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March 5 - March 12, 2025
The philosopher Dallas Willard used to say, “There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.”
Come, follow me.[11] 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.
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.
To a large number of Western Christians, he is a delivery mechanism for a particular theory of atonement, as if the only reason he came was to die, not to live.
Apprenticeship to Jesus—that is, following Jesus—is a whole-life process of being with Jesus for the purpose of becoming like him and carrying on his work in the world.
To follow Jesus, then, meant to walk alongside him in a posture of listening, learning, observation, obedience, and imitation.[22]
But as far as I can tell, not one time in the entire New Testament is disciple used as a verb. Not once.[24]
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.
Christian: 3x Apprentice: 269x
but quite a few surveys put the number of Americans who are following Jesus at around 4 percent.[31] So… Christians: 63 percent Apprentices: 4 percent
“A person who is simply a man of faith is [not] a disciple.”[32]
The problem is, in the West, we have created a cultural milieu where you can be a Christian but not an apprentice of Jesus.
Much preaching of the gospel today does not call people to a life of discipleship. Following Jesus is seen as optional—a post-conversion “second track” for those who want to go further. Tragically, this has created a two-tier church, where a large swath of people who believe in God and even regularly attend church have not re-architected their daily lives on the foundation of apprenticeship to Jesus.[33]
Short history tour: From at least World War II on, in many circles, the gospel was preached in such a way that a person could become a Christian without becoming an apprentice of Jesus. As I said, discipleship was optional—something to consider later if one were into that sort of thing. Many “converts” then felt that evangelism was a bait and switch: You come for the “free gift” of eternal life, raise your hand and pray the prayer, but then you are told to “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.” The problem is, that’s not what people signed up for. This split between evangelism
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And there it is—the fatal flaw: This version of the gospel has no call to apprentice yourself to Jesus. It normally requires you to say a one-time prayer, believe a set of doctrines about God, and attend church, thereby ensuring you go to heaven when you die.
For Jesus, salvation is less about getting you into heaven and more about getting heaven into you.
“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.”[46]
this tragic misunderstanding of salvation “tends to produce consumers of Jesus’ merit” rather than “disciples of Jesus’ Way.”[48]
He believes that you can live under the loving gaze of the Father; you can also become the kind of person who is like the Father—loving and joyful and full of peace, patience, and kindness. You can grow into a person of happiness, even in times of great suffering. The kind of person who is not afraid of suffering or even of death, who is free of the emotional need for things to go your own way. You can fulfill your purpose. You can even learn to do many of the incredible things Jesus did. To see the signs of his kingdom manifest in your ordinary life. It’s possible—all of it. But it’s not
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All of us are abiding. The question isn’t, Are you abiding? It’s, What are you abiding in? All of us have a source we are rooted in, a kind of default setting we return to. An emotional home. It’s where our minds go when they’re not busy with tasks, where our feelings go when we need solace, where our bodies go when we have free time, and where our money goes after we pay the bills.
Apprenticeship to Jesus is about turning your body into a temple, a place of overlap between heaven and earth—an advance sign of what one day Jesus will do for the entire cosmos, when heaven and earth are at long last reunited as one. This is the single most extraordinary opportunity in the entire universe: to let your body become God’s home. And it’s set before you every single day.
“persistent practice” and “mental habits.” Through practice we can train (or retrain) our minds to rest in God amid the entropy of life. But not without the use of habit.
But these are habits—not the law of gravity—and can be broken. A new, grace-filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps toward keeping God before us. Soon our minds will return to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the north….If God is the great longing of our souls, He will become the polestar of our inward beings.[23]
through habit you can co-create with Jesus a mind that is fixed on God all through the day.
Should you pursue this, the early days of “practicing the presence of God” will likely be difficult and humbling, yet joyful—difficult because we all forget God constantly and get sucked back into hurry; humbling for the same reason, but full of joy and happiness as we begin to tap into the deepest ache of our souls: the desire for God.
we become more loving by experiencing love, not by hearing about it in a lecture or reading about it in a book.
It’s just that you reach a point in any relationship, but especially with God, where words and even thoughts no longer carry you forward toward intimacy. They bring you so far but not all the way. They may even hold you back.
All I mean by mystic is a disciple of Jesus who wants to experience spiritually what is true of them theologically.
Prayer—of any kind—will always remain a chore, another task on our religious to-do list, until we come to realize that Jesus himself is our “exceedingly great reward.”[50] That the reward for following Jesus is, well, Jesus. It’s the sheer joy of friendship with him.
Long before the skull was the trademark aesthetic of punk rock bands, motorcycle gangs, or Hollywood pirates, it was the visual motif of Christian monks.
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.
live for your eulogy, not your résumé.
The single most important question is, Are we becoming more loving?
It would be much harder for God to hate us than to love us, because love is who God is inside his deepest self.
It’s agape—to will the good of another ahead of your own, no matter the cost or sacrifice that may require.
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.
Spiritual formation in the North American church is often truncated to this three-part formula: Go to church. Read your Bible and pray. Give. I’m all for these three practices (all three are in my Rule of Life). But in my experience, many Christians get thirty years down the road with this as their template for discipleship and don’t feel all that different; they just feel older.
In both my personal and pastoral experience, the problem is not that people don’t want to change (most do) or aren’t trying to change (most are); it’s that they do not know how to change.
But the main function of self-effort in our formation is to do what we can do—make space to surrender to God via the practices of Jesus—so God can do what we can’t do: heal, liberate, and transform us into people of love.
while the four Gospels have dozens of stories of Jesus instantly healing people’s bodies (after which, by the way, he almost always gave them instructions to go and do something as a next step), he doesn’t seem to do the same with people’s characters. There is not a single instance in which he simply waved his hand to take away an ugly habit or personality trait in one of his apprentices.
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 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.
Jesus begins and ends the Sermon on the Mount with a call to practice.
most people think they will grow to be more like Jesus through trying hard rather than training hard, when the exact opposite is true.
the practices of Jesus, also known as the spiritual disciplines. These are essentially activities we undertake as disciples of Jesus that re-habituate the automatic responses of sin in our bodies and replace them with the intuitions of the Spirit.
You want to become a non-anxious presence in the world. How do you do it? Do you listen to a good sermon on Matthew 6 and then just go out and…not worry? How’s that working for you? I’m guessing it’s not. For most of us, being told to live without anxiety is like being told to run a marathon. We can’t do it. Not yet. So, how do we live without worry? Well, we have to become the kinds of people who have learned to trust in God so deeply that we are free of fear. To do that, we must train (or retrain) our minds and bodies. So, yes, we listen to a good sermon on Matthew 6, and…we practice
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As Bonhoeffer said, “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”[55] He called this the “wish dream” of an ideal church. No actual church can ever live up to the wish dream of an ideal church.
how long someone has been following Jesus is a major factor in their maturity level, but so is how much time they give to Jesus in their daily life.
But for all the genuine value it’s added to the world, digital technology has had at least three disastrous effects on our generation’s formation. It’s formed us to expect life to be Easy Fast And controllable
