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

by John Mark Comer

What we are led to believe are just ads, news links, retweets, and random digital flotsam are, in reality, mass behavior modification techniques intentionally designed to influence how we think, feel, believe, shop, vote, and live. To quote the tech philosopher Jaron Lanier, “What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous

For those of us who desire to follow Jesus, here is the reality we must turn and face: If we’re not being intentionally formed by Jesus himself, then it’s highly likely we are being unintentionally formed by someone or something else.[6]

It’s my conviction that contrary to what we hear, living by faith isn’t a Christian thing or even a religious thing; it’s a human thing—we all live by faith.

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. My thesis is simple: 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.

“What lies at the heart of the astonishing disregard of Jesus found in the moment-to-moment existence of multitudes of professing Christians is a simple lack of respect for him.”[12]

But to say Jesus was more than just a rabbi or even the Messiah is not to say he was anything less than a brilliant, provocative, wise, spiritual master of how to live and thrive in this our Father’s world.

Following Jesus is not a three-step formula: be with him, become like him, and so on. But there is a sequence. It is not a program but a progression.

The word for “abide” is menō in Greek; it can be translated “remain” or “stay” or “dwell” or “make your home in.”[10] We could translate the verse like this: “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? 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.

And this matters, because 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 advance sign of what one day Jesus will do for the entire cosmos, when heaven and earth are at long last reunited as one.

“The undirected mind tends toward chaos.”

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. Our part in thus practicing the presence of God is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to Him.

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]

There is so much we can’t do in our spiritual formation; we cannot fix or heal or transform ourselves. But we can do this: We can be with Jesus. We can pause for little moments throughout our days and turn our hearts toward Jesus in silent prayer and love.

We can be deceived into thinking of abiding as no more than mental hygiene for the prefrontal cortex—the Christianized version of “think happy thoughts.” And while the curation of our consciousness toward the good, beautiful, and true is vital to our formation, abiding is not just about our thought lives or even our emotional lives. It’s about a level of with-ness to Jesus that goes beyond our thoughts and feelings. It’s about love.

The Greek word for “contemplate” here is katoptrizō, and it means to “gaze or behold.” To “contemplate the Lord’s glory” is to direct the inner gaze of your heart at the Trinitarian community of love. As the psalmist David put it, it’s “to gaze on the beauty of the Lord.”[34] To the degree we do so, we are “transformed into his image.” Meaning, we become like what we gaze at—Jesus. “With ever-increasing glory,” meaning, we become more and more beautiful, like Jesus, over time, through simple, daily contemplation.

As a general rule, we become more loving by experiencing love, not by hearing about it in a lecture or reading about it in a book.

Yet contemplative prayer isn’t looking to get anything from God; it’s just looking at God. “I look at Him, He looks at me, and we are happy.”

It’s not that words in prayer are bad; they aren’t. 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.

Mystics are just those who aren’t content to read books or hear sermons about this glorious reality; they want to experience this love and be transformed by it into people of love.

If this isn’t your experience of prayer—if for you prayer is closer to boredom, distraction, and scary emotions coming to the surface of your heart—please don’t shame yourself or self-flagellate; that won’t help. Just keep praying. Stay with it. The one non-negotiable rule of prayer is this: Keep showing up. Stay with the process until you experience what all the fuss is about. Don’t stop until you know by direct experience what I’m stumbling to name with words.

For Jesus, the secret place wasn’t just a place; it was a practice, a habit, a part of his life rhythm. He seemed to have little hiding places all over Israel where he would slip away to pray.

one reason so many people avoid the quiet is just because they have yet to find a way of being with God that is conducive to their personalities and stages of life.

So, work with your personality, not against it; tailor your practice to your Myers-Briggs type and stage of life, but find your secret place.

“Every choice is a thousand renunciations.”[73]

To be human is to change, constantly. Whether we are religious or not, we grow, evolve, fall apart, and come back together. We can’t help it; the nature of the human soul is dynamic, not static.

Formation into the image of Jesus isn’t something we do as much as it’s something that is done to us, by God himself, as we yield to his work of transforming grace. Our job is mostly to make ourselves available.

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? Or practicing more spiritual disciplines? Or more involved in church? Those are all good things, but not the most important thing.

It would be much harder for God to hate us than to love us, because love is who God is inside his deepest self.

The goal is to be formed by Jesus, at every level of our beings, into those who are pervaded by love.

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.

Formation will happen to you, per our earlier argument, with zero conscious decision on your part, but formation into a person of love in Christ will not. That you must choose, and keep choosing, day after day.

The genius of Jesus’ ethical teaching was that you cannot keep the law by trying not to break the law.

You have to be transformed in your inner person, or what Jesus called “the heart.”

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.

knowing something is not the same as doing something, which is still not the same as becoming the kind of person who does something naturally as a by-product of a transformed inner nature.

To make progress in our formation, we must face our sin. Otherwise, the spiritual journey is like trying to run an ultramarathon with a broken leg and stage IV cancer.

our wickedness is tied to our woundedness.

A key part of our spiritual journeys to wholeness, especially for those who have been through traumatic life experiences, is the healing of memories, in both our minds and our bodies. The mending of souls ruptured by sin done to us.

The problem is not that Westerners view sin through the lens of guilt/innocence, but that they often view it solely from this one angle and, in doing so, miss the full picture. Until we come to see sin as far more than the breaking of judicial laws, we will likely remain stuck in whole-life dysfunction.

But our Physician is the only true God…Jesus the Christ….He became subject to corruption, that He might free our souls from death and corruption, and heal them, and might restore them to health, when they were diseased with ungodliness and wicked lusts.[40]

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 everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”[44]

We are formed by at least three basic forces.

#1 The stories we believe

“The story you live in is the story you live out.”[45]

Pick your stories carefully. They will determine who you become.

The things we do, do something to us; they get into the core of our being and shape our loves and longings.