The more we draw from God, the more His presence is dynamic and filling and affirming, and we want more of it. You get a taste of God, and you want more of God. You get too busy and distracted. You start to get by with just a little bit of God.
And that's not too far from stopping up the well together, and then it becomes an obligation, and you're not really getting hardly anything. That's a profound observation from Gary Thomas. He's our guest again today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, helping us explore how we connect with God, how we can get to know God better. I'm John Fuller, and thanks for joining us. John, it's always great to have Gary in the studio. I'm going to puff you up a little bit. He's brilliant. He's a great communicator, and that is all true. Normally I go home, like tonight I'll go home and say to Jean, hey, I've got this great idea, this assessment of nine ways to worship the Lord.
Maybe we should take that. And she'll say, who'd you tape with today? She's got that down. It's wonderful. So I'm looking forward to learning more. If you didn't hear last time's program, go to the YouTube channel, or you can get a download from focusonthefamily.com. That's a great way to do it.
Or the app is another good way to do it, so you can hear the program from last time. We're going to continue today with Gary and talk about this idea of sacred pathways, nine ways to connect with God. We kind of joked last time that this is why denominations exist, because we get into a more dogmatic approach to the way we worship and commune with the Lord.
When the Lord creates us, to commune with him in a variety of ways. I mean, it'd be pretty boring as the creator to create one temperament, one style. So the Lord, like a bouquet of flowers, said, I'm going to do it multiple ways.
And that's his prerogative, because he's God. Now the idea is, can we figure it out? And fortunately, we have people like Gary who have put some thought to this and offered us this great tool, nine ways to connect with God. There's a quiz that you can find, and then we've got the list of nine temperaments that we've posted for you, if you want to do the deep dive here for us. Find out more about Gary, the book, and that list I mentioned.
It's all in the show notes. Gary, welcome back. Great to be back, guys.
It's good to have you as a neighbor living here in Colorado now. Absolutely. You enjoying it? I'm loving it. It's good. It's good. Hey, we're going to repeat stating the nine.
We'll just go right into the nine. So let's start with the naturalist. People who, you said last time, connect best with God in the outdoors.
Certainly you joked about living here in Colorado. Most of us are probably naturalists that way. But give more description, and let's go into a little more depth about the naturalist. Psalms 19 one says, the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork. So there's something about the naturalist. When they get outside and see the world that God has designed, he just becomes more real to them, and he could speak to them through it.
They see how he gives the smallest attention to something as tiny as an ant. But then here in Colorado, you look up and you see the majesty of the mountains. You see the different kinds of colors and grasses. And I grew up with a naturalist bent. I loved it in the Pacific Northwest. And then in Virginia, I would go to the battlefields, and they were so underused, I could take these hikes.
Spent about a dozen years in Houston, which my wife affectionately calls Cement City. So I drifted back more to the intellectual approach that we may get into. But coming back to Colorado, it's just yesterday morning. It's been a long stretch. I knew I had this coming up. Taking just a very leisurely run around the High Line Canal Trail, and then Old Dry Creek Trail, and Colorado right now as we're taping it.
Beautiful. On the verge of fall, barely starting to turn, and just smelling the air and whatnot. It's where God lifts us up. I'll never forget one climber telling me, he was climbing this one mountain. It's not a popular mountain.
He said he might have been the only person that year who climbed that mountain. And there's this beautiful flower near the top. And he said, it told me, God creates beauty for the sake of beauty. This isn't utilitarian.
No other person might see it, but God glories in the beauty of nature that he's created because that's the kind of God he is. And that's what carries a naturalist on the way. Let me ask you, in the naturalist context for me, this may be showing my stripes as a traditionalist.
I don't know. This is interesting. But are there some core things? I mean, if you are into kayaking, and you're feeling the presence of God while you kayak, do you need a little more there? Do you need, you know, like, Lord, this is great, bopping up and down on this river. I feel close to you. But do we need a little more structure?
Well, we do. There's what's called general revelation and specific revelation. I think nature is filled with general revelation.
