Restful Journey

As you ask God to enable you to learn “death to self,” you might consider how using disciplines of service, silence, prayer, and meditation may help. Serving those who never thank us and doing it for the love of Jesus can retrain us against our desire to be noticed or appreciated. Mini-disciplines of silence retrain us, especially ones such as not giving advice unless asked.  This thwarts my idea that as a support group leader and platform speaker I know important insights that must be shared! When I don’t speak up, however, I end up praying for people instead.  And finally, meditating on passages such as Psalm 23 prepares us to be almost at peace as we practice these other disciplines.  TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - Quiet yourself and then ponder your way through Psalm 23:4-6, perhaps in a way similar to this: Because I’m beginning to believe the Lord is my Shepherd, I’m not quite as uneasy facing shadowy places in life. At times, I actually have no fear of anything....

WHAT “DEATH TO SELF” LOOKS LIKE - As our personality becomes reorganized around God and his eternal life, self-denial becomes our settled disposition. At first we self-consciously deny ourselves—reject the preeminence of what we want when we want it—and look to specific motions of God’s grace to guide and strengthen us in this.  We will need a wise and constant use of disciplines for the spiritual life. This is because the substance of our selves, formed in a world against God, is ready to act otherwise. When we are dead to self we will not be surprised or offended at not getting what we want.  We will not even notice some things that others would react to, such as social slights, verbal put-downs, or physical discomforts. Other rebuffs will be noticed, but if we are dead to self to any significant degree, these rebuffs will not take control of us or disturb our feelings or peace of mind.  As Saint Francis of Assisi said, we will “wear the world like a loose ...

The idea of “death to self” is radical in a culture that tells us it’s normal to beef up our résumé, exaggerate our successes, and put forward the foot that impresses others most. After we recover from the shock that growing disciples of Jesus are to die to self-promotion, we find it difficult to believe it’s possible to live a rich life in God in which we lack nothing!  We won’t have to fake this (having to pretend we don’t want to be rich, thin, or own a fancy car). It will be normal because we are caught up in God’s life. We really will be okay; in fact, we’ll be so much better than we’ve ever been before.  TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - Quiet yourself and try to truly believe the ideas in Psalm 23:1-3. Picture this sheep who is surrounded by green pastures yet isn’t on his feet munching away. This sheep is so full and satisfied that he contentedly lies down without needing even a bite. Move through the verses in a way such as this (fill in the blanks with details from y...

A shift toward self-denial is needed to reorder the six dimensions of the human self in subordination to God. Self-denial mustn’t be confused with self-rejection , nor should it be thought of as a painful, strenuous effort against one’s will.  Instead, it is a settled condition of life in the kingdom of God, better described as “death to self.” Christian spiritual formation rests on this indispensable foundation of death to self and cannot proceed except insofar as that foundation is being firmly laid and sustained .  We must simply lose our lives—those ruined lives about which most people complain so much anyway. “Those who have found their life (soul) shall lose it,” Jesus said, “while those who have lost their life (soul) for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39, PAR).  Our “survival” cannot be the ultimate point of reference in our world. We must not treat ourselves as God. This selfless life enables us to do for the first time what we want to do: be ...

WANTING THAT DIFFERENT KIND OF LIFE - The ruined soul must be willing to recognize its own ruin before it can discover how to enter a different path, the path of eternal life that naturally leads to spiritual formation in Christlikeness. This transformation is not something that may or may not be added on as an option to the gift of eternal life. It is the path one must be on in order to have an eternal kind of life.  This transformation is not a project of “life enhancement,” where the life in question is that of “normal” human beings—a life apart from God. It is, rather, the process of developing a different kind of life, the life of God himself, sustained by God as a new reality in those who have confidence that Jesus is the anointed One, the Son of God. Those “in Christ”—that is, caught up in his life, in what he is doing, by the inward gift of birth from above—“are of a new making. The ‘old stuff’ no longer matters. It is the new that counts” (2 Corinthians 5...

