Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did.

by John Mark Comer

This is an alien idea in the writings of the New Testament. For example, in the literary design of the Gospels, you have two recurring groups: the apprentices and the crowds.[34]

The apprentices included all Jesus’ followers—the twelve apostles, but also many others, including women. The crowds were simply everyone else. There is no third category of “Christians” who generally agree with most of what Jesus was saying but don’t follow him or make

For Jesus, salvation is less about getting you into heaven and more about getting heaven into you.

But Jesus didn’t go around beating up on self-effort. As the saying goes, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.”[46] Don’t

Masters of the Way of Jesus have long called this “contemplation.” The word contemplation means different things to different people at different times in church history, but at its most basic, it just means looking at God, looking at you, in love. The word contemplation comes straight out of the New Testament itself, from a key passage in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians: We all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.[33] The Greek word for “contemplate” here is katoptrizō, and it means to “gaze or behold.” To “contemplate the Lord’s glory” is to direct the inner gaze of your heart at the Trinitarian community of love. As the psalmist David put it, it’s “to gaze on the beauty of the Lord.”[34] To the degree we do so, we are “transformed into his image.” Meaning, we become like what we gaze at—Jesus. “With ever-increasing glory,” meaning, we become more and more beautiful, like Jesus, over time, through simple, daily contemplation.

We let God love us into people of love.

“John Mark, sit in your sin and let God love you.” He did not mean “Keep sinning and don’t feel guilty.” He meant “When you sin [and I will, as you will], don’t hide it from God. Hold it before God, with no excuses, no blame shifting, no denial, just utter vulnerability, and let God love you as you are. And then let God love you into who you have the potential to become.”

The word Jesus used for “room” is tameion in Greek, and it can also be translated “inner room.”[56]

The apprentice is not above the rabbi, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their rabbi.[6]

This, then, is spiritual formation: the process of being formed into a person of self-giving love through deepening surrender to and union with the Trinity.

Because knowing something is not the same as doing something, which is still not the same as becoming the kind of person who does something naturally as a by-product of a transformed inner nature.

Ignatius of Antioch, a first-century church father who was mentored by the apostle John. (This will give you insight into how early Christian leaders thought about salvation.) He said, But our Physician is the only true God…Jesus the Christ….He became subject to corruption, that He might free our souls from death and corruption, and heal them, and might

restore them to health, when they were diseased with ungodliness and wicked lusts.[40] Is this how you

Confession is a core practice of the Way, and contrary to what many think, it’s not at all about beating yourself up in public. It’s about courageously naming your woundedness and wickedness in the presence of loving community as you journey together toward wholeness. It’s about not only the confession of sin but also the confession of what is true—who you are, who Christ is, and who you truly are in Christ. It’s about coming out of hiding into acceptance, leaving behind all shame.

This means we must begin by setting all that we are before God’s loving eye. It is only when we are honest with God, others, and ourselves about all the ways we fall short of love that we enter into the transformational process of becoming more loving. Put another way, the more we hide, the less we heal.

The stories we come to believe give shape to a thousand daily decisions, they give shape to what we do (or don’t do) and who we become. As my friend Pete Hughes of King’s Cross Church in London likes to say, “The story you live in is the story you live out.”

Suffering is sadness leaving the body.

Learning theorists frame apprenticeship as a four-stage training process: I do; you watch. I do; you help. You do; I help. You do; I watch.

Now, track with me, as this is a very simple idea that’s lost on so many Christians: If you are an apprentice of Jesus, your end goal is to grow and mature into the kind of person who can say and do all the things Jesus said and did.

There’s no official list of what Jesus did (just as there’s no official list of the practices), but I find it helpful to categorize Jesus’ ministry into three basic rhythms: Making space for the gospel Preaching the gospel Demonstrating the gospel Rhythm #1: Making space for the

You see, for Rabbi Jesus, meals were not a “boundary marker” but a sign of God’s great welcome into the kingdom; not a way to keep people out, but to invite people

This practice of eating and drinking with people far from God is what the New Testament writers call “hospitality.” The word is philoxenia in Greek, and it’s a compound word: philo means “love,” and xenos means “stranger, foreigner, or guest.”[27] Meaning: Hospitality is the opposite of xenophobia. It’s the love of the stranger, not the hate or fear of the “other.” It’s the act of welcoming the outsider

in and, in doing so, turning guests into neighbors and neighbors into family in God.

