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

by John Mark Comer

But what if it could look more like cooking a meal for your neighbor? Or gently offering a prophetic word to a friend? Or inviting your co-worker along to Alpha?[35] Or an act of quiet service in your city?

All around us people are in pain. The loneliness epidemic is raging—the percentage of Americans who say they have zero close friends has quadrupled since 1990;[36] 54 percent report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well.[37]

We ache to be seen, known, and loved.

let me offer five best practices for preaching the gospel in our secular culture.

#1 Offer hospitality

Learn to cook, set the table, and build community.

#2 Find where God is already working and join him We often start with the assumption that because someone isn’t a disciple of Jesus, God isn’t at work in their life. But what if we started with the opposite assumption? That God is all-present and full of love and drawn to sinners? That he is likely already at work in their life, gently inviting them in?

A witness is someone who sees or experiences something important for others to know about.

#5 Live a beautiful life

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 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).

Do not underestimate the raw power of simply practicing

But if those in the churches really are enjoying fullness of life, evangelism will be unstoppable and largely automatic.

I’m down for formation, emotional health, contemplative prayer—sign me up. But preaching the gospel? I think I’ll just mow my neighbor’s lawn and hope they figure out Jesus rose from the dead.

Hospitality is a great example.

“The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.”[56]

pariah.

Every person we meet is a God opportunity—to love and to serve.

Christ has no body now on earth but yours![66]

Work at its best is an expression of love.

“Work is love made visible.”[71]

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well….If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.”[72]

Work well; love well.

In my experience, he will often gently set a small burden of love on your heart—an idea that comes to mind in prayer, an unexpected opportunity in the middle of your day—to participate in the outward flow of the Trinity’s love to all.

You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.[2]

This will require most of us not only to arrange our days, but also to rearrange our days—from the hurry, digital addiction, and chronic exhaustion that we’ve been conditioned to believe is normal when, in reality, it’s truly insane.

This rule doesn’t mean a list of rules. It’s more of a set of practices,

If your emotional life is off kilter, if you feel far from God, stressed, anxious, and chronically mad, and you’re not becoming more of a person of love, then the odds are that something about the system of your life is poorly designed.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”[10]

What do I want to put into my life? and What do I want to keep out?

I hate to break it to you, but: You are being controlled, by your addiction to your phone,

Coming up with “rules” can put your life back under the control of your deepest desires.

The choice is yours: Rule, or be ruled.

iconoclast,

You have to say no more often than yes, because there are only so many hours in a day, and so many days in a life.

A Rule of Life is just that: an act of defiance against the powers and principalities of the digital empire. A way of staying true to your deepest desires: to be with Jesus, to let him form you into a person of love, to do whatever God put you on earth to do. A way of refusing to waste your life.

Of course, the challenge of a Rule of Life is that it will force you to clarify what your deepest desires are, to listen to your heart and your God.

But a Rule is very different: It’s self-generated from your internal desires, it has a ton of flexibility, it’s relationship based (not morality based), and it’s designed to index you toward your vision of the good life.

Love is the metric of spiritual maturity, not discipline.

Disciplines are the path, not the destination.

Love is the metric to pay attention to.

But keep in mind: many of the practices are incredibly joyful—Sabbath, sleep (yes, sleep is a practice of Jesus), feasting, gratitude, celebration, worship, etc. And many others, like solitude or fasting or serving, become joyful as we practice them over time.

The practices are disciplines based on the lifestyle of Jesus that create time and space for us to access the presence and power of the Spirit and, in doing so, be transformed from the inside out.

A discipline is a way to access power.

A spiritual discipline is a way to access not just your own power (through a kind of resistance training of your willpower muscle) but also God’s power.

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.

It could be walking your dog to let go of perfectionism, taking a spin class to care for your body, visiting an elderly neighbor who is lonely, driving in the slow lane, reading philosophy, or writing a proof for physics—you can offer any of these activities to God in hope that he will fill those spaces with his transforming presence.

And the good news is that transformation is possible, if we are willing to arrange (or rearrange) our lives around the practices, rhythms, and truths that Jesus himself did.

In silence, we enter into the mystery of the world to come—and into God himself.

You have to show up for prayer and you have to show up regularly.[43]