Personal But Not Private

Excerpt from Tullian Tchividjian post:  Up And Out, Not In

When a lot of Christian’s think about “spirituality” they tend to think of it monastically, individualistically. In fact, in his book on sanctification, Harold Senkbeil writes, “What has developed under the guise of the practice of the Christian faith borders on a new monasticism.” Many of us, in other words, think about spirituality exclusively in terms of personal piety, internal devotion, and spiritual formation. We focus almost entirely on ourselves and our private disciplines: praying, reading the Bible, and so on. That, we conclude, is what spirituality is first and foremost. And while personal disciplines are indispensable aspects of staying tethered to the truth of gospel (you’ll shrink without them), it’s interesting that when James makes his strong point in 2:14-26 about faith without works being dead, what he describes are not works of private spirituality but public service:

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? (James 2:15)

As one of my friends wrote recently, “True Christianity may be personal, but it’s not private. It is wildly, unashamedly, thoroughly public.”

Similarly, in James 1:27 he writes (the only place in the Bible where the word “religion” is used positively):

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

Even in that last phrase “keep oneself unstained from the world”, he’s not talking about monastic retreat, private meditation, or even personal piety. The contextual implication there  involves the need to “wash our hands of worldliness” which, throughout the book of James, is defined as self-absorption–a “my life for me” approach to life in contrast from a “my life for you” approach to life. Worldliness then, according to James, is me thinking always about me (see James 4:1-3).

Therefore, in both James 1:27 and 2:15, he’s making it clear that true spirituality actually take us away from ourselves and into the messy lives of other people. It is, in other words, not introverted, but extroverted—it doesn’t take me deeper into me; it sends me away from me. Real spirituality is forgetting about yourself, washing your hands of you.

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