Spiritual Disciplines

A healthy Christian life is marked by the disciplines that stir up our affections for Christ, give God opportunities to meet with and change us, and empower us to be used by Him to build up His people.

Prayer

On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed watchmen;
All day and all night they will never keep silent.
You who remind the Lord, take no rest for yourselves;
And give Him no rest until He establishes
And makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.1

I searched for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the gap before Me for the land, so that I would not destroy it; but I found no one. Thus I have poured out My indignation on them; I have consumed them with the fire of My wrath; their way I have brought upon their heads,” declares the Lord God.2

Now the Lord saw,
And it was displeasing in His sight that there was no justice.
And He saw that there was no man,
And was astonished that there was no one to intercede;
Then His own arm brought salvation to Him3

Prayer is the real work of mentoring. Prayer is by the far the biggest commitment I make when I decide to take on another guy. Prayers are magic words. Nothing you can say to your guys directly will have as much power as your prayers for them. Nothing you say directly to your guys will have power if it is not founded in and shaped by your intercession before God on their behalf. You should spend more time in prayer for them than you spend with them.

You have to pray constantly. Pray specifically for each guy and the things going on in their lives. Pray for what they have asked you to pray for, and pray for what you see they need. Pray with fasting. Pray with and over your guys.

“Lord, teach us to pray.”4

Prayer is a discipline that younger men need to be taught.

They need to know why they ought to pray. Prayer is paradoxical. God is omniscient, omnipotent and unchanging. He already knows what I want and need.5 So what is the point of prayer? In an attempt to resolve this conflict, David Platt has said that in prayer we encounter intimacy with God, express our dependence on God and experience being used by God.6 Our God is simultaneously the Holy and transcendent I Am, and the immanent and personal Father. Prayer is a living out of the fullness of this complexity. Only the I Am could hear or answer, only the Father would hear and answer. The I Am created all things from nothing according to an eternal and unchanging plan for His own glory and good. The Father so designed the world that His glory and good is our glory and good, that we are most satisfied when He is most glorified. In prayer, we meet with this God and are changed. In prayer, this God meets with us and works in the world.

Younger men need to be taught what to pray. The Lord’s Prayer establishes a basic model – praise, thanks, intercession, expectation. They should feel invited to pray from where they are. I remember as a kid praying for a magic wand or the ability to fly. One time a guy asked me about praying for a girl friend with “da boobies”. Yes, pray for that if that is where you are. God will change you and as He does your prayers will change. They need to learn how to see the things around them – their fears and challenges, their friends and family, their joys and accomplishments – through the lens of prayer. They need to be taught to pray big prayers, hard prayers, prayers for the impossible and hopeless.7

Younger men need to be taught how to pray. How to approach the throne of grace boldly. How to address a holy God. How to lead a group in prayer. How to pray in secret. They need practice turning passing thoughts into continual prayer, turning moments of hurling words at the ceiling into a moment-by-moment entering into the presence of God. They need to be taught how to fast. They need to experience praying with hopeful expectation, waiting on God.8

Study

For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.9

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.10

As with prayer, the purpose of spending time in the Word of God is to meet with Him and be changed by Him. Scripture completes prayer as the primary medium through which God speaks to us. Your guys need to develop the discipline of daily time in the Word and be equipped to make that time effective.

The best way to motivate younger men to spend time with God in regular Bible study is having them spend time with God in regular Bible study – tasting and seeing11 stirs hunger. You cannot force this, but you can encourage it and model it. Experiment with different ways of getting them to engage in the Text. Memorize a passage together. Go through a book or a topic or a story as part of and over the course of a few meetings. Maybe you just check in with them about their quiet times when you meet, or maybe you text them a reminder every day.

There are several things you can do to equip younger men to study the Word effectively. It is important that they be taught how to approach the Text to hear from God, rather than as an english or history textbook. Giving them an historical context for the stories can help them make sense both of the time line of the narrative and the meaning of particular passages. Provide them with examples of passages that have spoken to moments in your life, and show them how to apply the Text to their lives. Explain and model the many methods for engaging with the Word – going sequentially through a book, topical studies (how do they find relevant passages), meditating on a single passage, pursuing the answer to a particular question, reading large passages to discover the overall structure and themes.

I do not often push books or material beyond the Bible. Most of the guys I’ve worked with don’t want more to read and I don’t want to spend my influence pushing the thoughts of some guy as opposed to the thoughts of God. The exception to this for me has been C.S. Lewis’ essay The Weight of Glory12 – which is fantastic and available for free online. Some guys enjoy reading and respond well to books outside of Scripture – digging into a C.S. Lewis or Chesterton or Piper or Merton13 together can be fruitful. Sometimes you, or they, may find it easier to have conversations about topics, such as sex or pornography or girl friends, if there is a book to guide and inform those discussions. Bryant Jones has used Every Young Man’s Battle14 effectively for that purpose.

Worship

Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.15

Worship is not just singing. It is part of responding to the God’s revelation of Himself to you. Every activity of life, even the most mundane, can be (and ought to be) transformed into praise – can be done so as to lift Him up in our eyes and in the eyes of those around us. Model for your guys how to work in such a way as to bring Him glory. Show them how to praise Him verbally for who He is and what He has done. Encourage them to participate in corporate worship.

Fellowship

Let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.16

The Church is not some human invention, it is the body of Christ, the temple of God17. Being active participants, not just attendees, in a local church is crucial for the growth of your guys. Model this and talk about it. Teach them what to look for in a church and in a pastor. Especially as they leave for college, help them to find a church and explain how to get more involved than just getting on the attendance sheet.

Service

Who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds.18

God meets with us and changes us as we serve others. Model and explain how to serve others as an expression of faith in God as opposed to the faith in man of the misguided secular social justice movement. Give them opportunities to serve others. Teach them how to see the opportunities to serve the people around them. Demonstrate how participating in a local church leads to and is filled with service to others.

  1. Isaiah 62:6-7↩︎

  2. Ezekiel 22:30↩︎

  3. Isaiah 59:15-16↩︎

  4. Luke 11:1↩︎

  5. Matthew 6:8↩︎

  6. He probably said it in a book somewhere as well, but I heard it from him at a Student Life camp a few summers ago.↩︎

  7. Ephesians 3:19↩︎

  8. Psalm 37:4, 7↩︎

  9. 1 Corinthians 2:10-13↩︎

  10. Hebrews 4:12-13↩︎

  11. 1 Peter 2:2-3↩︎

  12. http://www.verber.com/mark/xian/weight-of-glory.pdf↩︎

  13. No Man Is An Island, Thomas Merton.↩︎

  14. Stephen Arterburn, 2004.↩︎

  15. 1 Corinthians 10:31↩︎

  16. Hebrews 10:24-25↩︎

  17. Ephesians 2:19-22↩︎

  18. Titus 2:14↩︎