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

by John Mark Comer

Any skilled con artist knows the key to deceiving your mark is to get them to believe your scheme was their idea. Translation: The key to getting people to follow you is to convince them they aren’t following anyone at all.

What we are led to believe are just ads, news links, retweets, and random digital flotsam are, in reality, mass behavior modification techniques intentionally designed to influence how we think, feel, believe, shop, vote, and live. To quote the tech philosopher Jaron Lanier, “What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.”[5]

For those of us who desire to follow Jesus, here is the reality we must turn and face: If we’re not being intentionally formed by Jesus himself, then it’s highly likely we are being unintentionally formed by someone or something else.[6]

It’s only human to be drawn to someone—a celebrity or guru or historical figure—and to desire to become like them. This is part of how God wired us to grow. We all have an ideal life we aspire to, and when we find a person or idea system that seems to embody what we want, we “follow” them, we put our trust in them. Or, in more Christian language, we “believe.”

I am one of many people who have found Jesus of Nazareth to be the most radiant light to ever grace the human scene. I’m an avid reader, and through the gift of literature, I have peered inside the minds of some of history’s greatest thinkers. All of them have laudable traits (and some not so laudable ones too). But the longer I live and learn, the more I’m convinced that Jesus has no real competition, ancient or modern. In my estimation, no other thinker, philosopher, leader, philosophy, or ideology has the coherence, sophistication, and deep inner resonance of Jesus and his Way. Much less the staggering beauty.

There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.

Contrary to what many assume, Jesus did not invite people to convert to Christianity. He didn’t even call people to become Christians (keep reading…); he invited people to apprentice under him into a whole new way of living. To be transformed.

My thesis is simple: Transformation is possible if we are willing to arrange our lives around the practices, rhythms, and truths that Jesus himself did, which will open our lives to God’s power to change. Said another way, we can be transformed if we are willing to apprentice ourselves to Jesus.

Every rabbi had his “yoke”—a Hebrew idiom for his set of teachings, his way of reading Scripture, his take on how to thrive as a human being in God’s good world. How you, too, could taste a little of what they’d tasted…

“The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.”[10]

“The Jewish people believed that becoming a great scholar of the Scriptures represented life’s supreme achievement. In such a culture, it made sense that the Messiah should be the greatest of teachers. No wonder Jesus became a Jewish rabbi.”[13]

Jewish kids started school around five years old at the local bet sefer (“the house of the book”), which was the equivalent of elementary school. Normally the bet sefer was built onto the side of the synagogue and run by a full-time scribe or teacher. The curriculum was the Torah, and in an oral culture, by the age twelve or thirteen, most kids would have the entire Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—memorized. At that point, the vast majority of students went home. They would apprentice in the family business or help run the farm.

But the best and brightest would go on to a second level of education, called bet midrash (“the house of learning”), where they would continue their studies. By the age of seventeen, they would have memorized—wait for it—the entire Old Testament.[15]

But the best of the best of the best would apply to apprentice under a rabbi. Now, this was really hard to get into. Apprenticeship programs were the equivalent of the Ivy League today but even more exclusive. You had to find a rabbi whose yoke you were drawn to and then beg to join his band of students.

Now, let’s say you were one of the lucky few who became an apprentice to a rabbi. From that day on, your entire life was organized around three driving goals: To be with your rabbi Jesus himself invited his disciples to “be with him.”[18] You would leave your family, your village, your trade, and follow your rabbi twenty-four seven. You were a student, but class wasn’t MWF from 11–11:50am. “Class” was life. You would spend every waking moment with your rabbi—sleeping at his side, eating at his table, sitting at his feet—and end up, after long hours walking behind him from town to town, covered in his dust. All. Day. Every. Day. To become like your rabbi Jesus had this great line about how “the apprentice is not above the rabbi, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their rabbi.”[19] That was the heart and soul of apprenticeship—being with your master for the purpose of becoming like your master. You would copy his tone of voice, his mannerisms, his figures of speech. You wanted to be him. Finally, your goal was… To do as your rabbi did The whole point of apprenticeship was to train under a rabbi in order to one day become a rabbi yourself. If you made it through the gauntlet of discipleship (and that was a real if), then, when he thought you were ready, your rabbi would turn to you and say something like “Okay, kid, I give you my blessing. Go, and make disciples.” This was what it meant to be a disciple. This is still what it means to be a disciple.

Here’s why: If disciple is something that is done to you (a verb),[25] then that puts the onus of responsibility for your spiritual formation on someone else, like your pastor, church, or mentor. But if disciple is a noun—if it’s someone you are or are not—then no one can “disciple” you but Rabbi Jesus himself.

The problem is, in the West, we have created a cultural milieu where you can be a Christian but not an apprentice of Jesus.

The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who…are identified as “Christians” will become disciples—students, apprentices, practitioners—of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.[35]

You see, Jesus is not looking for converts to Christianity; he’s looking for apprentices in the kingdom of God.

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

Christianity is more than a theory about the universe, more than teachings written down on paper; it is a path along which we journey—in the deepest and richest sense, the way of life.[49]

Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road [hodos/way] that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road [hodos/way] that leads to life, and only a few find it.[52]

One interpretation of this teaching is that only a few people are “going to heaven when they die” and that everyone else is on the train to the eternal torture chamber. Here’s a different interpretation that I find more compelling: The Way of Jesus is “narrow,” meaning, it is a very specific way to live. And if you follow it, it will lead you to life, both in this age and the age to come.

