I was sitting with the grandkids today… the three month old had just gone to sleep and the two year old was being a little turbocharged energy field They were safe — and so I looked at the magazines in the playground parents area. (It’s almost snowing in Manitoba. We were in an indoor playground}.

I saw an article suggesting that yoga should be used for children. I\e also in the last few days seem people discuss meditation as a means of controlling depression and despair. The secular world may base no time for God, but they have spiritual hunger. And this tends to be the false spirituality of fitness… there is a confusion of the incandescence that comes from exercise with spiritual growth.

1 CORINTHIANS 15:42b-50
What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 44It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. 45Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. 46But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual. 47The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. 48As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven. 49Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven.
50What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.
MATTHEW 11:25
25At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; 26yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.

Now the refromed, orhodox and reformed theologians may formulate this in different words, but all agree that salvation does not come by our effort, but by grace. It is not our work. (The catholics will say grace flows through the sacraments, and the reformed say it flows from election, but no person would argue that Jesus death was not neede). No man can stand before God. at our most transcendent, our most spiritual, we can be venial, selfish… indeed do evil to preserve our spirituality.

True spirituality flows from God. It is not how we feel. At times it is a sense of mechanical duty. There is no sense of blessing, and the seasons of blessing seem long ago. But true spirituality flows from God, not from our feelings.

False spirituality worships the ephemera: cgurus, wealth, health, power. But we are not promised these things. We are told that in this life there will be trouble for those who love Jesus, but in the next life they will be redeemed, and in their new flesh, God they will see.