The Fourth Inward Discipline – Study
Head for the hills! Susan’s going to tell us to go back to school!! Rest assured, that isn’t what the discipline of study is….but it could be, at least in part.
Just like meditation is about exploring God’s Word and God’s World devotionally,
STUDY is exploring the Word and World ANALYTICALLY.
While fasting is the most difficult of the inward disciplines for me, study is the most pleasurable. It is about the renewing of our minds, like Paul encourages us in Romans 12. It is the discipline of thinking about things. Tom defines doing “theology” as thinking about God – that is what the discipline of study is all about. Just like we want to get to know everything about the people we love, study helps us get to know God better.
As well, all of the spiritual disciplines are about change, about our being transformed into the man or woman God created us to be. Many Christians come to church, sing in the choir, teach Sunday School, pray regularly, but their lives are unchanged. Why? As Foster says, “Because they have never taken up one of the central ways God uses to change us: study. Jesus made it unmistakably clear that the knowledge of the truth will make you free. ‘You will know the true, and the truth will make you free. (John 8:32)’”
In the discipline of study we focus on primarily two things: we study books and we study life.
We study books and other writings – we study the Bible, and books of history, literature, politics and science. We read the news and the devotional masterpieces of our faith. Especially regarding the Bible, one of my professors would tell us that it’s important to know what the Bible meant before we can know what it means. This is true in the discipline of study, but not devotion. I didn’t need to know what Psalm 139 meant to its author in order to know how it touched my life. But we do need to struggle with what the Bible meant to the people it was originally written for before we can begin to apply it to how we live as Christians. We study individually and in groups. This is why Sunday School and studies like DISCIPLE are so important in our faith journey.
And we study life. We study here not by reading but by paying attention. We pay attention to the intricacies of an opening rose or the colors of the sunset. We pay attention to the ins and outs, ups and downs of human relationships – between individuals, families and nations.
Studying books or studying life involves four steps, according to Foster.
Repetition, concentration, comprehension and reflection.
Repetition ingrains our patterns of thought and changes us. Are we watching murders on TV or stories that uplift our hearts? Are we memorizing Scripture, or just skimming over it?
Concentration centers our mind on what is being studied. Are you really focused on the thing you are studying?
Comprehension is about seeking to understand what we are studying. How many times have you read something over and over again and then AHA you got it? That is comprehension.
Reflection helps us grasp the significance of the object of our study. We need to reflect not only on Scripture but on what is going on in our world in order to be able to understand things in new ways. It is in reflection that we seek to see things from God’s perspective. We seek to understand God’s Word and God’s World – and we seek to understand ourselves.
Study does take time, but it is an essential practice in the life of faith.
Next Week … The Outward Disciplines of Simplicity and Solitude