A friend was invited to teach a church about prayer. He met the senior pastor. He immediately sensed: this is a man of God. This is a man who knows how to pray.
I don’t know how my friend knew this, but I’ve experienced the same thing. I occasionally meet someone and sense ballast in their soul. They have a weightiness about them without even trying. It seems that they know God, that they have a depth about them.
These people aren’t always what you’d expect. Some of them are introverts; some extroverts. More often than not, they’re in the second half of life, and they’ve suffered. But you know when you’re with one.
You and I can’t choose to become such a person, but we can lean into some practices that make it more likely.
Keep Watch
“Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching,” Paul told Timothy (1 Timothy 4:16). It takes a combination of the two.
Pay attention to yourself. Guard the condition of your character and your conduct. The people I know who have a weightiness about them have done this for years. Secretly, they’ve feasted on God’s Word. They know how to pray. They read the best of books, usually books that one must read slowly. They avail themselves of the means of grace. They are committed to the church. They are who they appear to be. They’re not perfect, and they don’t pretend to be. As I mentioned, they have probably suffered. They’re not impressed by themselves. Their characters are marked by the seemingly contradictory qualities of both strength and gentleness.
But it’s not just about their character and conduct. They major in the right doctrines. They’ve built a root system of doctrine that’s sustained them through hard times. Their character isn’t built on sentimental beliefs about God, but on rock-solid truths about him. They have absorbed these truths so deeply that they’ve become part of their lives. As they do so, God goes to work in their souls.
You can’t take shortcuts to developing depth. It takes a steady commitment to watching one’s life and doctrine, a whole lot of grace, God’s help, and time. But over decades, new qualities begin to emerge. And when you meet someone like this, you know it without even knowing how.
They didn’t set their hearts on becoming this kind of person. They set their hearts on God. In the process, they become the kind of person that we should all aspire to be.
The Shallows
My hope as we enter a New Year is that I will put in more reps watching my life and doctrine.
I can’t think of a better goal than becoming someone who loves God’s Word, exults in Christ, develops the spiritual muscles of prayer and fellowship with the saints, and becomes increasingly bored with the trivialities of our age.
And if suffering comes, as we know it will, we can pray that God will use even that to refine us and make us more like him.
The people I know who live like this are compelling. By God’s grace, I hope to become that too, and to point others to becoming the kind of person who’s watched their life and doctrine for decades, and has seen their soul start to take the shape of Jesus himself.
