Finding Your Mountain Week 2: Training for a Lifetime
Luke 14:26-33
We are in Week 2 of our series “Finding Your Mountain” where we are learning from some of the experiences that our St. Luke’s Senior Pastor Rob Fuquay has brought back from his time on Sabbatical this summer. Pastor Rob got the chance to travel all over the world during his time away, hiking in different mountain ranges and having time to spiritually refresh.
So we’re looking at different lessons that came from that time, and today we are going to explore the value of training. So as we get started, I want to ask you a couple of questions:
How many of you could run a marathon right now?
What if you tried really hard? Do you think you could then?
How many of you could scale a rock wall?
Ok, same question, what if you tried really hard?
Finally, how many of you could lift 250 pounds?
You know where this is going...what if you tried, as hard as you possibly could?! Would that change the outcome for any of you?
I’m sure you can see the pattern here, but it leads to the point we’re looking at today. As the late pastor and theologian Dallas Williard says, “Training and trying are
different things.” Trying, in most things that we want to accomplish, will probably not get you super far, and even if you WANT to do something big, even if you have a lot of willpower to do that thing, you will almost always run up against the limits of your current abilities.
Training is different. Training is at its core, designed to help take us PAST our current abilities. It’s designed to get us prepared to tackle the obstacle or run the race or do the thing that feels really challenging. Training isn’t always fun. Training can sometimes feel monotonous or painful even. But the bottom line is that (SLIDE) consistent training leads to transformation.
Rob was telling me about the training that he and his wife Susan had to do in order to get ready for the part of their sabbatical where they hiked to Everest Base Camp. Base Camp is at 17,598ft and while it isn’t an especially technically complicated route, it is certainly NOT easy. The days are long, the altitude is high, and the weather can be challenging. You can’t really go into a hike like this WITHOUT a great deal of training and expect to be successful. And so in the months leading up to their hike, Rob and Susan did some training. Here’s a glimpse of what that was like:
(SHOW VIDEO)
So this is specifically physical training for some kind of athletic feat. But what about when the training we’re talking about is spiritual? The roadmap for that can be a lot less clear than when we’re trying to get our bodies into shape to do something. The goals are less defined and progress tends to be a little less linear than walk a certain distance each day, do this incline, and in six months you’ll be ready for an extreme high altitude hike. Spiritual training can’t be measured quite that cleanly and the results can be a bit more abstract.
But even though it’s usually not quite that prescriptive, this is some of the most important training that we can do. In fact, I’d say that spiritual training is essential to our faith journey.
Because spiritual training is the thing that lets us have the kind of life of faith we want, no matter what conditions we might encounter. It lets us go the distance, get to the goal, WHATEVER metaphor you want to plug in here...the point is that cultivating regular spiritual practices and opportunities to connect with God is the thing that keeps our faith growing and going. It keeps us from becoming stagnant in our spirituality, it gets us up and moving even if we feel kind of blah about it, and it reminds us that no matter where we are
in our faith, there’s always room to grow and explore and find new ways to live it out.
And just like physical training, sometimes spiritual training comes with an element of cost to it. It’s usually not the easiest thing that we will do. And we see Jesus address this idea of what it might cost and what it will take from us in the Scripture that we read today.
Now, I want to just name that there are some TOUGH things in this passage, starting with the very first verses that we heard read. Jesus comes out of the gate with some strong statements: he says “don’t come to me if you don’t hate all these things—family, friends, LIFE ITSELF!”
So this can quickly turn us off and make us tune out. Like, if this is what Spiritual Training looks like, I don’t want to do it! But there’s a couple of things here that we should pay attention to as we navigate this. This is the kind of scripture that I think can be tricky, because we want to ignore it or throw it out or just check out...but let’s stick with it and look a little closer.
Because first, I really believe that when Jesus starts this teaching off like this, to this big crowd of people, that what he says here is meant to add some attention getter to the moment. Honestly, it is a bit dramatic and it is fully intended to get some kind of reaction out of the person who hears it.
And it feels jarring because...it’s supposed to feel that way. And Jesus is a successful orator here, he does the thing he’s trying to do. It would have been uncomfortable then, it’s uncomfortable now, and that’s the point.
Because even though this it’s uncomfortable...it gets your attention.
And the beauty of something attention-getting like this is that it breaks our rhythm. It gets us off of autopilot. It’s like when you’re driving and you hear a siren behind you. All of a sudden, you pay attention! Even if you’re on the route you drive every day and you’re kind of zoning out, that makes you look at things a little bit closer and a little bit differently.
What if we looked at this idea of what it means to follow Jesus a little bit closer and a little bit differently? What if we looked at it not as a passive thing, but as a thing that we are called to be deeply engaged in? What if we looked at our faith and our lives and were really willing to take stock of the things that make them up? Because it’s really hard to have a life of deep spiritual growth if we are just coasting along and hoping for the best. And (SLIDES) It is hard to pay attention to our faith when we aren’t paying attention to the things that make up our lives.
One of my favorite podcasts is called “The Next Right Thing” and is hosted by Emily P Freeman. She talks a lot about
decision making on this podcast, but no matter what she’s talking about, nearly every episode she says this one line. She says, “This is a podcast about making decisions, but also about making a life.”
And I thought about that phrase, because I think I would borrow it and change it a bit and say, “this is a sermon about making faith habits but also about making a life.”
