Canteens and Cookstoves for Your Spiritual Life

Last year, hiking in Colorado, I had hours to meditate on the Christian life. Surrounded by mountains, meadows, and forests – and miles from civilization – I began to think about the daily routine of food.

Since we were backing for several days, we carried all of our food in our backpacks. Every evening we strung it up a tree to keep it away from nosy bears; every morning we hauled it back down and divided it among the hikers.

It’s impossible to carry enough water for a hike this long, so we stopped several times a day at various streams to refill our canteens. Of course, we had to purify the water, using specially designed filters, to ensure that our water was safe to drink. Since the water came from mountain brooks in Colorado, it probably would have been safe anyways – but it’s still better not to risk a virulent episode of a stomach bug!

Pondering our daily eating and drinking, I remembered that Christians are strangers in this world. We are on a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage to our heavenly homeland. And, just like backpackers, we need provisions to keep up our spiritual strength.

Studying the Bible is like packing your bag with food. You can carry it along with you. As you read the Word, listen to sermons, and study Scripture, you are filling your spiritual backpack with provisions that will come in handy throughout the journey. You might learn truth today that you will need in a week, just like you might throw in a granola bar that you might eat in a week.

But there is something that you can’t ‘stock up on’ in advance. You can’t ‘stock up’ on grace. God must give it to you each day. Just like it doesn’t work to try to carry enough water for your backpacking journey, so it doesn’t work to try to carry extra grace. God has to give it. This means that you’ll need to take time to pursue grace, just like you have to take time to find and purify water each day on the trail.

So fill your spiritual backpack with all the truth that you can cram into it. Study the Word, because you never know when you will need those nuggets of truth. But don’t act like you can get by without refilling your canteen with God’s grace, every day. We need him more than we realize.