  Someone who had reason to put confidence in himself—and thereby be a lost soul—was the centurion in Capernaum. He came to Jesus asking him to heal his servant who was suffering terribly. Jesus agreed, but the centurion was so confident in Jesus that he said, “Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Matthew 8:8, NIV). Stunning his Jewish listeners, Jesus complimented this Gentile by saying his faith was greater than that of anyone he’d met in Israel. Jesus then launched into a short description of heaven and hell, inverting all their cherished beliefs by saying that many would come from east and west (Gentiles!) for the feast in the kingdom of heaven, but subjects of the kingdom (Jews who relied on their Jewish identity to enter the kingdom) would “be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (verses 11-12). It’s as if Jesus said, “Things are not what they seem. I am t...

THE SOUL’S LOSTNESS - A ruined soul is a lost soul. What is a lost soul? Someone God is mad at? Theologically, the outcome of lostness is hell—a most uncomfortable notion. Certainly, if you are lost you are not likely to arrive where you want to be.  But the condition of lostness is not the same as the outcome to which it leads. We’re not lost because we are going to wind up in the wrong place. We are going to wind up in the wrong place because we are lost. To be lost means to be out of place, to be omitted.  Gehenna, the term often used in the New Testament for the place of the lost, may be thought of as the cosmic dump for the irretrievably useless. Think of what it would mean to find you have become irretrievably useless. When your car keys are lost, they are useless to you.  When we are lost to God, we are not where we are supposed to be in his world and hence are not caught up into his life. We are our own god, and our god doesn’t amount to much. To be lost means to ...

Like many folks, I would not choose the Ten Commandments as my favorite Scripture to cozy up with. But I experienced them differently when I experimented with Martin Luther’s way of praying called the Four Golden Strands. He prayed a verse of Scripture in four ways.  First, he asked God to help him apply the verse to himself in as many ways as possible (strand 1—but note that this is a prayer, not a beating-self-up session).  Then he made appropriate confessions to God based on those applications (strand 2).  He then thanked God for anything related to the verse’s truth (strand 3).  Finally, he offered requests of God regarding the truth of that verse.[1]  Since Luther often did this with the Ten Commandments, I decided to give it a try as I was hiking one day. Certainly the first two commandments did not apply to me because I wasn’t an idol worshipper, but I started with the first one anyway: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3, KJV)....

GOD BEING GOD - The fear of God, the proverb tells us, is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding (see Proverbs 9:10). “Knowledge” in biblical language never refers to head knowledge but always to experiential involvement. Thus, when Jesus defined eternal life as “that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3, KJV), he was speaking of the constant, close interaction with the Trinitarian being of God.  Jesus brings this grace into the lives of those who seek and find him. Progressive departure from God leads to life as we know and see it around us. The first of the Ten Commandments deals with this inclination away from God (see Exodus 20:2-3). God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn’t running the universe and does not get to have things as they please?  For the person who does not live honestly and interactively with God, th...

Think about someone you have known who exemplified genuine purity and humility, selflessness, freedom from rage and depression. Usually such folks have none of the Christian “celebrity” trappings about them. They are often overlooked, even by Christians.  They may ask questions no one wants to address, but it’s hard to dismiss them because they can ask these questions with gentleness and kindness. They are not living on the same terms as the general culture, and so others might find this confusing.   TODAY’S EXPERIMENT   Contact such a person, if possible. Or contact someone who knew that person well. Ask questions such as, “What is the most important thing to you? Why isn’t it important to you to be the center of attention? What advice would you give me?”  If such contact isn’t possible, journal for a few moments about one of these things:  -What attracted you to that person?  -Did you dismiss this person, as others may have?  Ask God to sho...

