More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 1 - March 17, 2025
The problem is, in the West, we have created a cultural milieu where you can be a Christian but not an apprentice of Jesus.
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]
can you imagine how many of those problems would effectively be solved overnight if the billions of living humans who identify as Christians all became apprentices of Jesus? If their driving aim was to approach every challenge as Jesus would?
Jesus’ gospel was that Israel’s long story had reached its climax in him—that he had come to reunite heaven and earth and usher in the kingdom of God, a God-saturated society of peace and justice and love. Jesus’ central message was that this in-breaking kingdom is available now, to all. That anyone, no matter who you are, where you come from, or what your station in life is, can enter this kingdom and be “blessed” (or “happy”) with God. You can have this new kind of life if you will put your trust and confidence in Jesus for the whole of your life.
we’d need some serious training in how to access this extraordinary new society and enter the inner life of God that’s been made available to us through Jesus. We’d need access to a new power to break off our old life habits (that belong to the kingdom of this world) and become who we were always meant to be: people of the new kingdom.
We are often told, “It’s not about what you do; it’s about what Jesus has done for you.”
But Jesus didn’t go around beating up on self-effort. As the saying goes, “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning.”[46] Don’t conflate the two.
Starting right where you are, you can follow him into a life in the kingdom that fulfills your deepest desires. 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
...more
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.
“Make your home in me, as I make my home in you.”
The question isn’t, Are you abiding? It’s, What are you abiding in?
whatever we “abide” in will determine the “fruit” of our lives, for good or for ill.
Apprenticeship to Jesus is about turning your body into a temple, a place of overlap between heaven and earth—an
The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds….This is the fundamental secret of caring for our souls.
we become more loving by experiencing love, not by hearing about it in a lecture or reading about it
Simone Weil defined prayer as “absolutely unmixed attention.”[40]
It is saying yes to God with my whole being but without words.”[42]
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]
Part of us deeply desires God, and part of us resists him and wants to rule over our own kingdoms,
self-giving love is twisted into “a little me time for Dad to recharge,” which often does nothing but deepen our bondage to self, not liberate it.
call to apprentice under Jesus is a call not to do more but to do less.
distinguished between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”[5]
remind yourself to live for your eulogy, not your résumé.
the question isn’t, Are you being formed? It’s, Who or what are you being formed into?
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]
S. Lewis claimed that all of us are on a trajectory to either life or death, and the farther we follow that trajectory, the more pronounced its effect on us becomes. He said we are either becoming “immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”[10]
Much of Christians’ current disillusionment over their lack of transformation is because they have never learned their part in spiritual formation. But our job isn’t to self-save; it’s to surrender.
The single most important question is, Are we becoming more loving? Not, Are we becoming more biblically educated?
Are you growing in love not just for your friends and family but for your enemies?
It’s agape—to will the good of another ahead of your own, no matter the cost or sacrifice that may require.
spiritual formation as “a process of being formed into the image of Christ for the sake of others”[20] and harps on the “for the sake of others” piece. Without this crucial element, formation will inevitably devolve into a private, therapeutic self-help spirituality that is, honestly, just a Christianized version of radical individualism,
Christlikeness is possible, but it’s not natural. In fact, the gravity and inertia of life will likely take you in the opposite direction.
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. We don’t have a good grasp on how the human soul goes from spiritual birth to spiritual maturity. So we have a lot of spiritual adolescents, but few elders.
Self-effort and grace are partners, not competitors locked in a tug-of-war for glory. 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.
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.
“spiritual bypassing”—trying to skip over our pain and just have Jesus “fix” us.
Jesus didn’t zap them; he just kept teaching, rebuking, and loving them, giving them time to grow and mature.
Our environment has warped us. Call it “secondary trauma,” as psychologists do, or “the world” as Jesus did; it’s like breathing secondhand smoke
Until we come to see sin as far more than the breaking of judicial laws, we will likely remain stuck in whole-life dysfunction.
sin as a kind of disease of the soul and salvation as the healing of the whole person.
Is this how you think about sin? As a fatal disease? Is this how you think about Jesus? As the physician of the soul?
Some translations say “healed you,” and others say “saved you.” Why? Because salvation is a kind of healing.
Salvation is not just about getting back on the right side of God’s mercy through judicial acquittal; it’s about having your soul healed by God’s loving touch.
not only can we hold unreality in our minds, but also we can come to believe that unreality. We can put our trust in lies and then, through our bodies, live as if those lies were true.
It undermines the untrue stories we believe; it says, “This is true, and this is a lie.” It shifts our trust. It rewires our mental maps to reality, making it possible for us to live in alignment with reality in such a way that we flourish and thrive according to God’s wisdom and good intentions.
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us,”[51] because we become like our mental picture of God. For this reason, spiritual formation in the Way of Jesus begins with the healing of our false images of God. If a person’s vision of God is distorted—if they view him as harsh, demeaning, or chronically angry…or as liberal, laissez-faire, and simply there to champion their sexual pleasure—the more religious they become, the worse they become. Because we become like who we believe God is.
Jesus does set a high bar, he’s incredibly in tune with the limits of our humanity. Jesus assumes that we will lust and want to get a divorce and call people names and love money and worry about our future. But what’s easy to miss is that Jesus also assumes that living his Way is going to take practice.
Jesus begins and ends the Sermon on the Mount with a call to practice.
rarely do we learn how to rely on grace and draw on God’s energies when we most need them.
let’s say you want to obey Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount to “not worry.” 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.
