You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

by James K.A. Smith

Worship is the “imagination station” that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom. If you are passionate about seeking justice, renewing culture, and taking up your vocation to unfurl all of creation’s potential, you need to invest in the formation of your imagination. You need to curate your heart. You need to worship well. Because you are what you love.

Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow.

Discipleship, we might say, is a way to curate your heart, to be attentive to and intentional about what you love. So discipleship is more a matter of hungering and thirsting than of knowing and believing.

He isn’t content to simply deposit new ideas into your mind; he is after nothing less than your wants, your loves, your longings.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting ...

The orientation of the heart happens from the bottom up, through the formation of our habits of desire. Learning to love (God) takes practice.

“All education, whether acknowledged or not, is moral formation.”

If we appreciate that human beings are liturgical animals, we will see young people with new eyes—as the ritual creatures they are, hungry for rites that give them rhythms and rhymes they can live into.

First, one of the best decisions we can make for the formation of our children is to enfold them in a congregation that is committed to historic Christian worship and multigenerational gathering.

Looking for the coolest or most popular youth group might not be the best indicator of where our children will be conformed to the image of Christ. To the contrary, it might be a “boring” congregation that actually does more to shape their loves and longing precisely by rehearsing the biblical story, week in and week out, in practices that are at work on their hearts even if they don’t realize it.

A congregation committed to the faith formation of young people is one that invites them from an early age to be true worshipers, enfolding and involving them in the congregation’s common practice of worship.

Formative youth ministry isn’t its own thing; it is, rather, the same repertoire of practices that characterize lifelong Christian discipleship.

Second, formative youth ministry will invite young people into a wider repertoire of Christian disciplines as rhythms of the Spirit.

And in any case, the unarticulated focus on entertainment only serves to reinforce a wider cultural focus on self that is cultivated by social media. Shouldn’t church be the place where we unlearn such narcissism?

The biblical doctrine of creation is not just about where we came from; it’s about where we are. It’s not just about who we are, but whose we are. It’s not just a statement about our past; it is a calling to a future.

The “image of God” (imago Dei) is not some de facto property of homo sapiens (whether will or reason or language, or what have you); rather, the image of God is a task, a mission.

We are commissioned as God’s image bearers, his vice-regents, charged with the task of “ruling” and caring for creation, which includes the task of cultivating it, unfolding and unfurling its latent possibilities through human making—in short, through culture.

And so we need to appreciate that culture is not neutral or benign—it is not simply a “good.” More importantly, we need to remember that creation—especially our creations—does something to us.

To take up our commission today—to carry out the work of being God’s image bearers—requires attesting to the fact that something is wrong.

We are called to what James Davison Hunter has aptly described as “faithful presence.”

Yes, God’s affirmation of the goodness of creation tells us that everything matters; and you will learn that over and over again in the church. It is in the worship of the Triune God that we are restored by being restoried.