C.S. Lewis talks about how God was speaking to him through the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, morning cobwebs in late summer with a little bit of dew on them, and the noise of falling waves or whatnot. That tells you there's a creator, but we need the presence of the Holy Spirit and God's word to remind us that there is a specific creator. There's a God that we're relating to. Because you can let the love of nature overcome your love of a person. Ultimately, we worship a person.
Not what that person has made, but who that person is. So now the second temperament is sensates. This sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings, but, you know, the sensates are coming around. Sound the alarm. What is a sensate? Yeah.
I score lowest on this, and it's so opposite. I grew up where you walk into this Baptist church and they would say, please maintain an attitude of quiet and reverence as we enter the presence of God. Then we frown at children.
Yes. And so you can't have any sound. You can't have too much statuary or anything like that.
It would be considered irreverent. And yet for sensates, it's the majestic cathedral. It's the majestic music. It's the smells. It's the sights. It's the sound.
Eastern Orthodox worship is very sensate, where they have incense and bells are ringing and even touching or kissing things. Henry Nouwen is an interesting case in point. He was sort of at a life crisis, deciding to leave teaching at an Ivy League school to go work at a home for developmentally disabled adults. So to meet with God, he went to where the original of Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son was kept. It's in a museum in St. Petersburg. And he just sat for hours in front of that painting. He said it was the expression of the Father, the reds, the colors, the way the light hit. That God spoke to him so strongly through that painting. I can't imagine looking in a painting for more than five or ten minutes. But for a sensate, they don't want to close their eyes and bow their heads and have it quiet.
It's the sensate world, smell, sound, taste, touch, sight opens it up. And so if you're trying to pray and you fall asleep, create—and I've seen a pastor do this—on his wall are a picture of photographs. These are the people he prays for, the key staff members, key families, key friends. And he's looking at that picture to focus on his prayers. One Easter season during Lent, I carried—I think it's a masonry nail.
I'm not sure. I'm not a very hardware type of a guy. I'm more of a bookstore guy than a hardware guy. But I just kept that nail in my pocket during Lent for 40 days so that if I'm grabbing my keys or I just bend over and I feel it pressing into my leg, I'm remembered the sacrifice of Christ. The sense of touch really helped me celebrate those 40 days. And so it's just finding ways to incorporate the senses to awaken you. And the reality is our brains are sort of like those old school computers where the more programs are firing, the more the motherboard is alive. And the reality is, as much as I hate this as a pastor and teacher, the church is more awake neurologically during worship songs when you've got sound and sights on the stage than when you've got a talking head behind a microphone. That doesn't make you feel too good, I can tell.
But that's where worship can hit all of the senses, and that's what makes the sensate come alive. I like that, yeah. The next one is traditionalist. I think I lean in this direction, but again, you're not all in one.
You're probably two or three different things. So the traditionalist is that person who enjoys the rituals and symbols. Why is that important, and does that maybe constrain us in some ways? I have a special place in my heart for traditionalists. I think I kind of lean there.
I'd say that would be one of my blends. And the reason I like to support them is that people often talk about how it's all just in your head. But there is a strong tradition in the Christian life about worshiping God the way that people have worshiped God for thousands of years, praying excellent prayers that were prayed a thousand years ago, celebrating the church calendar.
And I love it. If you celebrate Lent and Advent and then the coming of the Holy Spirit and the seasons of the church, you get a pretty full picture of the Christian life throughout that. And so they don't want to just make Easter a two-day celebration where maybe you go to a Good Friday service, bring out your best clothes on Sunday.
They're going to go through practices like Stations of the Cross that Christians have done. Observe Lent so that it becomes richer. And it's not because we do it out of obligation.
I'm speaking as an evangelical, but it can create new meaning. I remember one year I decided to give up sugar, which my wife wishes would be just a life calling that I would do that. But I said, I'm not going to eat any special dessert for 40 days, which is a big thing for me. I mean, it's not a meal if you don't have a dessert in my mind. I'm with you.
And so giving it up. And I remember going to a Christian bookstore like a week before Easter. I had to pick something up. I remember saying, can you believe it's Easter already?
