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

by John Mark Comer

So, yes, we listen to a good sermon on Matthew 6, and…we practice Sabbath; we set aside an entire day to practice trusting God. And…we spend time in the secret place, where we lay all our fears at God’s feet. And…we live in community, where others encourage us to trust in God. And…we practice generosity to free our hearts from empty loves. And…etc., etc. And over a long period of time, our anxiety is gradually replaced by a peace and unshakable trust in God. Training, not trying. Practice.

it’s vital that we participate in the “now and not yet” iteration of Jesus’ family, the church, which is both beautiful and deeply flawed.

Does the community call people up to a higher level of apprenticeship? Or does it devolve to the lowest common denominator of maturity (or immaturity)?

actual church can ever live up to the wish dream of an ideal church. So, people either give up on church entirely or settle into cynicism: “The church is a whore, but she’s my mother,” as the terrible saying goes. We must embrace this church, this pastor, these people. We must forgive these shortcomings and celebrate these strengths. Community is always a nonabstract journey into facing reality.

“Salvation”—rightly understood as the healing of our whole person—“belongs to our God.”[56]

black belt is just a white belt who never quit.” A saint is just an ordinary apprentice who stayed at it with Jesus.

It’s the very things we run from, avoid at all costs, dread, medicate, and deny that hold the secret to our liberation. These unhappy times of great emotional pain, in a beautifully redemptive turn, have the potential—if we open to God in them—to transform us

We can’t self-save, and we don’t have to. We have been saved, are being saved, and will be saved by Jesus and him alone. He’s the savior, not us. He’s the good shepherd; our role is just to follow. And to keep following through all the highs and lows along the Way.

The New Testament writers call Jesus the “the firstfruits”—this is an agrarian analogy from Jesus’ first-century world. The firstfruits were the first buds of the fall harvest, a sign of what’s about to erupt en masse.

Jesus did miracles not by flexing his God muscles like Thor but by living in reliance on the Spirit’s power.

He gave us his Spirit to empower us with his capacities. To do his work by his power, not our work by our own very limited resources.

How do we make space for God in such an emotionally loaded atmosphere? The same way he did: by eating and drinking.

Rabbi Jesus, meals were not a “boundary marker” but a sign of God’s great welcome into the kingdom; not a way to keep people out, but to invite people in.

there’s an iconic verbal formula that’s used two times in Luke: “The Son of Man came…”[23] First, Luke wrote, “The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”[24] That was what Jesus did—his mission. Then he wrote, “The Son of Man came eating and drinking.”[25] That was how Jesus did it—his method.[26]

Hospitality is the opposite of xenophobia.

The question is not, Are you preaching the gospel? It’s, What gospel are you preaching?

the percentage of Americans who say they have zero close friends has quadrupled since 1990;[36] 54

But preaching the gospel? I think I’ll just mow my neighbor’s lawn and hope they figure out Jesus rose from the dead.

Jesus’ healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly “natural” thing in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.[50]

To see like Jesus will likely require that we slow down, that we become present to the moment, that we breathe.

Be with Jesus and Become like him can skew a little more inward, but Do as he did is unmistakably outward.

David Brooks once defined commitment as “falling in love with something [or someone] and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.”[6] That’s what a Rule is—a structure of behavior to support us “when love falters,” to anchor our lives in something deeper than our fleeting emotions and chaotic desires.

Bonhoeffer, who, in a letter from prison, said to a young couple on their wedding day, “Today, you are young and very much in love and you think that your love can sustain your marriage. It can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love.”[7]

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.

What do I want to put into my life? and What do I want to keep out? Plus, What do I want to grow? and What do I want to die?

I just recognize the power of things like technology and media to both form and deform me. Left unchecked, these things are designed to consume my life and shape me into a specific kind of person—one who is wildly unlike Jesus.

Does this move me toward Jesus or away?

“pay attention to your jealousy.” He meant that playfully, as in: Pay attention when you see a feature of another person’s life and think, I wish my life was like that. Then craft a Rule to move in that direction.

Love is the metric of spiritual maturity, not discipline. Discipline is a means to an end—to be with Jesus, become like him, and do what he did.

you do the practices for the wrong reasons (to look good, one-up, or mask your shame), they work against your formation, not for it; they become a kind of parasitic infestation on your soul.

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.

As you yield your body to God, you are breaking the power of the flesh to control you and opening up to the power of the Spirit in its place. You are learning to be joyful, even when you don’t get what you want. You are practicing suffering and, through it, increasing your capacity for joy in all circumstances.

“We generally sin alone, but we heal together.”[48]

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

our role isn’t to “convert” anyone, but it is to preach—to tell others the good news of Jesus,

these nine core practices from the Way of Jesus form a time-tested trellis that is conducive to deep inner healing and overall life transformation. And that can be done in our day.

We must find God in the contours of our actual lives—not the lives we wish we had, used to have, or plan to have, but the lives we actually have, here, now. Because “God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.”[58]

If you have little kids at home, start small, be gentle with yourself, and remember that children can be like monastic bells to remind you that your time is not your own.[62] Every childlike interruption to your Rule can function as an invitation to surrender control and become a person of self-giving love.

Resist the urge to judge, critique, or overthink your practice.

Following Jesus doesn’t work as a hobby. It’s not an optional extra to the main point of your life—your career, school, family, sports, or whatever “it” is for you. We simply can’t add Jesus to the top of our already overbusy, consumeristic, emotionally unhealthy, hyper-individualistic, digitally distracted, media-saturated, undisciplined modern “life.” It’s not that it’s bad. It’s that it won’t work, full stop. We must come to realize that following Jesus is the main point of life. To borrow a term from the world of activism, it’s about centering Jesus, making him the dominant voice over your own.

And there is no way to apprentice Jesus without him interfering in your life, any more than there is a way to apprentice under a master of any craft and not have them disrupt how you live. That’s the whole point of learning under a master: you want them to disrupt how you live.

Let the dead bury their own dead. That sounds unkind to our modern ears, but it wasn’t; it was just blunt. Jesus was saying, “You can do that, but if you choose that path, it will lead you to death, not life.”

An apprentice of Jesus has no other will than the will of God.

it takes more self-mastery to yield your will than to wield it.

Ironically, in our attempts to avoid the difficult path of discipleship, we make our life harder, not easier. In our pursuit of happiness over obedience, we make our life less and less happy. In our resistance to Jesus’ yoke, we end up shouldering the crushing burden of our own unsatisfied desires.

When Jesus used a financial metaphor for salvation, he did not say it was free; he said it would cost your entire life savings, but you would gain a thousand times more than you gave up.

“sin happens when we refuse to keep growing,”

You must daily hold before your mind and imagination the beauty and possibility of life in the kingdom of God.