7. Any time you emphasize a particular facet of the spiritual life you run the risk of lacking balance or appearing to do so. If you are exercising the development of your inner life, this could raise some questions. Aren’t you avoiding your responsibility to love your neighbor when you are holed up in your room musing Bible verses or whatever? Aren’t you being selfish by looking after your precious little inner life when you should be feeding the hungry or asserting a just cause to right a wrong? What’s the big deal about the inner life anyway?
It should be obvious that good spiritual teaching would not divorce the inner life from the necessary “exterior” life of action.
The best way I have heard this expressed is that the inner life involves our response to the “Greatest Commandment” as stated by Jesus – to love God with all of our being. The life of the outward expression of spirituality is how the believer responds to what Jesus called the “second” greatest commandment – to love others as ourselves. Added to this is the idea that one’s love of God comes first as the source and inspiration for the second.
It could be said that we are conditioning our inner life to the end that God will use every thought, every word and every deed of ours to fulfill his purposes in us and, through us, in others.
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