  RUINED SOULS - One of the greatest obstacles to effective spiritual formation in Christ today is our failure to understand and acknowledge the reality of the human situation. We must start from where we really are.  Some years back, within a period of a few weeks, three nationally known pastors in Southern California were publicly exposed for sexual sins. But sex is far from being the only problem inside and outside the church. The presence of vanity, egotism, hostility, fear, indifference, and downright meanness can be counted on among professing Christians.  Their opposites cannot be counted on or simply assumed in the standard Christian group, and the rare individual who exemplifies these opposites—genuine purity and humility, death to selfishness, freedom from rage and depression, and so on—will stand out in the group with all the obtrusiveness of a sore thumb. This person will be a constant hindrance in group processes and will be personally conflicted by them, for...

POSSESSING THE LAND - The body, as well as the other aspects of the individual, can be re-formed to become our ally in Christlikeness. How? The land promised to the Israelites was one of incredible goodness—“flowing with milk and honey,” as it is repeatedly described. But it still had to be conquered by careful, persistent, and intelligent human action over a long period of time.  In the beginning of the conquest of the Promised Land, the walls of Jericho fell down to make clear God’s presence and power. But that never happened again. The Israelites had to take the remaining cities through hand-to-hand warfare, though always with divine assistance. What was then true of the Promised Land of the Israelites is true of individual human beings who come to God. The Israelites were saved or delivered by grace just as surely as we are. But in both cases, grace means we are to be—and God enables us to be—active to a degree we have never been before. Paul’s picture of grace is this: “And Go...

TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - Observe the habits that dwell in your body: not looking at people when they speak to you, interrupting them (if not aloud, then in your head), looking around at other people when someone speaks to you, shutting down when certain people speak to you, pacing or wagging your finger at people when you get wound up about a topic.  Reflect on the inner qualities that must exist in the various aspects of you and how they do or don’t dictate to your body. If you were to use your body to love God and others as yourself, what sort of retraining would the different parts of you need? Johnson, Jan; Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice: Experiments in Spiritual Transformation (Redefining Life) (p. 31). The Navigators. Kindle Edition.   

THE LOUDEST VOICE WITHIN ME - As our choices settle into character traits, they are “farmed out” to our body, where they occur more or less automatically without our having to think about what we are doing. But because we are trained in a world of wrongness and evil, the body comes to act wrongly before we think and has motions of sin in its members, as Paul said (see Romans 7:23), which may thwart the true intent of our spirit or will by leaping ahead of it.  Good intentions alone do not ensure proper action. This is marked by Jesus’ words: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Matthew 26:41). In this state, the body dictates to our soul (our executive center), which dictates to the mind and feelings, then to our spirit, and back to God. Conversely, the “life from above” flows the opposite way: from God to the spirit, to our mind and feelings, to our soul, and then to our body and its social context.  The former order (in which the body dictates) is characteristic o...

TODAY’S EXPERIMENT -  Come before God for the purpose of worship and prayer. Respond to God about this divine idea of giving humans choice, or the ability, to exercise their will. What sort of God is so generous as to share with persons the capacity to originate things and events, to exercise freedom and creativity? What sort of God allows humans to move outside his influence with power to do what is good or evil? Ponder why God chooses to give us humans such freedom.  As you are ready, offer thoughts to God, such as this: Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen. (Romans 11:33-36) Johnson, Jan; Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice: Experiments in Spiritual Tra...

THE WELL-KEPT HEART - INTERPLAY OF WILL, THOUGHTS, AND FEELINGS - If one’s life is to be organized at all, it must be organized by the will (or heart or spirit). It can be pulled together from the inside only. The function of the will or heart is to organize our lives as a whole and to organize them around God. Volition, or choice, is the exercise of will, the capacity of the person to originate things and events that would not otherwise occur.  By originate I mean to include two of the things most prized in human life: freedom and creativity. These are really two aspects of the same thing when properly understood: the power to do what is good (or evil). The thought of a sin is not sin, and it is not even a temptation. Temptation is the thought plus the inclination to sin, possibly manifested by lingering over the thought or seeking it out. Without the inner yes, there is no sin. But sin itself is when we inwardly say yes to the temptation, when we would do the deed, even though we...

