Live Simply

It doesn’t have to be complicated

Bruce Dutton is one of Fusion’s bible teachers. He has studied Biblical hebrew and often seems to have a “right word” for me either when I am chatting to him one on one, or when he is giving a devotion or delivering training.

Bruce does a regular devotion at Poatina morning teas, and at the moment he is working through Richard Foster’s “Celebration of Discipline”.

Yesterday he focussed on the discipline of simplicity and I found myself both encouraged and challenged so I pulled the book out and thought I would share some of the gems with you today.

The heart of the discipline of simplicity is that there is only one thing that matters.

The world will want to set our agenda for us, usually with one of the big three: money, sex or power. It’s amazing how many corrupted versions of Christianity are a simply a path to one of those three things.

Foster quotes Jesus in Matthew 6:33 when he says the key to living a simple life is to “seek first His kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well”.

Foster says:

“Focus on the kingdom produces an inward reality, and without the inward reality we will degenerate into legalistic trivia. Nothing else can be central. The desire to get out of the rat race cannot be central, the redistribution of the world’s wealth cannot be central, the concern for ecology cannot be central. Seeking first God’s kingdom and the righteousness, both personal and social, of that kingdom is the only thing that can be central in the Spiritual Discipline of simplicity.

He continues by stressing the fundamental importance of seeking first the Kingdom:

The person who does not seek the kingdom first does not seek it at all. Worthy as all other concerns may be, the moment they become the focus of our efforts they become idolatry. To centre on them will inevitably draw us into declaring that our particular activity is Christian simplicity. And, in fact, when the kingdom of God is genuinely placed first, ecological concerns, the poor, the equitable distribution of wealth, and many other things will be given the proper attention.

How do you know whether you are seeking first the Kingdom or something else?

Foster points out that in the passage that precedes Matthew 6:33, starting at verse 25, Jesus’s main focus is telling us not to worry. In fact he says:

….freedom from anxiety is one of the inward evidences of seeking first the Kingdom of God.

As someone who is inclined to lie in bed with my mind whirling at a million miles an hour, I find that statement a bit challenging. Part of me though, knows that it is at least partially true.

Life doesn’t have to be complicated.