A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

by Eugene H. Peterson

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding that you were wrong in thinking that you had, or could get, the strength, education and training to make it on your own; it is deciding that you have been told a pack of lies about yourself and your neighbors and your world.

We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

The enormous entertainment industry in America is a sign of the depletion of joy in our culture. Society is a bored, gluttonous king employing a court jester to divert it after an overindulgent meal.

Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us.

Endurance is not a desperate hanging on but a traveling from strength to strength.

Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them. . . . In response to hope the imagination is aroused to picture every possible issue, to try every door, to fit together even the most heterogeneous pieces in the puzzle. After the solution has been found it is difficult to recall the steps taken—so many of them are just below the level of consciousness. THORNTON WILDER

Ambition is aspiration gone crazy. Aspiration is the channeled, creative energy that moves us to growth in Christ, shaping goals in the Spirit. Ambition takes these same energies for growth and development and uses them to make something tawdry and cheap, sweatily knocking together a Babel when we could be vacationing in Eden.

His relationships with us are personal, true; intimate, yes; but private, no. We are a family in Christ.

God gets down on his knees among us, gets on our level and shares himself with us. He does not reside afar off and send us diplomatic messages; he kneels among us. That posture is characteristic of God.

Many think that the only way to change your behavior is to first change your feelings. We take a pill to alter our moods so that we won’t kick the dog. We turn on music to soothe our emotions so that our conversation will be less abrasive. But there is an older wisdom that puts it differently: by changing our behavior we can change our feelings.

My pastoral work was to fuse them into a single act: scriptureprayer, or prayerscripture. It is this fusion of God speaking to us (Scripture) and our speaking to him (prayer) that the Holy Spirit uses to form the life of Christ in us.

There is virtual unanimity among our Christian ancestors that the means consists precisely in this fusion of Scripture and prayer. It is not a terribly difficult way of reading and writing, but it does require diligent attentiveness. The fusion is accomplished by reading these Scriptures slowly, imaginatively, prayerfully and obediently.

If we move into the Scriptures too fast or move through them too fast, we’ll miss most of what is here.

The Author of the book is writing us into his book, we aren’t writing him into ours.