Years ago when I began attending twelve-step meetings, I felt great relief at hearing about the twelve-step goal of “becoming the same person all the time.” I felt as if I were many persons. I wanted one thing one minute and another thing the next minute. I wanted to do the right thing, but I also wanted to get unmet needs met, and that might take a little exaggerating or manipulation. Many times I said and did things I later regretted.  With this goal in mind, I began working on having an undivided heart: Teach me your way, LORD, that I may rely on your faithfulness; give me an undivided heart, that I may fear your name. (Psalm 86:11, NIV) To do so, I tried to take all my desires and focus them on God. It took a while to understand that the different aspects of myself needed retraining (reformation or, actually, transformation) before I could follow through to be the same person all the time.   TODAY’S EXPERIMENT  This may sound odd, but experiment with the psalmist...

THE HEART OF ME - The human heart is the executive center of a human life. This is where decisions and choices are made. Heart, spirit, and will refer to the same fundamental component of the person, but they do so under different aspects.  Will refers to that component’s power to initiate, to create, to bring about what did not exist before.  Spirit refers to its fundamental nature as distinct from physical reality.  And heart refers to its position in the human being, as the center or core to which every other component of the self owes its proper functioning. This heart or will or spirit interacts with the six basic aspects of individual human beings.  Thoughts (images, concepts, judgments, inferences)  Feelings (sensations, emotions)  Choice (will, decisions, character) Body (actions, interaction with the physical world)  Social context (personal and structural relations to others)  Soul (the factor that integrates all of the above to form one...

TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - What would it look like for you to “take love itself—God’s kind of love—into the depths of your being through the way of spiritual formation”? Consider the following next steps: - Read through a gospel, pausing to reflect on and relish each loving thing Jesus did. - Focus on just one loving thing Jesus did and picture his face as he did it. Maybe even put yourself in the place of the person Jesus loved for a moment and absorb that love. And then hold on to that loving look on Jesus’ face as you go to sleep tonight. - Spend a few minutes with the most loving person you know, thanking God the entire time for such a window into the heart of God standing right there next to you. - Do some small act of service for someone you love who is feeling overwhelmed: Make his bed, clean her toilet, or make that difficult telephone call he has been dreading. If you choose to do any of these things (which are examples of the spiritual disciplines of study, meditation, community, a...

WHO WE ARE, NOT HOW WE ACT  The primary learning in spiritual formation is not about how to act, just as the primary wrongness or problem in human life is not what we do. Often what human beings do is so horrible that we can be excused for thinking that all that matters is stopping it. But this is an evasion of the real horror : the heart from which the terrible actions come.  In both cases, it is who we are in our thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and choices—in the inner life—that counts. Profound transformation there is the only thing that can definitively conquer outward evil. It is very hard to keep this straight. Failure to do so is a primary cause of failure to grow spiritually. Love is patient and kind (see 1 Corinthians 13:4) so we, mistakenly, try to be loving by acting patiently and kindly—and we quickly fail . We should always do the best we can in action, of course; but little progress is to be made in that arena until we advance in love itself—the genuine inner r...

For some people, coming to faith has felt a bit like a bait-and-switch operation. At first, we hear mostly about grace. We hear we are saved by grace and that salvation is a free gift. But after a while, we are encouraged to try to be good. Yet it is exhausting to try to be good.  We think, This so-called free gift costs more than my puny self can buy. I’ll never make it. Consider the disastrous results of trying to be good. When we seem to be successful at growth, our spirituality becomes about us, not about the power of God in our lives. When we try hard and fail, we berate ourselves and spend tremendous energy on guilt and hopelessness instead of letting ourselves be drawn into the divine life by becoming fascinated with the great example of Jesus in the Gospels. This weight of trying to be good is an unnecessary load because the way to God is the way of all-encompassing inner transformation. God will work in us (see Philippians 1:6).  We have a part in cooperating with Go...

