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

by John Mark Comer

Your freedom is what got you here, not your constraint.[9]

A Rule of Life is an invitation to a very different definition of freedom than that of the modern world—an invitation to embrace the constraints that, if you give yourself to them, will eventually set you free.

In the same way, each of us needs to ask, What do I want to put into my life? and What do I want to keep out?

Limiting my intake of media (TV, film, YouTube) to a max of four hours a week. I lifted this from the Rule of Life from Andy Crouch and the community at Praxis: “Instead of having our imagination saturated by media, we seek to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. We commit to establish structured limits for our use of screens and our consumption of entertainment, in quantity, frequency, and moral character.”[14] That’s the stuff.

Notice: These are more like “rules,” but the heart behind them isn’t legalism. I’m well aware they aren’t a measure of my spiritual maturity at all. (If anything, my need for them is a measure of my immaturity.) Not one of them makes me any more loving or holy; 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. But my deepest desire is for God to consume my life and, in time, shape me into his image.

Choose your own constraints, or they will be chosen for you, not by the Spirit of God stirring your own heart toward love, but by a programmer in Silicon Valley working to steal your time and shape your behavior.

He clarified, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”[15]

Most of us genuinely desire what is good, but we fail because we avoid, procrastinate, or make excuses rather than take the necessary steps to move forward into our hearts’ desires. “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.”[16] We constantly self-sabotage.

This is the great challenge of discipleship: to move from aspirational ideas to authentic transformation.

literally rewiring our central nervous systems.

I don’t golf, but I still think about that analogy. Hearing sermons (or reading books) about following Jesus is kind of like watching YouTube videos on golf—it’s a wonderful place to start, but you won’t get very far until you put your shoes on and hit the green.

Stephen Covey once said, “We achieve inner peace when our schedule aligns with our values.”

To live a life of peace in the digital age will demand a kind of resistance.

Of course, the challenge of a Rule of Life is that it will force you to clarify what your deepest desires are, to listen to your heart and your God. One of the best ways to do that is, as an Ignatian scholar put it to me, to “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.

But the reverse is also true: Too little, too slow, and we atrophy, falling into a lethargic, self-centered fugue—what the ancients called “acedia,” or sloth, nicknamed by the monks “the noonday demon.”

No one of these is better than the others. Tragically, we humans tend to moralize our preferences, which can cause great harm to others who are different from us.

I’m also a firm believer in the psychology of stage theory. We mature through various stages in our psycho-spiritual development, just as we do in our physical development. Each one is necessary and healthy. Eventually, as you mature, you will inevitably face what the ancients called the “dark night of the soul”—a season where the practices don’t “work” like they are supposed to. You still practice them, but you don’t feel the same connection to God. That’s part of the journey.[64]

But you should know this: Historically, a Rule of Life was for a community. It was designed by early adopters, like Saint Augustine and Saint Benedict, to hold a community together around shared rhythms of spiritual formation. To center a community on Jesus. And like most things in life, it just plain works better in community.

So: Write up a Rule of Life, even if it’s just for yourself. But if at all possible, do this in community—with a few friends, with your small group or table community, or, in a dream world, with your entire church.

Change is all about consistency over time. Formation is slow, cumulative, and at times monotonous work. In the moment, you often don’t feel like the practices are “doing” all that much to you. They are; it’s just slow and subtle. But the philosopher James K. A. Smith said it well: “Micro-rituals have macro significance.”[66] They add up over time, like compound interest.

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.

There’s a “monastic impulse” of the Spirit in all of us, a part of our hearts that craves quiet prayer, solitude, and contemplation and that has a genuine desire (mixed with a tinge of healthy fear) for deep, vulnerable, heart-to-heart relationships with other followers of the Way.

Following Jesus is not convenient, quick, or easy. (Nothing meaningful in life is.)

That’s the whole point of learning under a master: you want them to disrupt how you live.

Find in the busy city the desert of the monks.[71]

live with depth and serenity and focus

What is one small step you can take this week in practicing the Way of Jesus?

What would happen if you were to say yes to the impulse of God’s Spirit inside you?

Jesus’ invitation—as I have repeated ad nauseam—was not to convert to a new religion called Christianity but to apprentice under him into life in the kingdom of God.

You see, Jesus did not beg or manipulate or bully. Coercion is not a fruit of the Spirit. He didn’t strong-arm or offer a sales pitch; he just invited. And when people balked or made excuses… He let them walk away.

See Acts 17:1-4 Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews. 2 And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, 3 explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.” 4 And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.

There are a lot of reasons people turn down Jesus’ invitation, but as best as I can tell, there’s a common denominator in every story: the high bar of entry.

What is it for you?

For Jesus, step one on the spiritual journey is to take up your cross—the ultimate symbol of death to self.

Within the inner chambers of the human heart, love for God and surrender to him are virtually indistinguishable. Jesus himself said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”[10]

You see, another, far less popular synonym for surrender is obey.

Within the heart of a true disciple is a settled intention of the will to obey Jesus.

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

But from the viewpoint of Christian spirituality, the full flowing of the human will, at the zenith of its power, is its capacity to yield itself back to God in loving trust; because it takes more self-mastery to yield your will than to wield it.

It will cost you freedom from the bondage of sin, healing from the wounding of sin, forgiveness from the guilt and shame of sin, and adoption into the family of God out of the isolation of sin.

The cost of non-discipleship

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.

But there is another path—that of apprenticeship to Jesus. The path of giving up all you are to receive all God is.

This is what following Jesus is like. As the missionary/martyr Jim Elliot put it, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”[20] 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. That’s grace.