The Missing Inner Life

“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.” 2 Corinthians 4:16

Let’s take some time to consider your inner life. As an elder and pastor at my church, I hear a great deal about the struggles of others. Some of the things I hear have drawn my heart to this subject. I am certain that many of the problems we experience spring from the reality that we have not nourished and developed our inner life with Christ. The verse I quoted above is one of my favorite reminders that every day, something should be happening on the inside that is renewing.

At the outset, I must admit that I’m unsure how to discuss this in practical terms. How does one speak about something that, by its nature, is unique to each individual? Explaining the inner life is difficult. Consider this. My best friend is MY best friend. If you were to ask me how you can become best friends with him, I could tell you a list of his favorite things to do, his interests, his personality quirks, and a lengthy list of minutia that would familiarize you with him in a very external way. But my path to best friendship with him includes more than that. It includes shared experiences that include highs and lows. It includes conflicts and disagreements that we worked through. You can’t replicate that.

The inner life of a Christian is the same. It’s more than accrued theology from reading the Bible. It’s more than the disciplines of regular prayer and fasting. It’s a shared experience between you and the Holy Spirit. You read the Bible to learn about the LORD, and He gives us the Holy Spirit so that we can experience the LORD. Jesus manifests His life in us by the Holy Spirit. It is a shared experience between you and Him.

But if I’m going to discuss the Christian inner life, then I have to put it in terms that can be digested. So I’m going to suggest four things that are non-negotiable and equally important.

• Word
• Prayer
• Fasting
• Friendship

Word, Prayer, & Fasting

You may wonder why I am lumping the first three together. It’s not because they’re less important. Everything in this list is equally important. But of the four things, these are the least complicated.

• Study the Word. Read your Bible. There’s nothing in the Christian life more elementary than this. You must internalize God’s Word, and the only way to do that is to read it or listen to it being read. Both are easily done these days. The barriers to this are lower than ever in the history of the world. God’s Word is readily available in multitudes of languages and formats.
• Pray. Develop a prayer life that never ceases (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Have dedicated times of prayer in the morning and evening, but continue all day long to have an open line of communication with the LORD. Keep the conversation going throughout your day.
• Fast. We have overcomplicated fasting. Some people say they need to feel called to fast. I disagree. Fasting is simply an exercise where we deny ourselves food (or some other physical need) for the sake of learning to depend on the LORD. So when you fast, hunger is supposed to be satiated with spiritual food instead of physical food. There’s nothing complicated about it. Simply stop eating for a predetermined amount of time, and when hunger strikes, instead of eating, pray, read the Word, or share your faith. Do something that will satiate your soul, not your stomach. In John 4, when Jesus spoke with the woman at the well, his physical hunger was satiated by doing the will of the Father (John 4:31-34). Why would anyone need to feel “called” to do this?

Now, the problem with these three things, and why I lumped them together, is this: they can be faked. There are loads of professors all across academia who study the Bible, and know the Bible better than many pastors, but they don’t know Jesus. There are numerous religious people who pray constantly, but it’s a cold exercise of religious observance, rather than a conversation with their Maker. There are even those who may fast, but they do it for outward appearances, so they may appear righteous. But our fourth non-negotiable cannot be faked.

Friendship

“No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” – John 15:15

You cannot fake friendship with Jesus. Go back to what I said about my best friend. You can take all of the facts that I tell you about him, and then tell other people that he’s also your best friend, but that would be a lie. You can even photoshop yourself into pictures with him, but at the end of the day, if he were asked about you, he’d probably say, “Never heard of ’em.” Friendship is always a two-way experience. So, my friendship with Jesus begins with John 15:15. He has befriended me. He has shared all things with me by the Holy Spirit. The question is this. What am I doing in this friendship?

• Do I recognize that I am never alone? Everything I do, whether I’m aware of it or not, Jesus comes along via the Holy Spirit.
• When I grieve the Holy Spirit, am I quick to make amends and ask for forgiveness? It’s not the kind of forgiveness that saves me, but the kind of forgiveness that repairs relational strain. He is the friend who sticks closer than a brother.
• When I’m confronted with a decision with no clear Biblical instruction, am I asking Him what to do? This is where the relationship starts to gain depth by bringing Him into everyday decision-making.
• Do you make a plan and just do it, or do you give your plans to the Holy Spirit and submit to any course corrections He makes? His perspective and plans are always better than ours. He may have goals for you today that aren’t on your list.
• Do you rejoice in Him? Do you take joy in the fact that you have an open line to the Father because the Spirit has taken residence?
• Do the things that grieve Him grieve you as well?

I could keep going, but this is a great deal of what it means to be friends. From Christ’s point of view, it’s complete, because, after all, you are already seated with him in heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6). From our point of view it is a friendship that needs cultivation every day as we learn to dwell with Him in the everyday, ordinary rhythms of life.

Let me close with this. I’m convinced that the reason so many Christian men and women aren’t getting enough from their pastors and leaders in the Body of Christ is because they aren’t cultivating this friendship. Pastors can preach, teach, instruct, and exegete the Scriptures until they run out of words, but the people listening to them will always feel like something is missing until they cultivate their own inner life with Christ. The best sermons on marriage and family ever preached by the best preachers who’ve lived cannot substitute an inner life with Christ that is being renewed day by day.

Don’t blame your church, your pastor, or your small group leader for that nagging sense of something missing. Look inside first. Is there daily renewal that comes from friendship with the LORD of glory? Start there. Your pastors have to maintain their own inner lives. You must cultivate your own. It is no small thing that the Maker of heaven and earth has saved you and called you a friend.

Reciprocate that.