Sunday I’m preaching part three in a series about growing our faith. I’ll be talking about spiritual discipline. Today I saw an article in the NYT that really highlights our need for private spiritual disciplines.

The article called “Dan Brown’s America” can be read at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19douthat.html

“In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.”

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle.”

If dying to yourself daily is what Christ calls us to…. Then then trend to focus more on self is what Christ calls us away from. Spiritual disciplines cause us to test if we are trusting ourselves or is our trust and confidence completely in Christ.

After reading an article like this, we can see that the church has gotten too far away from our private disciplines of faith.