Shownotes
The Kingdom Corner Reading Room
You Already Have a Rule of Life
Based on Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer
Hello, and welcome to the Kingdom Corner podcast, where you can propel your faith into even deeper levels as we discuss how to live the Kingdom culture on earth as it is in heaven, just as Jesus prayed. Here’s your host, The Great Matt Gibe.
Good day, good day, Kingdom Corner Reading Room readers and devotees. The Great Matt Geib here to welcome you again to another episode of the Kingdom Corner Reading Room, where we slow down, open a good book, and let the truth shape us one page at a time.
Today we’re back into our book, Practicing the Way: Be With Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did, by John Mark Comer.
Here’s a thought I’d like you to carry with you as we read through this section today. Just one simple question:
Do you know what your rule of life is?
Do you know what your rule of life is?
We’ve already started this section. We’re on page 162: You Already Have a Rule of Life.
The author, John Mark Comer, is talking about how we already — each of us — have a rule of life. That is the way we live each and every day almost without thinking about it. A default way of living. Things that we do that become automatic habits and rhythms.
It can be positive, or it can be negative.
You already have one.
And I want you to think about that and reflect upon it too.
So let’s get into our reading, and perhaps you’ll become more enlightened about this topic.
You Already Have a Rule of Life
“Here’s the thing: you already have a rule of life. It may be written or unwritten, conscious or subconscious, wise or foolish, based on a long-term vision or short-term instant gratification, moving you toward a desired destination or sabotaging your best intentions.
But even if you’ve never heard of a rule of life until two minutes ago, you do have one.
You have a way in which you live — a morning routine, a typical workday, a network of relationships, a budget, activities you spend your free time on, and so on.
The question isn’t, Do you have a rule of life? It’s: Do you know what your rule of life is? And is it giving you the life you want? Is it working for you or against you?
The best way to tell is to take a kind of spiritual self-inventory — an honest assessment of your life.”
I love this little saying that comes from the business world:
“Your system is perfectly designed to give you the results you are getting.”
I like to apply that maxim not to a widget factory or the bottom line on a spreadsheet, but to the health and growth of our souls — or lack thereof.
“If your emotional life is off-kilter, if you feel far from God, stressed, anxious, and chronically mad, if you’re not becoming more of a person of love, then the odds are that something about the system of your life is poorly designed.
Because your life is the byproduct of your lifestyle.
The problem is not that your rule of life isn’t working — but that it is.”
Francis Spufford, in his case for Christian spirituality, wrote about the feeling of waking up on a Saturday morning with a mild hangover, a bit lonely, empty, and unfulfilled — and how at some point you have to grapple with the fact that your free choices aren’t delivering the life you want.
Your freedom is what got you here, not your constraint.
“A rule of life is an invitation to a very different definition of freedom than that of the modern world — an invitation to embrace the constraints that, if you give yourself to them, will eventually set you free.”
The novelist Annie Dillard famously said:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
But read through the lens of spiritual formation, how we spend our days doesn’t just determine what we do with our one precious fleeting life, but also who we become.
Picking up your phone first thing upon waking and checking social media isn’t just a habit — it’s a choice to let yourself become formed into a certain kind of person.
Spending more time reading the news than reading Scripture isn’t just wrong — it’s a choice to become more like your favorite news commentators than like Jesus.
Spending your money on yet another thing you don’t really need isn’t just playing around with disposable income — it’s feeding an appetite within you that will only grow more ravenous.
All these things we do… do something to us.
They form us.
Guarding and Guiding
“A rule of life must balance two sides of an emotional equation. It must guard and it must guide.”
The Christian intellectual Andy Crouch beautifully defines a rule of life as:
“A set of practices to guard our habits and guide our lives.”
Let’s circle back to the vine metaphor.
A gardener has two jobs: to tend the plants and keep out the weeds.
In the same way, each of us needs to ask:
- What do I want to put into my life?
- What do I want to keep out?
- What do I want to grow?
- What do I want to die?
“If you were to look at my rule — one I live by with a small community of friends — you’d see a bunch of spiritual disciplines you would likely expect: an hour of quiet time each morning to pray and read Scripture, a weekly Sabbath and meal with my community, a monthly day in solitude, and so on.
