When Eternal Life Changes Everything (2 of 3)

This is not the description of a completed saint. It is the description of a direction of travel. The disciple moving from duty toward desire does not arrive at permanent ecstatic awareness of the divine presence. He grows into an increasingly natural orientation toward the Father as the primary relationship around which everything else is organized. Some days the desire is more palpable than others. The dark nights come. The dryness comes. The discipline carries the relationship through the seasons when desire is less available. But the direction of travel is clear. And the destination is thirst.

The Role of the Spiritual Disciplines Reconsidered

Volume I Part Twelve covered the spiritual disciplines in detail: prayer, Scripture, worship, fasting, Sabbath, solitude, confession, service, generosity. Everything taught there stands. But John 17:3 adds a dimension to the disciplines that fundamentally changes their function if received correctly.

Richard Foster, in his foundational work on spiritual disciplines, describes them as “means of grace” rather than means of earning. You do not discipline yourself toward God in order to produce His favor. You discipline yourself to place yourself in the conditions where His grace can reach you. The discipline is not the achievement. The discipline is the opening.

John 17:3 frames this even more precisely. The disciplines are not activities you perform to grow closer to God. They are the activities of a person who is already in the knowing relationship and is cooperating with the Father’s initiative to deepen it. You pray not to initiate contact but to respond to the One who has already drawn near. You read Scripture not to accumulate information about a distant God but to hear the voice of the One whose Spirit is already in you. You fast not to punish the flesh into spiritual sensitivity but to sharpen the awareness of what is already real.

When the disciplines are understood this way — as the response of a person who already possesses eternal life to the God who gave it — they cease to be a burden and become an expression. You do not maintain them out of obligation. You maintain them because you know that when you neglect them, you are not losing the relationship but you are diminishing your awareness of it. The loving relationship is there. You are simply less awake to it. The disciplines are the practices that keep you awake.

The Enemy’s Strategy Against the Knowing

Satan’s oldest and most effective strategy is not primarily to produce gross sin in the disciple’s life. It is to replace the knowing with activity. To keep the disciple so busy with the things of God that he has no time for God Himself.

This is the strategy Jesus identified in the Woes to the Pharisees (Matthew 23), which Part Five of this volume will treat in full. The Pharisees were not idle. They were extraordinarily active — tithing meticulously, praying publicly, fasting regularly, teaching zealously. Their religious activity was prodigious. And Jesus said of them: “You have neglected the more important matters of the law — justice, mercy and faithfulness.” (Matthew 23:23) More devastating still: “Miserable hypocrites!” Not for their laziness. For their religious industriousness detached from the knowing.

The contemporary version of this strategy is visible in the disciple who reads his Bible every morning without ever encountering the God who wrote it. Who prays without ever pausing to listen. Who serves in every ministry at church and has no interior life to speak of. Who engages the cultural battles with fierce energy and has not been alone with the Father in weeks. Who knows the doctrines precisely and the Person only distantly.

The enemy does not need you to abandon the faith. He only needs to keep you too busy with the expression of the faith to attend to the source of it. If the lamp is lit but the vine is severed, the lamp burns down and eventually goes out, and the disciple does not notice until the darkness is complete.

The enemy’s most effective strategy is not to produce gross sin in the disciple’s life. It is to replace the knowing with activity. To keep the disciple so busy with the things of God that he has no time for God Himself.

Three Practices That Cultivate Desire

Having named what desire looks like and what threatens it, three specific practices deserve emphasis for the disciple who wants to move from duty toward desire. These are not the full list of spiritual disciplines from Volume I. They are the three that most directly address the knowing that John 17:3 describes.

Practice One: Contemplative Reading of Scripture

The difference between reading Scripture as information and reading Scripture as encounter is not a difference of Bible version or reading speed or study method. It is a difference of posture. The disciple who reads for information asks: “What does this say?” The disciple who reads for encounter asks: “What is the Person behind this saying to me?”

Lectio divina — the ancient practice of slow, prayerful, receptive reading of Scripture that was introduced in Volume I’s Part Twelve — is the formal expression of this posture. But the posture itself is what matters, not the specific method. Read slowly enough to hear. Pause when a phrase holds you. Do not rush past the holding to reach the next verse. The holding is where the knowing happens.

Jesus said in John 10:27: “My sheep hear my voice.” The sheep do not generate the voice. They hear it. The contemplative posture toward Scripture is the practiced discipline of hearing — of coming to the Word with ears open rather than pen poised, with the expectation of being spoken to rather than the intention of accumulating content.

Practice Two: Silence and the Single Question

Volume I Part Twelve introduced solitude and silence as spiritual disciplines. In the context of John 17:3, a specific practice within silence deserves attention: the practice of sitting before God with a single, honest question and waiting long enough to receive a response.