And I'm like, yes, it's crawling here. I've got one more week and I can have a cake on Sunday. I mean, it was just a simple act of giving something up, observing a longstanding tradition, made my Easter so much more memorable. And so following a rule of prayer, having symbols, traditionalists like to have symbols. I know a pastor, I thought this was brilliant. He struggled with how do I keep my focus on my family and my church in balance? There was a pond halfway between his home and his church. When he leaves church, he's praying for issues of the church, his staff, people he had counseled. What's he going to do on the sermon? He reaches the pond and he mentally would say, all right, God, I'm throwing all of these concerns into the pond. They're yours.
You work on them. And then he says, I want to pray for my family. And he prays for his family. Let me be fully present when I get home. Let me be there for my kids.
Let me be attentive to my wife. And then the next morning when he leaves home, he's still praying for his family and he comes to the pond. All right, Lord, I'm picking these up.
What are we going to do about this? What about this elder? What about that sermon? And that symbol helped him keep the proper balance between loving on his family and fulfilling his duties as a church. And so you might put a cross in the car if you have a problem with anger. I think it's better to put the cross in the car than outside on the bumper sticker because we've all been cut off by somebody. Honk if God loves you.
And you're like, I want to honk, but not for that reason. So symbols and rituals can be a meaningful thing for them. It's not boring. God has met me here. They might have a chair where they do 90 percent of their quiet times in that chair. Go through a prayer book.
Have all of these things that they've done throughout their life. An early church, Father Chrysostom, taught how if you were a Christian during that time, you would read and pray through Psalm 62 in the morning and Psalm 140 in the evening. That's what the early church did.
Those are two particular Psalms. And that would sound so boring to probably the majority of people. But imagine that a mother teaches her daughter this when she's 12.
You're 12 now. We want you to do it. This is what Christians do. And she's praying through those two Psalms in the morning and the evening until the day she finds someone that she wants to marry. And she prays that Psalm in the morning and evening on her wedding day.
And, Lord, it's not just me now. I'm getting married. Thank you that you've been with me through my single years. Now be with me as a wife. And so she prays the Psalm the morning and the evening that she gives birth to her first child.
It's not just me and my husband now. I'm a mother, another generation. She prays those Psalms that helps her raise her kids through childhood and then teenagers. And now she's an empty nester. And she's praying that Psalm when her daughter, last child, goes off to college. Lord, thank you for being there now.
I'm an empty nester. And then she's a grandparent. And she keeps praying those Psalms. So she's praying them the day her husband dies. And now she's a widow. It's back to just being her and God as it was so many decades before. And those Psalms have literally been the bookends of her life. They have walked her through being a single gal, being a young married, being a mom, being an empty nester, and now being a widow.
They've tied her life together. Now some people would still say, that sounds so boring. But some traditionalists hearing us that never thought about this might think, man, if I'd had a ritual like that, that tied my whole life together, how powerful that would be.
And maybe I want to start one now. Gary, we're moving through these. The next one is aesthetics. Another kind of, what does that mean, Gary?
You know, the first editor who worked on this begged me to come up with a better title. Because if you don't read classic Christian literature, it sounds like a weird word. Think of a monk or a nun. They're people who like to get away. They are easily distracted. Whereas the sensate and the naturalist can draw a great connection to God through the natural world God has made or the senses that we have. The ascetics tend to have a very interior faith. Even a ticking clock would be a distraction to them. Something they see or a bird calling in the distance could be a distraction. Because they have this interior faith.
So they want to get away and be alone. If you're married to an ascetic, please don't take it personally. You'll actually have a better marriage if you'll let them connect with God. And it doesn't mean they don't love you if you're a distraction, but that's just sort of the soul that God has given them.
There's really three things that mark the ascetic. There's solitude. They just have to get alone. They want to connect with God on their own. The second one is they tend to be strict. And that sounds so hard, like you think of monks and nuns as very strict, but I put it this way.
