For whatever reason, coming into this year, it felt like a good time to review my heart life, and to re-evaluate my faith walk. I felt the need to do this because I was reminded by the example of good friends that faith expresses itself more in what you do than in what you say, and I’ve also been realizing that what I so often do is counter to what I say. I think I think a certain way, but my life doesn’t live according to that thinking.

Psychologically, this kind of living is disintegration- or living without integration.

We can do it often. We can compartmentalize our lives, and turn on spirituality here and turn it off for carnality there, but in the end, we cause our lives to sputter and stall and grind gears, and we wonder why we can’t get momentum- with God, in work, with others. We have amazing mechanisms within that shield us from seeing the damage we do to ourselves when we live in duplicity, in fragmentation.

I have a friend at church who calls me Lurch because I am tall and have a prominent forehead, so I sort of resemble the character on the Addam’s Family show, but when I dig deeper into my life and the way I live, her nickname works. When we live compartmentalized lives, the movement of our lives is often bound in lurches.

Fortunately, at the beginning of the year, our small group started a new study in the letter to the Philippians. As I looked for guides to help me teach it letter as a leader, I came across Warren Wiersbe’s little book on the epistle. Wiersbe has a way of making the Scriptures pop out and meet you where you are, and the stories behind the letter’s words become rich and well-rounded backdrops. And then he presses you personally to respond to the lessons in the Scriptures.

In this case, Wiersbe leads out and say Philippians is Paul’s ode to joy. You and I are supposed have lives full of joy as we walk with the living, gracious God- and if we don’t, there are some basic reasons. And Wiersbe then pulled a simple nugget out of chapter 1 to diagnose a key spiritual malaise that stops up joy.

Simply put, we aren’t single-minded in our commitment to Christ. “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain”, Paul plainly states in verse 21. Joy is a product of being all in with God, and truly trusting in Him to enliven, encourage, and empower us. When we realize we are to take the weight of life off ourselves and put it on Him, and instead let ourselves be led by Him, joy wings to us and surrounds our lives- because we surround ourselves with Him, His promises, and His kindness. Joy is a product of trusting Him.

Preparing an intro for the study two weeks ago, a mnemonic device came to me that sunk into my mind as a clear suggestion from Him for when I am not living in joy (which I should be as a believer): S.T.O.P.

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S is for surrender. If I am being overwhelmed with doubt, worry, fear, or frustration, it is because I have taken back a claim on some area of my life, which means I have essentially quit trusting that He is looking out for me in it, and overall. Surrender requires a full commitment to the basic tenets that God is good, God is in control, and that God has great plans for each one of us- and that we will stay in step with Him. We get distracted. We want to keep certain parts of our lives from Him and His plans. We compartmentalize, and pretend doing that is okay. And then our lives lurch, and we wonder why. The first step to recovering joy is to surrender to Him again, where we are, with who we are, to what He has for us. And if God has a plan for us in our lives, we will not know what that is unless we are where He wants us to be. His.

T is for trust. Trust really is the other side to surrender. Without faith in Him and His goodness, this whole Christian life thing is bunk. After all, this whole Christian living thing is about living with Him, and to do that requires that we trust in Him, over our reservations. “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him (Hebrews 11:6).” God is more concerned about our trust in Him than anything else, because that is the core of any good relationship, and that is the whole push of why Christ came: that we might know and trust He and His Father. Love cannot be where trust is not. “Everything that does not come from faith is sin (Romans 14:23).” So once we surrender, to God and His designs for the world, and His plans for our life, we try not to go back like Israel to Egypt. We keep looking forward and upward through a confidence that He is providential, aware of every detail of our lives, and working in us for our good.

O is for obey. There is no better way to express our trust in Him than by striving to hear his guidance for our lives and to do it. There are some directions that God gives to us, in generic terms, that should be no brainers that display we are his. For all of those basic requests He has laid out in Scripture, our compliance to them will be a result of our trust of Him. For me, this call to obedience has been a reversal in my lax tithing over the last few years. For this time, I’ve viewed tithing as optional, with my list of excuses as to why I wouldn’t give God my money. But I wasn’t surrendered to Him, and trusting in Him. It’s for such a reason that Lewis says this in Mere Christianity:

“[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”

Obedience is just a natural response to trust, because, like a child heeding his father’s directions, we know we obey Him because He loves us. Obedience is faith in action.

And P is for Prayer. A big part of joy comes from being free from staring at yourself and your needs and your wants and your problems. Joy is a product of being focused on the Other: on Him, and on others in our lives. Prayer lifts us out of ourselves, to not only change our orientation from self-interest to other-focused, and it has the added effect of connecting us to God and others. Prayer helps push us out of our egocentric interests and deeper into surrender and trust in God. And prayer is an act of obedience and devotion (Phil 4:6, Luke 18:1).

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I am really mindful this month of the gift I possess, to be free to live in joy. But I know it is a fruit of being single minded about who God is in my life. And when I find myself drifting, I am trying to STOP, and hand it all back to him.

I anticipate the lurching to stall a bit and momentum to grow, and hopefully, I become less disintegrated, less compartmentalized. More integrated. But those products, among others, will no doubt be a consequence of my trust remaining in Him.

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Image Credit: “Don’t Stop” by Mike Rastiello via Flickr. Creative Commons license.