How Writing Cultivates Intimacy with God
I was told not to equate preparing for sermons with devotional Bible reading. There is truth in that encouragement. If we professionalize spiritual disciplines, then our spiritual life tends to become stuffy and transactional from expecting that clocking in yields certain results. On the other hand, I’ve learned if the posture of my heart in my sermon preparation isn’t devotional, then my preaching becomes dry and academic. If I am not growing spiritually through my pastoral ministry, I’m not pastoring as God intended. I would say the same thing to engineers, teachers, stay-at-home moms, and salespeople. I’d say the same thing to bloggers.
Blogging ought to grow us in holiness. When we blog for God’s glory, the discipline of writing becomes integrated into the web of our spiritual disciplines. We believe blogging can be cultivated as a companion to spiritual disciplines and even as a spiritual discipline in its own right. Before we consider this, we want to send up a warning flare: challenges for the Christian blogger abound.
We are writing this chapter in the heart of the COVID-19 outbreak. Anyone who thought the news cycle was fast before could never have predicted what 2020 would bring. It’s not just the speed of the news that is alarming; it’s the demand for a response. Woke culture requires we weigh in on every injustice lest we are complicit in evil, and call-out culture requires anger without grace.
Our mediums of public communication compound the problem. Twitter and Facebook are immediate, unfiltered, and democratized. As bloggers, we can feel the pressure to respond. That impulse may be appropriate, but we must remember that the work required to produce balance, nuance, and truth is far greater than what it takes to post falsehood and distortion. Moreover, our impulse to write can arise out of anger, arrogance, and self-interest, along with the desire to score pageviews off a cultural moment.
Writing is always fraught with significant challenges in the pursuit of holiness, but avoiding danger seems to require more vigilance when culture scatters sticky traps around every issue. In this day, how can our blogging cultivate the fruit of the Spirit rather than the fruit of the flesh?
In his book Habits of Grace, David Mathis suggests there are three basic forms of spiritual disciplines: hearing God’s voice through the Bible, having God’s ear through prayer, and belonging to God’s body through Christian fellowship. Let’s consider a blogger’s cultivation of Christian character through these three clusters of spiritual disciplines.
Hearing God’s Voice
If we are to speak for God, we need to hear from him. We need his encouragement, his exhortation, and his direction. Thankfully, he’s the God who speaks. “For the Lord gives wisdom; from his mouth come knowledge and understanding” (Prov. 2:6).
When Satan tempts Jesus to create bread after forty days of fasting in the wilderness, Jesus tells the enemy that even while he is starving, God’s word is more essential than food. Quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, Jesus says, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).
God can speak through various means, but he speaks most clearly through his word. If we have any hope of offering others wisdom, listening to God must become a primary and ongoing habit. Our human understanding is like the grass that withers and fades, while God’s wisdom stands forever (Isa. 40:8). Our writing is fallible; God’s is infallible. Our writing is errant; his is inerrant. The world judges authors by their creativity and brilliance. But we know our words, no matter how pretty, will return to dust unless they convey God’s truth.
“The world judges authors by their creativity and brilliance. But we know our words, no matter how pretty, will return to dust unless they convey God’s truth. ”
This does not mean blogging that exposits Scripture is the only kind that glorifies God. But it does mean our writing, whether fiction, memoir, didactic, or some other style employed while covering topics not explicitly related to the Bible, is still subject to God’s truth and ought to reflect his light. Around forty authors on three continents across fifteen hundred years wrote the sixty-six books of the Bible. The authors came from all kinds of backgrounds and wrote in all sorts of styles. They wrote poetry, history, songs, wisdom, letters, and polemics. Incredibly—and in contrast to most holy books in other religions—each author’s voice is distinct. The biblical authors were carried along by the Holy Spirit, but as the Holy Spirit directed them, their personalities remained wholly present.
This diversity of each author’s personality and gifting should encourage us. We, of course, will never author Holy Scripture. But isn’t it encouraging to know that even today God still delights in using an author’s unique personality and situation, through the power of his Spirit, for his good work? It is not the size of our platform that assures us how far our words will reach, but rather it is our trust in a God whose word never returns void (Isa. 55:11).