When somebody's infatuated, they're living a very strict life in that they don't want to do anything that they can't incorporate the person they're infatuated with. They're very protective of all their other relationships. They're kind of ruthless with anything that keeps them from their heart's delight. And that's kind of how the ascetic is with God. And so they need extra time alone.
They tend to lean toward a strict faith and then austerity. We have a friend who was like this. They just don't want any distractions. Now, she lived in a very small home with her husband and two kids. And it was hard for her to get alone and for things to be quiet. So what she would do in the night when she puts the kids to bed, she would go into the bathroom. They had just one.
Turn on the water to create white noise, and that would be your best time to pray. It's interesting reading about John and Charles Wesley. Their mother, Susanna, raised, I forget, like 12 kids. But we're glad because I think Charles was number 12, right?
So we've got some good hymns out of it. And what do you do in a small house with 12 kids? Well, she had this thing where back then women had layers of their clothing. And so she would go sit in a corner and put one of the skirts literally over her head. And the Wesleys learned, you don't bother Mama when her skirt's over her head.
She's just trying to drown out the world. And that tends to be what ascetics do. So things like watching in the night, there's something about praying when everybody else is asleep and you're seeking the Lord. And it makes sense because it tends to be quieter. There are less distractions. Stillness is a practice where they agree not to speak. They're just going to be silent.
And if you've ever gone on a stillness retreat or you just go for a hike by yourself, it's amazing how much closer God can feel and how your thoughts can gather. We lose a lot with our tongue. Well, let's see if we can hit the last few that remain. Activist is the next one. Now, this sounds a little, really?
Is that a temperament or just an attitude? These are Christians who legitimately feel closest to God when they're fighting God's battles. They just feel God's presence and his empowerment. They're standing up against injustice. It could be an evangelistic campaign. It could be a march that's a protest.
It could be working politically to end something. But they're the people that God raises up that they feel closest to God when they're fighting God's battles. Before Sacred Marriage came out, I wrote a lot of books with some well-known people. And one was a person who became quite famous for the issue that she was dealing with. And she was brought to the Lord through a very activist Christian group. And I was trying to work with them because what happened is they would do rallies and confrontations. And there were legalities involved or whatnot. And after six months of this, this woman was shattered because it was so draining for her to be in this confrontation all the time.
And they thought maybe she's falling away because when you're an activist, they're excited. This is great. Welcome the police. Welcome the courts.
It was just like all of the confrontation, they made it feel like we're on the right track. And I was trying to help them see that while I think all of us are called to a certain level of activism, there are certain times when we need to stand up. Parents saying to a school board, no, this isn't going to happen in our schools. For some people, that's draining. They need to go and walk in the woods or have a two-hour worship time at their church. Other people are energized by it. And so it's just recognizing that what fires us up might empty out others and just being sensitive to that. That's really important to remember. Next would be the caregiver category.
This one, it's an interesting one for me. I think I do know people that fit this rather well. But the idea that you gain a sense of closeness to the Lord by taking care of other people. Mother Teresa would be an example of that, I think.
Absolutely. And it's not just caring for sick people. I've seen this a lot with men who are the first to volunteer for, and I love this, ministries to fix widows' cars, or they're there to fix up the church or on work days.
My church that I'm a part of has afternoon times where we go out and you're helping parks or schools or whatnot. And I like to tell wives to appreciate this aspect because they might be married to a man who's just not musical at all. And so they're kind of looking at him sideways in worship, and he just doesn't seem to be getting into it. And they might think, man, does he even love the Lord?
But when there's something physical to do to fix a widow's fence or to take care of this or that, or maybe they're an EMT and they're there to care for people in times of emergency, they're the first to step up. Singing isn't the only way to worship God and show your love for God. For these people, music just doesn't do it for them. But showing care in Jesus' name, they feel God's presence reaching out to others, and I think it's a precious temperament. Gary, last time you mentioned how enthusiasts welcome some level of risk and disruption in life.
Talk about enthusiasts. Yeah, they need to take spiritual risks, I think, to stay alive. And it's like they wake up and just say, Lord, let me meet somebody I've never met before where maybe they need a financial gift, maybe they need a word of encouragement, maybe I could share my faith, because that makes God feel real to them. Rather than going to what God has done in the past, they want to know, what is God doing in the present? The past is sort of the traditionalist.
