[Written by Dr. Chris Peters]
As we come into the final few months of 2021, now is most certainly a good moment to pause and look back at the first 75% of this year, even as we pivot and look to finish the year well. That can mean a lot of things, but in my 25 years of pastoral ministry and almost 30 years of walking in the Lord, it does not mean less than embracing the means of grace.
The means of grace, or spiritual disciplines, as they are also called, can be intimidating for all of us. Perhaps they bring to mind our failed attempts to carve out regular prayer time, or our stumbling with any regular personal scriptural and devotional reading, or more ominous and demanding practices, like fasting. Hopefully we are all growing in our identity in Christ, by grace, through faith alone, such that we don’t head off in either misguided “license” (using God’s mercy as an excuse to live without purposeful obedience to God) or “legalism” (overestimating our ability to follow God and perhaps even creating extra rules that we might be wired to accomplish easily, so we can perform spiritually). Instead, we would aim to elevate both the radical call to transformation we are invited into by grace, and the radical love God has shown to credit righteousness to sinners like us.
It is with this perspective, and only with it, that we can look at things like Starr Meade’s devotional book, and read the recent sections on the tenth commandment without dodging their impact or ditching the faith altogether. As the Apostle Paul reminds us, and Meade highlights, the tenth commandment – you shall not covet – is the tour de force of the commandments. Even if we miss the way that the other commandments compel us to seek grace and call us to even deeper obedience than we thought, we find it very hard to do with the tenth. The catechism #80 reminds us to be distinctively content in life. Everything else around us and in us, bids us to do the exact opposite. What joy to know that we can square up with the undoing of God’s law and let it land fully on us, because we know Jesus bore all the punishment for us, and gifts perfect righteousness to us.
This same perspective allows us to look back at 75% of the year and be honest with ourselves about where we have fallen short in our purposes and aims…perhaps including spending time and guiding our household through a spiritual growth plan like Meade offers and our church has pursued. And this also allows us to not wallow in where we fell short but to be inspired by God’s amazing kindness to put ourselves and our household in the way of grace through spiritual disciplines these last few months of 2021. All of us, including myself, can give a lot of reasons to justify where we and our household are, not the least of which has been another year of Covid issues, but as the theologians of the past have simply said, so I call to myself and our church – “Further In…and Further Up!”…in our 2021 journey of faith.
