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

by John Mark Comer

Name your malaise: political polarization, climate change, looming global war, the mental health epidemic, addiction, Christian

nationalism, widespread hypocrisy

among Christian leaders, our simple inabil...

If we are rooted in the pursuit of hedonism—another drink, another toke, or another hookup to take the edge off the pain and let us find a moment’s peace—that will form us as well, likely into people who are compulsive, addictive, and running from our pain and, simultaneously, our healing.

But if we are rooted in the inner life of God…that will also form us. It will slowly grow the “fruit of the Spirit” in our life: “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

Where is your emotional home? What do you return to in your quiet moments? Where do you go to find solace and joy? What would it look like for you to make your home inside God?

And like all skills, it will take practice to master… Turning

God into a habit When you first come awake at the beginning of the day, where does your mind naturally go? When you lay your head on your pillow after a long, tiring day, what are your final thoughts as you drift off to sleep? In the little moments of space throughout your day—waiting in line for your morning coffee, stuck in traffic, sitting down to a meal—where does your mind fall “without thinking” about it? Let’s be honest: For most of us, it’s not to Jesus.

It’s to our wants and needs, our fears, our wounds—to negative rumination. “The undirected mind tends toward chaos.” The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this phenomenon “psychic entropy.”[19] But on this, ancient Christian spirituality and bleeding-edge neuroscience agree: The mind can be retrained. Re-formed. Whether you call this process neuroplasticity or “the practice of the presence of God,” the powerful truth still stands: ...

Each time you get a little mental breath in the busyness of your life—that split second after you hit send on the email, the moment when you come to a red light, or those first conscious thoughts when you awake from sleep—through deliberate practice, you can train your mind to come back to God, come back to God, come back to God… Eventually your mind—and through it, your entire body and soul—will anchor itself in God, will “abide.” Even in all the noise and chaos of the modern world, with its traffic to suffer, meetings to attend, and babies to feed, you can develop a mind that is rooted in God. If the mind is a kind of portal to the soul and if “you become what you contemplate,”

But show me a person’s habits, and I will show you what they are truly most passionate about, most dedicated to, most willing to suffer for, and most in love with. And I will show you who they will become.

The most important thing that happens between God and the human soul is to love and to be loved.[32] Do you believe that? That the most important thing in all of life is to love and be loved by God?

The reward for following Jesus is Jesus

Find your secret place

Jesus said something about prayer that I find surprising (which is not surprising). His first piece of advice was not about what to pray but where:

Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life.

We live time-torn lives: We want to be with Jesus, but we just don’t have time to pray. We genuinely desire to grow into people of love, but our to-do lists are too long to make any serious attempt. We know rest is the secret to the spiritual journey, but Sabbath? That’s one-seventh of our lives! And yet we are totally unsatisfied: We feel hurried, anxious, far from God, spiritually shallow, and stuck in our self-defeating habits of behavior. The spiritual journey to reach the heights of the kingdom has hit a plateau; the Way has become a loop; Easter has become Groundhog Day.

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]

Case in point: elderly people. 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.

One of the many gifts of the addiction community has been its unsparing honesty about just how weak and in need of grace and community we all are, and just how inept our willpower is.[14]

But if you had to summarize Christlike character in one word, there would be no competition: love. Love is the acid test of spiritual formation.

If you want to chart your progress on the spirituality journey, test the quality of your closest relationships—namely, by love and the fruit of the Spirit. Would the people who know you best say you are becoming more loving, joyful, and at peace? More patient and less frustrated? Kinder, gentler, softening with time, and pervaded by goodness? Faithful, especially in hard times, and self-controlled?

17] He is the one who loves, the one who is loved, and the ultimate source of all love. And

remember, love as defined by Jesus is not just a nice feeling of affection. It’s an attitude, yes, of compassion, warmth, and delight, but it’s also an action. It’s agape—to will the good of another ahead of your own, no matter the cost or sacrifice that may require.

It’s formed us to expect life to be Easy Fast And controllable

After all, we can just slide our thumb and dinner will magically appear at our door twenty minutes later…. As a result, we are conditioned to expect quick, fast results with minimal effort, all at our beck and call. We often carry this mindset over into our formation—we assume we just need to find the right technique or life hack to solve the problem of the soul. But in reality, formation into the image of Jesus is Hard Slow And we are not in control There’s no killer app, no quick fix, no shortcut. The formation of the human soul is more like growing a vineyard than ordering takeout.

I do; you watch. I do; you help. You do; I help. You do; I watch.[5]

But listen carefully: In Jesus’ incarnation we also see what a real, true human being is like. We see what God had in mind from the beginning—what human beings have the potential to become if reunited with God.

So, when you read the miracle stories, don’t just think, Oh, well, Jesus was God. Yes, he was. But also think, Wow, this is what a real, true human being, walking in the power of the Spirit, is capable of.

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.

If you want more of God, give him away.

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.

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.”[35]

John Ortberg has observed, “We generally sin alone, but we heal together.”[48] Or as they say in AA: “I get drunk, we stay sober.”

Our deepest wounds come from relationships, and yet, so does our deepest healing.

But we simply are not meant to follow Jesus alone. The radical individualism of Western culture is not only a mental health crisis and growing social catastrophe; it’s a death blow to any kind of serious formation into Christlike love. Because it’s in relationships that we are formed and forged.

And here’s a key truth: Not only does the practice of service have the potential to mend our fractured world; it has the power to mend us. This is one of the most surprising things about the discipline. You think you’re there to help others, but you quickly realize you’re the one being helped.

You’re being set free of your ego, your entitlement, your self-obsession. When you serve in the Way of Jesus, the lines blur between servant and served, giver and recipient. Both give, and both receive. Dignity is restored in one; freedom won in the other.

Of course, another word we Christians love for death to self is surrender.

the great paradox of Christian spirituality is that it’s in dying that we live, it’s in losing our (false) self that we discover our (true) self, and it’s in giving up our desires that our deepest desires are finally sated.