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

by John Mark Comer

Jesus’ model of apprenticeship was a far cry from our Western educational system. As one pair of scholars put it, “Learning wasn’t so much about retaining data as it was about gaining essential wisdom for living, absorbing it from those around him. This was…the ancient method whereby rabbis trained their talmidim, or disciples.”[21] To follow Jesus, then, meant to walk alongside him in a posture of listening, learning, observation, obedience, and imitation.[22] For Jesus’ first apprentices, the goal wasn’t to pass a test, get a degree, or receive a certificate to frame on your office wall; it was to master the art of living in God’s good world by learning from Jesus how to make steady progress into the kingdom of God. It was less like learning chemistry and more like learning jujitsu.

Here’s why: If disciple is something that is done to you (a verb),[25] then that puts the onus of responsibility for your spiritual formation on someone else, like your pastor, church, or mentor. But if disciple is a noun—if it’s someone you are or are not—then no one can “disciple” you but Rabbi Jesus himself.

The night before his death, Jesus made a puzzling promise to his apprentices: I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.[5] Short exegesis: The phrase “another advocate” is hard to translate into English. The Greek word for “another” is allos, and it literally means “another of the same kind”[6] or “another one of me.” The word for “advocate” is paraklētos, and it can be translated “helper” or “intercessor.”[7] So, the Father will give us another one of Jesus? To be with us? To help us and intercede for us? Exactly.

In all of Jesus’ teachings, what we call God is, in a mysterious but beautiful way, a flow of love between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. God is a community of self-giving love; each member of the Trinity, as theologians call them, is distinct yet somehow still one. To be with the Spirit is to be with Jesus, and to be with Jesus is to be with the Father. It’s to enter the flow of love within the inner life of God himself.

Then he gave this instruction: Abide in me, and I in you.[9]

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.” Jesus uses this word menō not once but ten times in this short teaching. Go read it. He’s driving to a singular point: Make your home in my presence by the Spirit, and never leave.

All of us are abiding. 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. We will make our home somewhere, the question is “Where?”

The time of busyness does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees before the Blessed Sacrament.[20]

Each time you get a little mental breath in the busyness of your life—that split second after you hit send on the email, the moment when you come to a red light, or those first conscious thoughts when you awake from sleep—through deliberate practice, you can train your mind to come back to God, come back to God, come back to God… Eventually your mind—and through it, your entire body and soul—will anchor itself in God, will “abide.” Even in all the noise and chaos of the modern world, with its traffic to suffer, meetings to attend, and babies to feed, you can develop a mind that is rooted in God.