TRYING TO BE GOOD, Part 1 The external manifestation of Christlikeness is not the focus of Christian spiritual formation. When outward forms or behaviors are made the main emphasis, the process will be defeated, falling into deadening legalisms.  This has happened in the past, and it is a major barrier to wholeheartedly embracing spiritual formation in the present. Peculiar modes of dress, behavior, and organization are just not the point. Externalism, as we might call it, was a danger in New Testament times. But “that Christ be formed within you” is the eternal watchword of Christian spiritual formation (Galatians 4:19, PAR). This word is fortified by the deep moral and spiritual insight that while “the letter of the law kills, the spirit gives life” (2 Corinthians 3:6, PAR).  To illustrate briefly, Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew 5–7) refer to various wrong behaviors: acting out anger, looking to lust, heartless divorce, verbal manipulation, returnin...

When we say phrases such as, “He caught me off guard,” or, “That bad word just slipped out,” we refer to the truth that our outer actions aren’t accidental—they mirror our character within. When regrettable words “slip out,” we didn’t have time to dress up what was in our heart before it came tumbling out of our mouth.  Unsavory thoughts leak out in objectionable words and behavior. Such “slips” reveal publicly the private inner workings of our heart. Jesus explained that “the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45, NIV). Our task, then, is to cooperate with God in being changed on the inside so that we take on the personality of Christ.  As we let what is stored in our heart be transformed, we behave as Jesus would behave. If our insides are renovated, what comes out of us will bring about peace and righteousness. We won’t have to try to love. Unloving thoughts and actions simply won’t occur to us, just as loving ones will begin to spring up without our awareness....

 In many historical periods, as well as today, Christians have generally found their way into the divine life slowly and with great difficulty, if at all. Yet formation in Christ is not a mysterious, irrational process, something that strikes like lightning whenever and wherever it will, if at all. It is not something that is magically conferred upon us in the midst of curious rituals and antique practices. Spiritual experiences (such as Paul’s on the Damascus road) do not constitute spiritual formation, though sometimes they can be a meaningful part of it. One reason so many people fail to immerse themselves in the words of the New Testament (see quotations in previous devotion) is that the life they see there is so unlike what they know from their experience. This is true even though they may be quite faithful to their church and really do have Jesus Christ as their hope. The New Testament presentation of the life in Christ only discourages them or makes them feel hopeless. Why s...

Is it possible we rush to say, “Nobody’s perfect” because we’ve met so few people who show genuine love and move through life without superiority, insensitivity, or gossip? Maybe we have met a few but didn’t notice the beauty of their Christlikeness. Instead, we were impressed by other things—their ability to quote Bible verses or answer questions about world religions. Those who speak articulately about the Bible may draw our attention more than those who live a transformed life. Try picturing this hypothetical moment of dwelling on the beauty of God and the kingdom life: Let’s say I confessed to you my disgust with someone who annoyed me and how hopeless I felt about ever loving this person. What if instead of trying to make me feel better by saying, “Nobody’s perfect,” you said you believed in God’s power to transform me into a radical person who pays loving attention to those who annoy me? What if you prayed for me about this? What if later that day you encountered an annoying pers...

POSTLUDE  Now it is time to look back and to look forward: back to what we have studied in this book, and forward to our life, which lies ahead of us, where we will move onward in time to become the persons we will ever be, for eternity. In this book I have tried to clearly present the path of spiritual formation, the authentic formation of the human person, as seen in the people of Jesus Christ through the ages.  I have tried to gently ignore the many vessels of spiritual formation that litter the historical and contemporary landscapes and concentrate on the treasure: Jesus Christ himself, living with increasing fullness in every essential dimension of the personality of the individual devoted to him as Savior and Teacher. The renovation of the heart in Christlikeness—that is, in humanity as God always intended it—is not something that concerns the heart (spirit, will) alone.  The heart cannot be renovated if the other aspects of the person remain in the grip of evil. “...