But then you’d see a bunch of odd — but for me, keystone — habits that don’t show up on any historical rule of life because they are mostly my way of dealing with the dark underbelly of the digital age.
Really, they are more like anti-habits — my attempt at counter-formation.”
Here are a few examples:
- Parenting my phone.
- “I have an old-school analog alarm clock by my bed. My phone goes to bed at 8:30 PM each night tucked away in a drawer in my home office. And it isn’t allowed up until I’m finished with my morning time of prayer and hit my daily quota for writing.”
- Practicing a full 24-hour digital Sabbath.
- “We power off all devices — our phones, computers, TV — for the entirety of our weekly day of rest and worship.”
- Limiting social media use to one day a week.
- “I think of it like breathing toxic fumes. Sometimes necessary to live in the modern world, but no good for you. Too much will kill you.”
- Limiting intake of media — TV, film, YouTube — to a maximum of four hours a week.
“Notice these are more like rules, but the heart behind them is not legalism.
I’m well aware they aren’t a measure of my spiritual maturity at all. If anything, my need for them is a measure of my immaturity.
Not one of them makes me any more loving or holy. I just recognize the power of things like technology and media to form and deform me.”
Left unchecked, these things are designed to consume our lives and shape us into a specific kind of person — one wildly unlike Jesus.
“But my deepest desire is for God to consume my life and, in time, shape me into His image.”
“I very much believe we all need at least some rules around our phones.
And should we choose to play with fire — social media.”
Does that grate on you?
Are you thinking, But I’m a free spirit. I don’t like to be controlled.
“I hate to break it to you — you are being controlled by your addiction to your phone, the appetites of your body for pleasure, the spooky algorithms of Silicon Valley.
Coming up with rules can put your life back under the control of your deepest desires.
Choose your own constraints or they will choose for you.”
Not by the Spirit of God stirring your heart toward love — but by a programmer in Silicon Valley working to steal your time and shape your behavior.
“The choice is yours: rule or be ruled.”
To live by a rule, of course, will require a crash course in learning to say no.
Not just to sin, but to all sorts of things — good and bad.
“I used to weigh high-potential behaviors with the question: Is this sinful or not?
But now that I better understand the gospel and its possibility of life that is truly life with Jesus, my new question is:
Does this move me toward Jesus or away from Jesus?”
That’s a far more interesting question.
“The goal is to live with a kind of focus and intentionality and peacefulness that many admire and aspire to, but precious few attain.”
Steve Jobs famously said he was as proud of what Apple had not done as what the company had done.
He clarified:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that are there.”
“It’s the same with a rule. You have to pick carefully. You have to say no more than you say yes, because there are only so many hours in a day and so many days in a life.
But hear me: a wisely chosen rule has the potential to enrich your life in ways you could not possibly imagine.”
So we’ll end the reading there today and move into a few reflection questions.
Reflection Questions
1.
Have you ever taken a spiritual inventory of your life to see what kind of results you are experiencing?
You may need to sit with the Lord on that one a bit. Maybe do a little journaling.
I always say: get your journal out when we read through this book and ask these questions.
2.
Are the current things you are doing in your life moving you closer to Jesus or further away from Him?
Are the daily habits and routines in your life forming Christ in you — or distracting you from Him?
And here’s a thought that jumped out at me based on this reading:
We each have the ability, as free-will people created by God, to choose our rule of life.
We can adjust the things we do or do not do to become the individual God created us to be.
I’ll say that again.
As free-will agents, each of us has the ability to choose what our rule of life will be — to adjust it, to do more positive things, to remove negative things, so we can become more of the individual God created us to be.
And this line really struck me:
“A rule of life is an invitation to a very different definition of freedom than that of the modern world — an invitation to embrace the constraints that, if you give yourself to them, will eventually set you free.”
Wow. Isn’t that amazing?
I came up in the 70s when people started saying things like “free love” and “do whatever you want” and “if it feels good, do it.”
And this says almost the exact opposite.
Another saying I have on my desk right here is from Jocko Willink:
“Discipline equals freedom.”
There’s something powerful about that.
Because I think somewhere along the line, many of us started believing discipline was bondage when, in reality, wise discipline can actually lead us into freedom.
Anyway, I’ll leave you with those thoughts today.
And we will be back tomorrow with another reading as we continue further into this topic of A Rule of Life.
God bless you all.
