four married sons and five adorable grandchildren. Active in educational ministries with her local church, Michele delights in sitting at a table surrounded by women with open Bibles. You can find more of her writing at her website, Living Our Days.