Training
Ephesians 6:10, 13-21[1]
As I mentioned last week, anyone who’s made the effort to
learn a skill knows that it takes practice. But those of us who’ve been serious
about trying to learn that skill know that it also takes training. I’ve learned
that lesson in my on-again, off-again career as an amateur guitar player. I
started trying to play guitar back in 1979. I went off to college that year,
setting about teaching myself how to play guitar. I learned some chords, and I
could play well enough to lead camp songs, but that was about as far as it
went. And it didn’t take long before my guitar sat in a corner mostly unplayed.
Twenty years later I decided to try again to learn to play
guitar. This time I took lessons. I started with classical lessons, because I
wanted to learn to play the notes on the guitar, not just the chords. I did
that for about a year and a half. Life’s changes interrupted my classical
lessons, but I kept at it. Several years later, I decided I wanted to learn to
play an electric guitar also. The technique is quite different. So I started
taking weekly lessons. I did that for about five years. I learned a lot about
basic technique. I learned to play some solos, like the one from “Hotel California.”
More importantly, I learned something about the music theory behind Blues and
Jazz, and I learned to improvise a bit. I still have a lot to learn about
playing guitar. But I know that I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without some
training.
We’ve been talking a lot lately about what it looks like to
try to live the Christian life. In his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul has
urged us to “lead a life worthy of your calling” (Eph 4:1, NLT). And we
learned over the last several weeks that we demonstrate the quality of our
faith by the quality of our relationships. We saw that Paul gets uncomfortably
specific about what that looks like. And we heard him encourage us to conduct
our relationships in such a way that we seek to do good to others, and not to
harm, we try to help others, not hurt them, and we look for ways to give to
others, rather than trying to take from them. And last week we discussed what
it looks like to “live wisely, and not foolishly” (Eph 5:15, CEB) by practicing
things like honoring God, and gratitude, and respect for others. And as we have
been discussing all along, this way of life takes constant practice.
But I would suggest that living the Christian life also
takes training. It’s not something that we can just teach ourselves. We learn
to live this way over time, over years and even decades of training and
practice. St. Paul alludes to this training in our lesson for today. He uses
the analogy of a soldier equipped for battle, with armor, a shield, and even a
weapon. These days, using military analogies for the Christian life can be
troubling. Unfortunately, throughout the ages too many Christians have taken
the “battle” image Paul uses here too literally. And that makes it hard for us
to compare a life that seeks to follow Jesus with warfare. But I think the main
point of this passage is that it takes training to prepare for living the
Christian life.
If we recognize that Paul is using the image of a soldier
to encourage us to engage in training, perhaps we can learn something from this
passage without endorsing any kind of violence in the name of Jesus. Take, for
example, his encouragement to “Let the truth be like a belt around your waist,
and let God’s justice protect you like armor” (Eph.
A second line of training may be suggested by Paul’s call for us to “Let your faith be like a shield” and to “Let God's saving power be like a helmet” (Eph 6:16-17, CEV). The good news about our salvation by grace and the hope of the coming kingdom of God is not easy to understand. This suggests another area of training for the Christian life. We have to make an effort to dig into what the gospel means for us and for our lives. That includes Bible study. And Bible study starts with reading the Bible on a regular basis.[2] I think that’s what Jesus was talking about when he called people to “eat” his flesh as the bread of life. He was talking about ingesting his words, meditating on them, internalizing them, and remaining attentive to God’s voice. But we all need help understanding what we’re reading and hearing in the Bible. That’s where organized study comes in. We can participate in a group Bible Study. We can also read books that help make the gospel more understandable and more real to us. I find that helpful after 40 years of study. There are some authors who make it all “come to life.”[3]
Paul suggests a third focus of training in the discipline
of prayer. I like the way Gene Peterson renders it in The Message: “pray
hard and long” (Eph
It takes practice to live the Christian life. I’m still
practicing, still trying to learn how to get it right. But more than that, it
takes training. When we try the do-it-yourself method of learning to live the
Christian life, the results may be just as unreliable as when I tried to teach
myself to play the guitar. We need training to learn how to discern God’s will
and put it into practice in our lives, in so far as it is humanly possible. We
need training to figure out what the right thing to do is, and to figure out
how to try to do it. We need training to understand the good news about Jesus
that is the foundation for living the Christian life. And we need training to
learn how to “pray hard and long.” The Christian life is not a do-it-yourself
project. It’s not something we can successfully achieve on our own. Just as I
needed a teacher to learn to play the guitar, so we all need to look to those
in the body of Christ who can train us in the disciplines that enable us to
live the Christian life in the face of the real-life situations we deal with
every day. And part of the good news about this is that every day is a day when
we can start again to learn how to live our lives more like Christ.
[1] ©
2024 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 8/25/2024 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] Cf. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol
5, 59-60: “brief passages cannot and must not take the place of reaching the Scripture
as a whole. … The full witness to Jesus Christ the Lord can be clearly heard
only in its immeasurable inner relationships, in the connection of Old and New
Testaments, of promise and fulfillment, sacrifice and law, Law and Gospel,
cross and resurrection, faith and obedience, having and hoping
[3] Cf.
Henri Nouwen, Here and Now: Living in the Spirit, 72: “Reading in a spiritual
way is reading with a desire to let God come closer to us. Most of us read to
acquire knowledge or to satisfy our curiosity. … The purpose of spiritual
reading, however, is not to master knowledge or information, but to let God’s
Spirit master us.”
[4] Cf. Nouwen, Here and Now, 68: prayer is “the discipline that helps us to bring God back again and again to the center of our life.”
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