How the Syrian Monastics Inspire Me — Lucas Hilty

What are things that we as, um, present-day Anabaptists, you know, as, as present-day Christians, learn from these people who were just regular people, you know, going about normal life in a lot of ways, trying to figure out this thing called church, this thing called Christianity in the very, very early years? You know, what, what's a few things we can learn from them?

We haven't talked about the, the ascetic strain of Eastern Christianity, uh, very much, but, um, many of the records and, and the, the letters and books that have been passed down to us came from, well, the people who, who made it their business to read and write. So not everybody did that, but the people who tended to read and write a lot were the monks or the, there was a group called the Sons of the Covenant, Sons and Daughters of the Covenant, actually, because women were included. And, um, so much of what they did was church work and working with the Bible and writing things.

So they passed down to us stories and, and teachings about a very, uh, rigorous approach to self-denial, uh, to, to renouncing human society as a whole. Um, and by that I mean not people, but, but normal ways of doing things. So normally you get up and you take a shower and you trim your hair, but not if you're a monk, because, um, you want to kind of renounce the, the sort of normal comforts of life, uh, because you're doing battle with your passions. And so the way that this answers, or the reason I'm, I'm mentioning this in response to your question is that I'm really challenged by, uh, you know, sometimes their way of life seems strange, maybe mistaken to me, but at least I think we can say on their best days, the reason they were doing it was because they loved the Lord and they were, they took it 110% seriously, their faith.

Um, it affected even the ones who weren't, uh, monks on a mountain. They just felt like it was an all-consuming passion to pursue the Lord, um, to pursue holiness and to, to live what they called the evangelical life, which was not, um, easy believism. It was a life that was patterned after the gospel.

So, um, that became, I think, really their genius when it comes to missions. It wasn't the fact that they were so, um, so easy to join or that they required so little. It was the fact that they were such remarkable people. Um, and again, I'm not possibly in some, uh, they possibly overdid it, they possibly misapplied some scripture and so on, but nonetheless, they demonstrated that they had overcome, you know, the, they had overcome almost human nature in their fasting, in their, um, in their, uh, ascetic activity. Now, they still had human nature, but they had overcome the sort of normal way of life. And people admired that. They believed that this was a demonstration of, you know, God's power at work.

And so, um, I think we can learn, I can learn from this that, um, these, the, uh, secret to, to growing as a Christian and the secret to being more effective in, in the kingdom is not to sort of chill and just, just, uh, float down the river of life, but it is to embrace hard things, embrace sort of the difficulty of God's call. And, uh, but to do that, not in some sort of grim, uh, sad way of life, but to do it with kind of all the, the burning fire of the presence of God. And if I, if that sounds, uh, hyperbolic, um, this is how they talked about it. Their poetry, they produced beautiful poetry, um, and they showed that they were yearning for what I think Tozer calls the white-hot presence of the throne of God.

And that's what stirs me up and what makes me think I want to learn from these people. I don't necessarily, necessarily need to be just like them, but I want to learn some of that from them.