Do Not Despise the Gentle Nudge
A river cuts through Harrisburg, Pennsylvania where I live. Small rapids gurgle as the shallow water runs over rocks.
When my son and I have kayaked the river, we have learned—big surprise—that it’s much harder to paddle upstream than down. But we have also learned that even when traveling downstream, you still have to paddle in order to steer. If you cannot steer, you drift along until you smack a boulder or get sucked into the counter-swirl of an eddy current. Avoiding these dangers sometimes requires paddling with all your might, but most often simply holding the tip of your paddle in the water at the proper angle is all that is necessary to avoid danger.
This idea is similar to how Christians understand obedience. There is a goodness to seeking mountain-top experiences with God when the chains of sin break and gospel joy erupts. Most of the time, however, walking with God entails small steps of obedience in the same direction over a long period of time. David Mathis calls these acts of devotion habits of grace. They often come from daily prayer, Bible reading, and weekly church attendance.
These little adjustments to our spiritual lives, while seemingly small and insignificant by themselves, make all the difference in avoiding spiritual danger and experiencing intimacy with God.
Seek More Nudges and Less Shoves
Nutritionists tell us that to lose one pound a week you must pull a calorie deficit of 3,500 calories a week, or about 500 calories a day. Losing weight requires not one massive 3,500-calorie decision, but a hundred smaller decisions. The same principle is true in dental hygiene. The dreaded dental pick is only there to scrape the plaque that gentle brushing can no longer clear. The ideal, however, is for a few minutes of brushing each day to have the desired effect.
Andy Crouch speaks to this in his book on technology. “An increasing body of psychological research suggests that our supply of willpower—the ability to make hard decisions that go against our instincts or preferences—is limited” (The Tech-Wise Family, p. 33). Crouch suggests, therefore, that we build “nudges” into our life that will help make our desired choices easier to make.
By nudge he does not mean shove. A nudge is a small force applied at the right time to a particular location in order to make a difference in the outcome. For example, making the clear-headed decision to only have a computer in public places will not stop you from looking at porn, but it can nudge you in the right direction. A shove would look more like taking a baseball bat to the motherboard.
My point is not to denigrate forceful action. The Bible speaks of God’s Word as heat that melts and a hammer that smashes (Jer. 23:29). The voice of the Lord can splinter individual cedar trees, shake the wilderness, and strip bark off an entire forest (Psalm 29). Sometimes this kind of force is necessary. Sometimes people do get caught in spiritual eddy currents, and soft paddling will not free them. They must row with all their might back into the stream of faithfulness. Jude speaks of saving certain sinners by “snatching them out of the fire” (1:23). That requires force.
But the Bible also portrays the word of God in softer imagery: as washing with a rag or as gentle rain falling on tender grass (Eph. 5:29; Deut. 32:2). As such, we should not despise the small and seemingly insignificant activities that keep us on the path of life. I believe this is what Paul means when he tells Timothy to keep a close watch on both his life and his doctrine so that he might save himself and those who sit under his teaching ministry (1 Tim. 4:16).
“Quiet and unseen acts of piety may not have sound and fury, but they do signify something.”
Most preachers get into a deadly theological pit not with a backhoe, but with a spoon, one little scoop at a time. Paul wants his son in the faith to make a habit of ladling grace into his life rather than sin because even small consistent scoops of grace will keep him away from danger. Quiet and unseen acts of piety may not have sound and fury, but they do signify something. As Tim Challies has observed, “We overestimate what God will do in us over a year but underestimate what God will accomplish in us through a lifetime.”
The Nudge of Church Discipline
Examples of nudges in the Christian life abound. First, consider church discipline. Christians tend to think of church discipline only in the superlative—those rare and dramatic moments at an annual congregational meeting where somebody did something really bad, and now they’re gonna get it.
This caricature of church discipline should be just that. When you put together Matthew 18:15–20, which teaches that as few people should be involved as possible, along with Galatians 6:1, which teaches that restoration should be done “in a spirit of gentleness,” a very different picture of church discipline emerges. In a healthy church, discipline happens regularly among brothers and sisters who “bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2). Only when gentle nudges do not work should we apply more force.
Has God put someone in your life who needs a nudge?
The Nudge of Confession of Sin
Consider also how the confession of sin breathes life into our relationship with God. Recently, I confessed to our small group Bible study that I sensed bitterness creeping into my spiritual life. People had let me down, and I smoldered silently and sinfully about it.
On the one hand, confessing my bitterness to my small group and asking for prayer wasn’t that big of a deal; I stood only ankle-deep in quicksand—no reason for serious alarm yet. But on the other hand, if I didn’t confess, didn’t ask for prayer, didn’t repent to God, and didn’t forgive those who hurt me, then before long I might have been neck-deep in bitterness. David reflects on what happened to him when he held back confession: “For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away” (Ps. 32:3).
Do you need to confess a sin to God and ask others to pray for you?
The Nudge of Imperfection
Finally, consider the way the imperfections in our local churches can work for a Christian’s good. When local churches went online during Covid lockdowns, I kept hearing about church attendees who found a “better” church and preacher somewhere else online. Ordinarily our geographical boundedness kept us local, but the internet offers endless possibilities to find a better church, say, in Dallas or Denver even if we live in Decatur. And by “better,” I mean a larger church with a more famous preacher and a snazzier online getup, as opposed to their less sexy church where a no-name pastor prays for his sheep by name.
Why, I wonder, was this trade so easy to make for some church attendees? Perhaps because the trade was a symptom rather than a cause. Perhaps the cause is that many wrongly understand Christianity and weekly gatherings as a series of self-help shoves toward self-actualization. If a big church with a better pastor can produce more umph, then just get your spiritual nuggets from that church instead.
But what if overlooking small imperfections in our weekly gatherings and serving God among imperfect saints is part of the very plan God has chosen to develop us into spiritual maturity and stir our affections for that which only he can satisfy?
In the last year, have you been tempted to think meanly of your local church and its pastors?
Do Not Despise Lots of Nudges in the Same Direction
In his classic A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, the late Eugene Peterson wrote, “There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness” (p. 16). Here, and throughout his life of faithfully pastoring small churches, Peterson critiques our lust for epic experiences while showing the beauty and power of piety in the seemingly mundane, the small nudges that apprentice us toward holiness.
When we read our Bibles each day and no angels dance on the page, when we pray and the walls of a prison do not shake, and when we speak and revival does not break out, that’s okay, because when obedience happens, however seemingly small and unnoticeable, nothing never happens. Keeping the rudder of a ship pointed away from danger might not feel all that significant but tiny course corrections would have kept the Titanic from missing the iceberg, just as nudges keep us walking intimately with God.