I want God to do something new and fresh. And they tend to be more the extroverted in that they like group worship, and it's more fun to do that when you're surrounded by others. So that's sort of, they have this outward-oriented faith of mystery and celebration. I'm thinking of a friend who lives that way and is, I'll just say, is unscripted.
This person likes life unscripted. Let's see what God's going to do. Not just worship, but life. Yeah. That's interesting.
When you look in the Old Testament, I mean, there are a number of festivals where Israel is commanded to rejoice and forbidden to mourn. Now, I tend to score low on the enthusiast scale. And if you're more intellectually bent or whatnot, you're thinking, is that just a shallow, emotional kind of faith? But the reality is God deserves to be celebrated and glorified, and the world needs to hear it. And so I really respect this pathway. I don't want to neglect the last two, which are contemplative and intellectuals.
So hit those two quickly, and then we'll move to the close. Contemplatives have an emotionally-oriented faith. They sing the songs like, God is my lover, I'm his beloved. It's more of an emotional connection where they just adore him, and they might talk about wanting to just sit in God's presence. And again, that has a lot of support in some Christian traditions, particularly from the East, that really stresses experience.
When you look at things like meditative prayer, or centering prayer, or the Jesus prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner, is the most famous form of the Jesus prayer. And some people might say, what is the point in repeating all of that? And the point is, it keeps me in the presence of Jesus. And then what?
And they say, well, that is the what. I just want to be around Jesus. I want to remember Jesus. I don't want to forget Jesus.
I want to be directed by Jesus. And it fills them up emotionally. It fills up their minds and their heart.
Yeah, that's good. And then intellectuals at the very end. I'm thinking of, you know, you think of these great scientists, Sir Isaac Newton and Pasteur and others who said, I pursue science because it's God's creation, and God's creation can be known through science. That's kind of an intellectual approach. If I could almost rename that, I'd almost say conceptuals.
Intellectuals assumes you have to be smart. But it's really about, my heart isn't opened up until I understand something new about God. I learned something about God, and that's what I appreciate. And so they might be in an enthusiast service where there's all these powerful testimonies and singing the same words over and over and over again. They're kind of dying in the back saying, can you give me some data?
Can you give me something I can apply to sink my teeth in? Just because, again, to open up their heart, you open up their mind by teaching them something new about God. Well, Gary, that's so good. And we have run out of time, but we've covered two days and gotten through the nine pathways. Thanks for writing it, Sacred Pathways, Nine Ways to Connect with God. What a great resource, and we want to make it available to you. So get ahold of us here at Focus on the Family. John will tell you how in a minute. But make a gift of any amount. If you could do it monthly, that helps. That's how Gene and I support Focus.
Dina and John do that too. Or a one-time gift. And we will send the book as our way of saying thank you. I think the bottom line as I've sat with you, Gary, the last two days is it just gives you an awareness of how to become more like God and how to interact with the Lord in a way that excites you, which I think excites God. And that's the beauty of it. And a world of delight is awaiting every listener that finds a new way to connect with God on a daily basis that they enjoy and delight in. Amen.
So get ahold of us. Let me make mention of this. We don't often talk about the impact that we're having together, but during the last 12 months, thanks to your generosity and support, we were able to help nearly one million people grow stronger in their faith. And your ongoing support is really the critical fuel to help us get that done through the podcast, the radio program, and all the ways that we equip people to deepen their faith in Christ.
And part of it is working with a great partner like Gary Thomas to do that. So thank you for those almost one million people that have been helped just in the past year. Yeah, your generosity means the world to us and to them. Thank you in advance for any gift you make when you call 800 the letter A in the word family, or you can donate online.
We've got the details in the show notes. Well, thank you for joining us for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. Join us as we hear from Paul David Tripp, Dr. Greg Smalley, Ted Cunningham, and more. Mark your calendar to join us on October 28th through 30th right here at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs. Visit thefocusedpastor.com slash refresh for more details.
