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January 24 - February 1, 2020
Spiritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.
Once we understand spiritual formation as a process, all of life becomes spiritual formation.
Thus spiritual formation is the experience of being shaped by God toward wholeness.
Everyone is in a process of spiritual formation! Every thought we hold, every decision we make, every action we take, every emotion we allow to shape our behavior, every response we make to the world around us, every relationship we enter into, every reaction we have toward the things that surround us and impinge upon our lives—all of these things, little by little, are shaping us into some kind of being.
C. S. Lewis states it in his inimitable way: Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself.
Spiritual formation is not an option! The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development. The only choice we have is whether that growth moves us toward wholeness in Christ or toward an increasingly dehumanized and destructive mode of being.
Even if it feels like nothing is happening, something is happening. The inner chaos created by your constant attempts to control things is having a chance to settle down. You are giving up control so God can do or say something surprising. You are opening yourself to being addressed by God. You are becoming a receiver. You are being still and letting God be the one to act in God’s way, in God’s own time.
Our cross is the point of our unlikeness to the image of Christ, where we must die to self in order to be raised by God into wholeness of life in the image of Christ right there at that point. So the process of being formed in the image of Christ takes place at the points of our unlikeness to Christ, and the first step is confrontation.
All of God’s work to conform us to the image of Christ has as its sole purpose that we might become what God created us to be in relationship with God and with others.
If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others.
Our relationships with others are not only the testing grounds of our spiritual life but also the places where our growth toward wholeness in Christ happens.
Left to ourselves in the development of our spiritual practices, we will generally gravitate to those spiritual activities that nurture our preferred pattern of being and doing. The shadow side of our preference pattern will languish unattended and unnurtured.
Thinking persons will tend to be more theological, more analytical and structural in their spirituality. Theory and principles of spiritual life will be their focus, but they may slight the affective, emotional aspects of their relationship with God and others that could keep their spirituality from becoming a legalism.
Each of us will tend to develop models of spiritual life that nurture our preference pattern.
If, however, intuition is our preferred pattern, the creative use of our imagination, re-creating in our mind’s eye the scenes of biblical passages, listening to the thoughts and ideas that emerge from within will characterize our spiritual patterns.
Should thinking be one of our preferences, we will tend to be cerebral in our spirituality. We will appreciate reason as the means through which we encounter God; we’ll tend to be analytical and theoretical in our wrestling with the Scripture, preferring to theologize abstractly on an issue rather than struggle with its personal appropriation in our daily life.
if we have a strong preference for judgment, our spiritual life will probably be very highly structured and regulated. Devotional practices will be planned, usually following a well-developed pattern; reading of Scripture will be very systematic, and we will have a tendency to control our relationship with God.
in order to develop holistically in our spirituality, we also need to nurture our shadow side. One-sided spirituality, while it may be comfortable and may seem to be advancing us on our spiritual pilgrimage, will ultimately begin to disintegrate under pressures for nurture from our shadow side.
I am an INTJ. That means if there is to be holistic spiritual formation in my life, I need dynamics in my spiritual activities that will nurture the ESFP part of me. For me, these become spiritual disciplines, because they are not activities that I would eagerly or naturally fall into.
Intuitive persons rely on the intuition emerging from within their own spirits as their primary source of data, and thus awareness is their natural spiritual path. In a thinking person, of course, the primary arena is the mind, with knowledge as the natural spiritual path;
For persons whose preferred pattern is judgment, the exercise of the will is the primary arena of a natural spiritual path that manifests itself in a disciplined spirituality.
Here is the crucial point: in order for our spiritual pilgrimage to be a balanced growth toward wholeness in the image of Christ for others, we need to have dynamics of spiritual life that will nurture both sides of our preference pattern.
How do my patterns of individual and corporate spirituality nurture my shadow side?
If the church stays with the same pattern of worship for ten or fifteen years, the result may be a congregation of people whose preference patterns are essentially the same. We should ensure that our corporate spirituality nurtures persons holistically. The same holds true for small groups, which often stagnate in a pattern of spirituality that is comfortable for the members but restrictive to potential new members whose presence might be a much-needed gift of God’s grace to the group.
The Christian’s journey toward wholeness in the image of Christ for the sake of others progresses by means of spiritual disciplines.
The classical pilgrimage toward wholeness in Christ has been characterized by four stages. These can be thought of either as the overall path of Christian spirituality through life or as the path toward wholeness in any given area of our lives. That is, all four of these stages can take place incrementally within our spiritual pilgrimage and at the same time shape the whole pilgrimage itself.
Thus our Christian pilgrimage is a complex, multifaceted, multilevel ebb and flow of relationship with God.
Prayer, as a classical spiritual discipline, is primarily relational, not functional.
Prayer becomes a sacrificial offering of ourselves to God, to become agents of God’s presence and action in the daily events and situations of our lives.
Spiritual reading is the discipline of openness to encounter God through the writings of the mothers and fathers of the church, beginning with the Scriptures.