Having God’s Ear
The Creator of the universe doesn’t merely allow us to speak to him; he invites us to speak to him; he longs for us to talk to him. Because Jesus Christ put on flesh and entered our broken world, we know that we do not pray to a distant God. We converse with one who understands our pain and predicaments. “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses,” the author of Hebrews reminds us, “but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” The exhortation that flows from this truth is that we should “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:15–16). We must heed God’s voice, but what an unexpected and wonderful truth that God would care to listen to ours.
As writers, prayer is essential not only in developing our inner character but also in shaping our output. In Colossians 4:2–4 Paul says it is through prayer that he aligns himself with God’s motivations and intentions. “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison—that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak.”
Let me unpack this rich passage. Paul tells us that our prayer ought to be steadfast, watchful, and characterized by a grateful heart. A healthy prayer life is consistent and persistent. We pray when we rise in the morning, when we eat, and as we drift off to sleep. When we pray, we do so watchfully. We pray as those on the lookout for God’s blessing, for the spiritual attacks against ourselves and others, for the advancement of God’s kingdom, and for Christ’s glorious return. And we pray with gratitude, as those with hearts full of thanksgiving.
These same attributes—steadfastness, watchfulness, and gratefulness—should also characterize our writing. The more we pray, the more our hearts will be shaped by steadfastness, watchfulness, and gratitude. And the more our hearts are characterized by these God-glorifying attributes, the more our writing will reflect him.
“Blogging—even Christian blogging—tends to be directed by the cultural winds whirling around us. Don’t let them. ”
Cultivating this kind of prayer life runs contrary to the impulse of our flesh. Blogging—even Christian blogging—tends to be directed by the cultural winds whirling around us. That current issue under a blogger’s skin, that fuel feeding the brightest dumpster fire, that volley of words bouncing around our echo chamber—these all conspire to shape us more than our prayers. Don’t let them.
Belonging to God’s Body
In our individualized world, we tend to think of spiritual disciplines as something between God and us, but our pilgrimage toward Christlikeness is not a road traveled alone. God intends for us to live in community and under authority.
In Paul’s letters, he consistently encourages us to participate in God’s family. Such participation requires more than superficial acknowledgment of God’s family. Community is the gym where we exercise compassion, kindness, humility, forgiveness, and love. Paul’s vision of community isn’t whitewashed; he knows exactly how demanding it is to live with one another. Our community will challenge us. We’ll have to exercise compassion to the stone-hearted, kindness to the rude, humility to the proud, and forgiveness to those who wrong us. All of this will be for their spiritual benefit and ours. It’s in God’s community that we admonish one another, we sing praises to God, and we offer thanksgiving back to God. Thankfulness appears to be at the forefront of Paul’s mind, as he mentions it three times in this paragraph about God’s family.
In Glenna Marshall’s book Everyday Faithfulness, she reminds us that “your church is God’s gift to you” (108). If your church is God’s gift to you, then you must have a local church to call yours. This is true for all Christians but needs to be received just as warmly by bloggers who often have a network of online relationships that can (wrongly) become a substitute for their local church. Don’t bypass your local church; it’s there that God intends for you to find brothers and sisters who will encourage you to persevere when you are weary and will exhort you when your blog becomes cynical or self-serving.
Writing to glorify God means that we honor his bride, the church. If you are considering writing about someone in your church, critiquing your leadership, or expressing disappointment, we urge you to follow biblical principles of peacemaking (see Jesus’s admonition in Matt. 18:15, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone.”).
One of the common tropes of Christian blogging expresses concern that the church isn’t paying enough attention to a given issue, whether that’s racism, abortion, pornography, singleness, or something else. Before you write that post, consider reaching out to your pastor. Maybe he has a blind spot; or perhaps you do. Venting to a listening world can feel courageous, but the harder move, the one that requires faith and the one that God desires you to make first, involves going to your brothers and sisters before you go to the blogosphere.
This may be more difficult, but it’s the system God designed for his glory and our good.
Excerpted with permission from Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World by Benjamin Vrbicek and John Beeson. Copyright 2020, Fan and Flame Publishing. The print book was published last November, but the audiobook was just published.
John Beeson serves as co-lead pastor at New Life Bible Fellowship in Tucson, Arizona. He attended Gordon College and Princeton Theological Seminary, and is married with two kids. He blogs at The Bee Hive. He is the coauthor of Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World.