You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

by James K.A. Smith

The best art, Aristotle says, makes plausible what might otherwise seem impossible. It is a matter of mimetic persuasion: convincing us that this could be.

It is one thing to understand the sentence “The dead shall be raised”; it is quite another to feel what it must be like if it is true that “he is risen!” But this is a conviction that happens on the register of the imagination.

Only when you are formed this deeply can you say as C. S. Lewis did, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”11 This is a “belief” that you carry in your bones.

Christian worship fuels our imaginations with a biblical picture of a world that, in the words of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, is “charged with the grandeur of God.”

In order to do that, Christian worship needs to be governed by the biblical story and to invite us in by speaking to our embodiment.

Let’s consider how the liturgical tradition embodies this.

This narrative arc of Christian worship, passed down through the centuries, is a kind of macroreenactment of God’s relationship to creation.

the opening “chapter”—gathering—unfolds with a call to worship, reminding us that God is the gracious initiator here, echoing our being called into existence by the Creator.

Just as God’s creative power made us to be human, so the Spirit’s renewing power will enable us to be human.

become aware of his holiness and our sinfulness and thus are led into a time of confession

What is lost when we remove this chapter from so many gatherings that purport to be Christian worship? We lose an important, counterformative aspect of the gospel that pushes back on secular liturgies of self-confidence

Having been graciously called into the presence of a holy but forgiving God, we now enter into the listening chapter of worship.

the law is now received as that gift whereby God graciously channels us into ways of life that are for our good, that lead to flourishing.

This culminates in our communing with God and with one another. We are invited to sit down for supper with the Creator of the universe, to dine with the King. But we are all invited to do so, which means we need to be reconciled to one another as well.

The Lord’s Table is a leveling reality in a world of increasing inequalities, an enacted vision of “a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine” (Isa. 25:6).

The sending at the end of the worship service is a replay of the original commissioning of humanity as God’s image bearers because in Christ—and in the practices of Christian worship—we can finally be the humans we were made to be.

Thus worship concludes with a benediction that is both a blessing and a charge to go, but to go in and with the presence of the Son, who will never leave us or forsake us—to go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

The goal of any analysis or explanation can only be to help you appreciate what’s at stake in the practices, to help you understand why we do what we do when we worship.

Worship is the sacramental center of God’s transforming grace. You might think of worship as the repair station for our erotic compasses. Or, as Calvin suggested, think of the church’s worship as the gymnasium in which the Spirit puts us through the paces of a spiritual workout that restor(i)es our hearts.

you need the meal that is the Lord’s Supper, you need the nourishment of the Word.

What if you can’t discern anything close to this narrative plot in the Sunday gatherings at your local church?

First, look closely.

Try to be part of a solution.

Finally, if renewal doesn’t seem possible, you might have to make a difficult decision, after much prayer and counsel, about worshiping elsewhere.

in many ways I think the future of orthodox, faithful, robust Christianity hinges on the renewal of worship.

Taylor highlights a particular strand of modern Christianity that has had a significant impact on contemporary expressions, particularly evangelicalism. Taylor describes this as a dynamic of “excarnation.”16

So in addition to the conviction that the human Jesus embodies God, Christians have also traditionally emphasized that creation itself is charged with the Spirit’s presence.

Critical of the ways such an enchanted, sacramental understanding of the world had lapsed into sheer superstition, the later Reformers emphasized the simple hearing of the Word, the message of the gospel, and the arid simplicity of Christian worship.

To use a phrase that we considered above, this was Christianity reduced to something for brains-on-a-stick.

now that the whole world has been disenchanted and we have been encased in a flattened “nature,” I expect it will be forms of reenchanted Christianity that will actually have a future.

It will be “ancient” Christian communities—drawing on the wells of historic, “incarnate” Christian worship with its smells and bells and all its Gothic peculiarity, embodying a spirituality that carries whiffs of transcendence—that will be strange and therefore all the more enticing.

historic Christian worship is not only the heart of discipleship; it might also be the heart of our evangelism.

What Christian communities need to cultivate in our “secular age” is faithful patience, even receiving a secular age as a gift through which to renew and cultivate an incarnational, embodied, robustly orthodox Christianity

In the 1980s, North American evangelicalism experienced an almost revolutionary innovation: what later came to be known as the megachurch.

If it was going to be sensitive to seekers, the church would have to remove those aspects of its practice and tradition that were alleged to be obstacles to the “unchurched.”

Historic worship always included a communal, public confession of our sin.

This regular, stark, uncomfortable confession of sin doesn’t seem like something that would be “enjoyed” by seekers.

In other words, what if confession is, unwittingly, the desire of every broken heart? In that case, extending an invitation to confession would be the most “sensitive” thing we could do, a gift to seeking souls.

Here is a truth the seeker-sensitive movement couldn’t have imagined: people want to confess.

If that’s the case, rituals that invite us to confess our sins are actually gifts. The rites of confession have their own evangelistic power.

Christian worship doesn’t just rehearse the outlines of this story in a kind of CliffsNotes, bullet-pointed distillation of some “facts.” It does so in a way that is storied, imaginative, and works on us more like a novel than a newspaper article. Story isn’t just the what of Christian worship; it is also the how.

Something is going on in the worship of the gathered/called congregation beyond simply the dissemination of information.

If God meets us as liturgical animals who are creatures of habit, he also meets us as imaginative animals who are moved and affected by the aesthetic.

Desire-shaping worship isn’t simply didactic; it is poetic. It paints a picture, spins metaphors, tells a story.

the gospel isn’t just information stored in the intellect; it is a way of seeing the world that is the very wallpaper of our imagination.

“To do by ‘feel’ what cannot be done by regular conscious thought”: that’s not a bad description of the goal of discipleship.

This kind of “sense” is deeper than knowledge; it’s a know-how you absorb poetically, on the register of the imagination. Formative worship speaks to us—shows us,19 touches us, shapes us—on this level.

In other words, how we confess makes a difference as to whether this practice will truly be formative.

Thus the prayer is not just a “rite” for a Sunday morning; it is a gift that goes with us throughout our week as we seek to follow Christ.

The divine initiative of love for us—even while we were enemies (Rom. 5:8–10)—is the first grace that both makes possible and provokes our love.