"The second conviction was that my primary pastoral work had to do with Scripture and prayer. I was neither capable nor competent to form Christ in another person, to shape a life of discipleship in man, woman, or child. That is supernatural work and I am not supernatural. Mine was the more modest work of Scripture and prayer- helping people listen to God speak to them from the Scriptures and then joining them in answering God as personally and honestly as we could in lives of prayer. This turned out to be slow work. From time to time, impatient with the slowness, I would try out ways of going about my work that promised quicker results. But after a while it always seemed to be more like meddling in these people's lives than helping them attend to God.
More often than not I found myself getting in the way of what the Holy Spirit had been doing long before I arrived on the scene, so I would go back, feeling a bit chastened, to my proper work: Scripture and prayer; prayer and Scripture. But the and is misleading. Scripture and prayer are not two separate entities. My pastoral work was to fuse them into a single act: scriptureprayer, or prayerscripture. It is this fusion of God speaking to us (Scripture) and our speaking to Him (prayer) that the Holy Spirit uses to form the life of Christ in us...
A few years after writing A Long Obedience I noticed that a lot of people were talking and writing about "spirituality." I thought I knew what they were doing and was delighted that so many allies were showing up in unexpected places. But it turned out that I was wrong. I had read my own convictions into their interests. I thought they were interested in living the life of Christ first hand; I thought they were interested in Scripture and prayer, the most accessible means provided to us for cultivating that life and maturing in it. By and large they were not. The torrent of "spiritualities" that continues both within and without Christian communities, apparently without letup, has little liking for either "long" or "slow."
...[M]en and women who believingly follow Jesus Jesus (what we commonly call "the Christian life" or "Christian spirituality") are best guided and energized by a fusion of Scripture and prayer. For as long as an enthusiasm for Christian "spirituality" accelerates without an equivalent commitment to its means, nothing much is going to come of it. There is virtual unanimity among our Christian ancestors that the means consists precisely in this fusion of Scripture and prayer."
-Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
Scripture, prayer, and worship... this rhythm is essential to the life of faith.
Posted by: Aaron Smith | June 11, 2007 at 05:00 PM