Jesus invited all to apprentice under him into life in the kingdom of God. And nothing’s changed over time: We’re all still invited, no matter who we are or what we’ve done. Oppressed or oppressor. Upwardly mobile or entrenched in poverty. Polymath or high school dropout. Fastidious health nut or addict. Mentally sound or not. Virgin or sexually promiscuous. Married, divorced, or divorced again. Hyper-religious or fallen away. Full of faith or racked by doubt.

“God said, ‘Vengeance is mine.’ ” “I don’t believe in God,” replies Dantès. Then comes the priest’s haunting line: “It doesn’t matter. He believes in you.”[57]

This is the first and most important goal of apprenticeship to Jesus: to be with him, to spend every waking moment aware of his presence and attentive to his voice. To cultivate a with-ness to Jesus as the baseline of your entire life.

In all of Jesus’ teachings, what we call God is, in a mysterious but beautiful way, a flow of love between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. God is a community of self-giving love; each member of the Trinity, as theologians call them, is distinct yet somehow still one. To be with the Spirit is to be with Jesus, and to be with Jesus is to be with the Father. It’s to enter the flow of love within the inner life of God himself.

If we are rooted in the infinite scroll of social media, it will form us, likely into people who are angry, anxious, arrogant, simplistic, and distracted.[11] If we are rooted in the endless queues of our streaming platforms of choice, they will form us too, likely into people who are lustful, restless, and bored, never present to what is…

The most important thing that happens between God and the human soul is to love and to be loved.[32]

Just keep praying. Stay with it. The one non-negotiable rule of prayer is this: Keep showing up. Stay with the process until you experience what all the fuss is about. Don’t stop until you know by direct experience what I’m stumbling to name with words.

When you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.[55]

Jesus’ life template was based on a rhythm of retreat and return, like breathing in and then out. Jesus would retreat: He would slip away from the noise and press of the crowd and find a place where he could pray, alone or sometimes with a few very close friends. He would inhale. Then he would exhale, or return: He would come back to preach and teach and heal and deliver and offer love.

“Spend one hour a day in adoration of your Lord and never do anything that you know is wrong.”[64]

Jesus is calling you to slow down and simplify your life around the three goals of an apprentice: To be with your rabbi, become like him, and do as he did. To make apprenticeship to him the animating center of gravity for your entire life.

“The number one problem you will face is time,” he said, because “most people are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually vibrant lives.”[69]

Our souls were not created for the kind of speed to which we have grown accustomed. Thus, we are a people who are out of rhythm, a people with too much to do and not enough time to do it…. Our lives can easily take us to the brink of burnout. The pace we live at is often destructive. The lack of margin is debilitating. We are worn out. In all of this, the problem before us is not just the frenetic pace we live at but what gets pushed out from our lives as a result; that is, life with God.[70]

What you are now, we used to be. What we are now, you will be.

Résumé virtues are what we talk about in life—where we work, what we’ve accomplished, what accolades we’ve received, and so on. Eulogy virtues are what others talk about when we die—namely, the people we were, the fabric that made up our character, and the relationships that defined our sojourn on this earth.

To “remind yourself that you are going to die” is to remind yourself to live for your eulogy, not your résumé. It’s to not waste your precious, fleeting time here but to focus on what matters in the grand scheme of eternity—becoming a person of love through union with Jesus.

Spiritual formation is not optional. Every thought you think, every emotion you let shape your behavior, every attitude you let rest in your body, every decision you make, each word you speak, every relationship you enter into, the habits that make up your days, whether or not you have social media (if you do, how you use it), how you respond to pain and suffering, how you handle failure or success—all these things and more are forming us into a particular shape.[8] Stasis is not on the menu. We are being either transformed into the love and beauty of Jesus or malformed by the entropy of sin and death.

“We become either agents of God’s healing and liberating grace, or carriers of the sickness of the world.”[9]

we are either becoming “immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”[10]

Most people over the age of eighty are either the best or the worst people you know. Hear me; I do not mean this in an ageist way. Just the opposite, in fact. Most twentysomethings I know are just kind of mid, as my teenage kids would say. They aren’t saints or potential terrorists; they’re just normal. This isn’t true of most elderly people I know. Run through your mental Rolodex of people past eighty: Most of them are either the most gracious, happy, grateful, patient, loving, self-giving people you know, just happy to be alive and sitting in the room with you, or the most bitter, manipulative, spiteful people you know, oozing emotional poison into their family lines and reveling in others’ pain. Sure, some are in the middle of the bell curve, but most are noticeably to one side.

“The best decade of your life will be your seventies, the second best will be your eighties, and the third will be your sixties.” By best he did not mean the happiest (though I expect that too) but our richest and most joyful and helpful to others.

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.

Losing strategy #2: More Bible study A lot of churches operate on the assumption that as a person’s knowledge of the Bible increases, their maturity will increase with it. I have been around Bible-teaching churches for my entire life, and I can assure you this is, at best, wildly insufficient.

The doctrine of original sin means…that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf grows wider and wider.[35]

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.

The best example of confession I can think of is, again, from AA. When people say “Hi, my name is _____, and I’m an alcoholic” to introduce themselves, that’s confession, far more than saying sorry to God in our minds at church.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”[44]