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

by Eugene H. Peterson

Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness.

Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms.

The reason my childhood was one enthusiasm after another was that I hadn’t yet found an organizing center for my life and a goal that would demand my all and my best.

I pray to GOD—my life a prayer—and wait for what he’ll say and do.

—with GOD’s arrival comes love, with GOD’s arrival comes generous redemption.

Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them.

A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering.

A man or woman of faith who fails to acknowledge and deal with suffering becomes, at last, either a cynic or a melancholic or a suicide.

By setting the anguish out in the open and voicing it as a prayer, the psalm gives dignity to our suffering.

We live in a time when everyone’s goal is to be perpetually healthy and constantly happy. If any one of us fails to live up to the standards that are advertised as normative, we are labeled as a problem to be solved, and a host of well-intentioned people rush to try out various cures on us.

“You know, there is an American myth that denies suffering and the sense of pain. It acts as if they should not be, and hence it devalues the experience of suffering. But this myth denies our encounter with reality.”

face it with faith, not avoid it out of terror.

ministry is a very confronting service. It does not allow people to live with illusions of immortality and wholeness. It keeps reminding others that they are mortal and broken, but also that with the recognition of this condition, liberation starts.

God is at the foundation and God is at the boundaries.

Suffering is a mark of our existential authenticity; God is proof of our essential and eternal humanity.

The acceptance and the belief both emerge out of those times when “the bottom has fallen out” of our lives.

there is more than a description of reality here, there is a procedure for participating in it. The program is given in two words: wait and watch. The words are at the center of the psalm. “I pray to GOD—my life a prayer—and wait for what he’ll say and do. My life’s on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watch...

The psalmist’s and the Christian’s waiting and watching—that is, hoping—is based on the conviction that God is actively involved in his creation and vigorously at work in redemption.

Hoping does not mean doing nothing. It is not fatalistic resignation. It means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions.

It means a confident, alert expectation that God will do what he said he will do.

We need to know where we are and where God is.

the big difference is not in what people suffer but in the way they suffer.

The same shaking that makes fetid water stink makes perfume issue a more pleasant odor.”)

it does not explain it or explain it away.

our place in the depths is not out of bounds from God.

The “bottom” has a bottom; the heights are boundless.

I’ve cultivated a quiet heart.

Humility is the obverse side of confidence in God, whereas pride is the obverse side of confidence in self.

“If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.”

Psalm 131 is a maintenance psalm. It is functional to the person of faith as pruning is functional to the gardener: it gets rid of that which looks good to those who don’t know any better, and reduces the distance between our hearts and their roots in God.

unruly ambition and infantile dependency,

If we are not careful, we will be encouraging the very things that will ruin us.

All cultures throw certain stumbling blocks in the way of those who pursue gospel realities.

For all its fancy dress and honored position, it is still a stumbling block.

living without limits, being in control instead of being in relationship, exercising power instead of practicing love.

It is difficult to recognize pride as a sin when it is held up on every side as a virtue, urged as profitable and rewarded as an achievement.

Ambition is aspiration gone crazy.

Aspiration is the channeled, creative energy that moves us to growth in Christ, shaping goals in the Spirit.

sweatily knocking together a Babel when we could be vacationing in Eden.

Having realized the dangers of pride, the sin of thinking too much of ourselves, we are suddenly in danger of another mistake, thinking too little of ourselves.

Christian faith is not neurotic dependency but childlike trust.

Our Lord gave us the picture of the child as a model for Christian faith (Mk 10:14-16) not because of the child’s helplessness but because of the child’s willingness to be led, to be taught, to be blessed.

God does not reduce us to a set of Pavlovian reflexes so that we mindlessly worship and pray and obey on signal; he establishes us with a dignity in which we are free to receive his word, his gifts, his grace.

God knows what he needs before he asks him.

His life’s centre of gravity has shifted. He now rests no longer in himself but in God.

as discipleship continues, the sensible comforts gradually disappear. For God does not want us neurotically dependent on him but willingly trustful in him. And so he weans us.

When Charles Spurgeon preached this psalm, he said it “is one of the shortest Psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn.”

We are, alternately, rebellious runaways and whining babies.

there is another way, the plain way of quiet Christian humility.

For every Christian encounters problems of growth and difficulties of development.