The writer Rosaria Butterfield called this act “radically ordinary hospitality”: Radically ordinary hospitality—those who live it see strangers as neighbors and neighbors as family of God. They recoil at reducing a person to a category or a label. They see God’s image reflected in the eyes of every human being on earth…. Those who live out radically ordinary hospitality see their homes not as theirs at all but as God’s gift to use for the furtherance of his kingdom. They open doors; they seek out the underprivileged. They know that the gospel comes with a house key.[31] This was Jesus’ way.

we’re not responsible for outcomes any more than a witness is responsible for the ruling in a trial. People have agency, free will; salvation is some kind of a mysterious mix of God’s initiative and human response. Our job isn’t to “save” people; it’s to say with the apostle John, “We have seen, and bear witness, and declare to you” that “the life was manifested.”

#5 Live a beautiful life I love this line from the apostle Peter: Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.[42] The Greek word translated “good” here is kalos; it can be translated “beautiful” or “lovely” or even “shapely.”[43] The idea is to live a radiant and compelling life, not hidden away in a Christian utopia but “among”—right in the thick of—“the pagans” (not a derogatory term in the ancient world).

To possess God, we must give him away. As the missionary Frank Laubach said it, “I must talk about God, or I cannot keep Him in my mind. I must give Him away in order to have Him.”

this sounds next to impossible, remember that the only way we can do any of this stuff is “in the power of the Holy Spirit.” Yes, we train under Jesus, but these aren’t skills we master through the right technique (though skill is often required); they are signs of the in-breaking kingdom that we channel through our bodies in love.

you are going about your ordinary life, live with your eyes wide open to see what the Father is doing, all around you, and then to partner with him. As Jesus said, “I only do what I see the Father doing.”[64] Jesus had this uncanny ability to see people—to see what God was doing in them, right then, right there—and to unleash God’s power and purposes for them in each moment.

The way we turn our work from “marking time” into “ministry” isn’t by becoming a pastor or starting a nonprofit; it’s by doing whatever we do the way we imagine Jesus would do

it if he were us

—with skill, diligence, integrity, humility, the kingdom’s...

Whenever I officiate a wedding, I quote a line from the pastor and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who, in a letter from prison, said to a young couple on their wedding day, “Today, you are young and very much in love and you think that your love can sustain your marriage.

It can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love.”

Stephen Covey once said, “We achieve inner peace when our schedule aligns with our values.”

One of the best ways to do that is, as an Ignatian scholar put it to me, to “pay attention to your jealousy.” He meant that playfully, as in: Pay attention when you see a feature of another person’s life and think, I wish my life was like that. Then craft a Rule to move in that direction.

#1 They are not a barometer of spiritual maturity Yes, a disciple is a “disciplined one,” and yes, it’s likely that a more mature disciple of Jesus will live by a rigorous regimen of practices and a less mature disciple will be more chaotic and noncommittal. But. Love is the metric of spiritual maturity, not discipline.

I know some people who never miss a week of church, read through the entire Bible every year, and never watch R-rated movies (all good things) but who are still self-righteous, controlling, fueled by anger, blind to their own shadow, and, at times, incredibly unloving.

Love is the metric to pay attention

But spiritual disciplines are simply a means of appropriating or growing toward the life that God graciously offers.”

If you do the practices for the wrong reasons (to look good, one-up, or mask your shame), they work against your formation, not for it; they become a kind of parasitic infestation on your soul.

discipline is any activity I can do by direct effort that will eventually enable me to do what I currently cannot do by direct effort.

do what we can do—read Scripture, pray, practice Sabbath, eat a meal with community—to be formed into people who can eventually do what we currently cannot do: live and love like Jesus.

Ancient Christians called this “synergy”—working not for God, but with God. God works, and we work. God has a part, and we have a part. Our part is to slow down, make space, and surrender to God; his part is to transform us—we simply do not have that power. Utilizing the disciplines, we can say with Paul, “God is working in [me], giving [me] the desire and the power to do what pleases him.”

But it must be said: Anything can become a spiritual discipline if we offer it to God as a channel of grace.

Dr. Robert Mulholland defines spiritual disciplines as “acts of loving obedience by which we offer our brokenness and bondage to God for healing and liberation.”

Our job is just to offer them back to God for the only pure motive there is: joyful love.

Centuries ago, Saint Isaac the Syrian said, “Speech is the organ of the present world. Silence is the mystery of the world to come.”[40] In silence, we enter into the mystery of the world to come—and into God himself.

Talking to God—praying premade prayers like the psalms or liturgy, or singing prayers at church, and so on Talking with God—conversing with God about your life. Lifting up the details of your life before God with gratitude (talking to him about what is good in your life and world), lament (talking to him about what is evil in your life and world), and petition and intercession (calling on God to fulfill his promises to overcome evil with good) Listening to God—hearing God’s voice through quiet listening, Lectio Divina, the prophetic, and more Being with God—just looking at God, looking at you, in love (also called “contemplative prayer”)

one non-negotiable rule: You have to show up for prayer and you have to show up regularly.