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

by John Mark Comer

But at its worst, this is laziness, pure and simple, because it’s far easier to go to church once a week chasing a spiritual high and angle for a download from heaven than to do the daily, unglamorous work of discipleship. This approach can be just another search for a quick fix, a shortcut, what the psychologist John Welwood called “spiritual bypassing”—trying to skip over our pain and just have Jesus “fix” us. Cue the rise of conference junkies chasing the next spiritual high or people who show up at church every time the doors are open but refuse to go to therapy. Jesus is in the business of healing souls. But 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. The opposite is true—we see their stubborn sinfulness live on for years. Jesus didn’t zap them; he just kept teaching, rebuking, and loving