Spiritual or formational reading is the exact opposite of informational reading. Spiritual reading is entered into best, perhaps, when the text is chosen for us—for instance, by the use of a lectionary. This way we begin by yielding control to someone or something outside of our agenda.
Instead of coming to the text with our agenda, we come in a posture of openness to God’s agenda.
We read attentively, seeking not to cover as much as possible as quickly as possible but to plumb the depths of the text so that the text may plumb the depths of our being and doing. Rather than an analytical approach, we take a contemplative posture that is open to ambiguity and mystery.
The final goal of spiritual reading is to be mastered by God for the fulfillment of God’s pur...
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reflect on each of the disciplines as Mulholland describes them—prayer, spiritual reading, lectio divina, liturgy, which includes worship, the daily office, study, fasting and retreat. Which are regular parts of your life right now? How are you experiencing them as acts of loving obedience to God—or not? How is God meeting you in these practices? Do any feel dry even though you are practicing them regularly? Talk to God about this. Are there spiritual practices described here that are not a regular part of your life right now? Do you feel drawn to any of them? Resistant? Need more information
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What I hear Paul saying is, “If you continue to allow the dynamics of your deadness to shape your behavior, you will make shipwreck of your faith.”
I would suggest that you take one of the elements of your “dead body” as an illustration for yourself as you read on. It may be a harmful habit. It may be a disruptive attitude. It may be a destructive relationship. You know what it is. When you are completely honest with yourself, you know at least one area of your life where your “body” is dead because of sin. You know of at least one thing in your life that is not in harmony with God’s purpose for your wholeness in the image of Christ.
If you have had that rollercoaster experience—trying to maintain the discipline, falling off, starting it again and falling off, starting it again and falling off—it may be because you’ve not been offering God a genuine discipline. You may have been trying a do-it-yourself operation, a form of works righteousness.
I don’t know about you, but I know that when that warfare gets strong I can become amazingly subtle; I can rationalize beautifully a million reasons it’s perfectly okay to go back to the old behaviors, the old deadness. And it makes perfectly logical, rational sense. It can even seem pious, except that I know deep down in my heart that it isn’t. This is why I need others who will keep on saying, “Come on, Bob, quit kidding yourself, hang in there, push on, keep on offering the discipline.”
When we continue to offer the discipline, that discipline becomes a means of grace God works through and moves to transform that dead portion of our body into life in the image of Christ. One morning you wake up and discover, often to your amazement, that the discipline is no longer a discipline; it is now the natural outflow of a being that has been raised to new life in Christ—that the Spirit of the One who raised Christ Jesus from the dead, the Spirit who also dwells in you, has made alive your dead body also. You did not do it. God did it. But God did it through the discipline you offered.
see, God has created us for a symbiotic relationship in our pilgrimage toward wholeness, and we have a responsibility in that relationship. But we must never deceive ourselves that our role alone is what brings about the transformation.
The practice of silence is the radical reversal of our cultural tendencies. Silence is bringing ourselves to a point of relinquishing to God our control of our relationship with God. Silence is a reversal of the whole possessing, controlling, grasping dynamic of trying to maintain control of our own existence. Silence is the inner act of letting it go.
We tend to think of solitude as simply being alone. In the classical Christian spiritual tradition, however, solitude is, in the silence of release, beginning to face the deep inner dynamics of our being that make us that grasping, controlling, manipulative person; beginning to face our brokenness, our distortion, our darkness; and beginning to offer ourselves to God at those points. Solitude is not simply drawing away from others and being alone with God. This is part of solitude. But more than this, it is being who we are with God and acknowledging who we are to ourselves and to God.
Prayer is the outgrowth of both silence and solitude. In silence we let go of our manipulative control. In solitude we face up to what we are in the depths of our being. Prayer then becomes the offering of who we are to God: the giving of that broken, unclean, grasping, manipulative self to God for the work of God’s grace in our lives.
there can be no social holiness without personal holiness.
Our unique individuality is one of the gifts we bring to the body of Christ. Others need the gift of our preference type in their growth toward wholeness. We need the gifts of others’ preference types in our growth toward wholeness. The diversity in our temperament types is part of the glorious diversity of the body of Christ, in which God nurtures us to wholeness.
Where one has all the right answers, all the easy answers, all the quick fixes, there is no room for mystery. There is no room for paradox. And if there is no room for mystery there is no room for God, because God is the ultimate mystery.
One part of genuine spiritual pilgrimage is coming to the point where we let go of our limited concept of God. We let go of that box we have enclosed God in, and we open ourselves to allow God to be whatever God wants to be in our life. When we do this, we also lose our former awareness and sense of God’s presence. We lose our grasp on God.
Are we willing to let God be God in our life?
The Old Testament prophets continually remind God’s people that the worship of God is incompatible with social, economic or political injustice. Worship of God is to result in a focal concern for the welfare of one’s neighbors and community.