Spiritual training doesn’t happen in a bubble. It isn’t something that stands on its own, totally independent of what’s going on with the rest of our lives. If we’re really doing it the way that Jesus invites us to, it should be impacting everything. And so when he starts out this talk by comparing following him to all these other things in life, I think we have to understand that he has picked the very BEST things in life to compare to. It’s not like he says, “hey, following me is going to be better than littering, and being petty, and doomscrolling all night.” I mean, we know that!
But when he holds up the value of creating a sustained and transforming faith life up against all the very best parts of life, I think he’s saying that these things can feel like the pinnacle of life...AND that following Jesus can take us to places BEYOND even the best things we know and imagine. That the BEST goodness we get to experience, the BEST goodness we know to hope for...there’s even more. And that
is the stuff that we build our lives on. That is what this spiritual training starts to create.
And sometimes the things we build our lives on, the things that are worth building a life around...it can take us by surprise. This is where we have to live into the next part of what Jesus speaks about here in this passage, where we have to really assess the cost of the things we’re pursuing. We have to ask questions like: (SLIDE)
- What is this leading me toward? What is it leading me away from?
- Is this the life I want, or the life I think I’m supposed have?
- Does this cultivate a life of joy?
- If I build my life on this thing, what story will it tell?
It’s worth running even the best of plans through this set of questions. Because every goal that we work toward has an endpoint, and sometimes those endpoints can be really challenging to process. There’s a documentary called (SLIDE) “The Weight of Gold” that Michael Phelps helped create back in 2020, and as much as I LOVE the Olympics, it’s worth understanding the perspective he and several other athletes bring to the conversation through this documentary. Their point is that they built their lives around this ONE thing, this ONE goal, it was the whole point of
everything they did, to win Gold at the Olympics...and it didn’t always lead where they thought it would. In many cases, the fame and the pressure and the sheer scale of the accomplishment actually brought on struggles that were more than these athletes were equipped to handle. They hadn’t trained for the mental health challenges, they hadn’t trained for the letdown of “what’s next now?” The thing that was supposed to be the biggest thing...was missing something.
You know, there’s this idea that really stood out to me when I read today’s Scripture. It’s when Jesus says (SLIDE) “For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? 29 Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, 30 saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.”
We can begin to build a life and realize that we haven’t really considered what it’s going to cost to build that thing. We can have hopes and dreams but without really anchoring our souls and creating practices that connect us to God, I just have seen it too many times where we miss the real point. And then we find ourselves not only really confused about what we’re doing and how we got there, but we realize that
(SLIDE) We can spend our lives building something that is incomplete.
But we don’t have to. And this is where this idea of Spiritual Training becomes important. Because when we develop practices and rhythms to build our lives around, it impacts every area of those lives. It impacts our time, and our resources, and our attention.
And I want to be so clear as we move into these last several minutes of our message. I’m going to talk to you about practices, and I am NOT here to give you a bunch of stuff to do. I know you’re busy. Me too! I know there’s a lot of pressure in your world to do the things and check off the list. Mine too. So this ISN’T another set of things you’ve got to do. It IS hopefully a helpful resource to help you do what Jesus says here, to consider what you’re building and how to do that in a way that keeps you connected to God and to the life that you really want to create.
So I’m going to give you three practices you could try. There are so many more. So many! But maybe these three will be a place to start or continue or just try to experiment with as you keep building and sustaining your soul and your faith.
Daily 10 minutes of silence: I like this one, because you can do it ANYWHERE. Preferably, you’d let this be your focus, this is not an invitation to multitask but it’s an
invitation to really sink into God’s presence and be still. Your mind WILL wander. You WILL get distracted. You may get bored and antsy. And all of that is ok. Your training here is to let yourself stop and listen and be open to whatever the Spirit of God might want to speak to you that day.
Prayer of Indifference: Ruth Haley Barton talks about this, and it is simple but not even close to being easy. It’s where we pray, usually over decisions we’re trying to make or plans we want to pursue, and we pray that as we make these choices, that nothing would matter more to us than following where God is leading. No matter how significant or inconsequential it might be. Your training here is to depend on God and surrender to what the Spirit might be working on.
Evening Family Gratitude Practice: This one takes only a few minutes and share with each other something you are grateful to God for from your day...and this can be done with kids or roommates or a partner...whatever family is to you. And I do want to say for our families with kids that I know it can be hard to cultivate these practices. You are all over the place, you are tired, you are making it through the week. So start simply, don’t make it complicated. Your training here is making faith conversations as normal and accessible as possible in your family space.
And a quick word to our families: We have resources for families in the Gathering Area, on the cart that you can check out. These include parenting kids at every age and stage, and our Kids Team would love to talk to you more if you have specific questions about what it looks like to create these rhythms for your family.
Here’s the truth—with all of these, really with ANY spiritual practice that we do, what we are doing with spiritual training is creating consistent ways to connect with God that take us through the long haul. And the reason we call this training is because it’s probably going to take some time and some repetition and some commitment before any of these practices, the ones I named or ones you find on your own, but before any of these practices really make any kind of noticeable impact in your spiritual life. I just want to be upfront about that.
It’s like you could just go hop on a treadmill and walk at a high incline a couple times and say, “I’m ready for Everest!” but...you’re not. This isn’t instant results we’re going for. But what it does do is produce consistent sustainable results for a life long faith. It's about what God is going to do in your life over a lifetime. It’s about the life that you are going to build, year after year, season after season, up after down, all of
that that is why we do these practices. That is why we engage in spiritual training.
Because you and I, we have the opportunity to build something that lasts. We have the opportunity to build the kind of faith that sustains us. We have the opportunity to build a life that reflects who Jesus is and takes us to incredible, holy places.
Let’s pray.