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W hen the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” the saying goes.
Spiritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.
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.
This means that one of the first dynamics of holistic spiritual formation will be confrontation.
Like Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
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.
If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others. Are you more loving, more compassionate, more patient, more understanding, more caring, more giving, more forgiving than you were a year ago? If you cannot answer these kinds of questions in the affirmative and especially if others cannot answer them in the affirmative about you, then you need to examine carefully the nature of your spiritual life and growth.
Fénelon, the seventeenth-century spiritual master, put it well: A traveller who is marching across a vast plain sees nothing ahead of him but a slight rise which ends the distant horizon. When he tops this rise, he finds a new stretch of country as vast as the first. Thus, in the way of self-renunciation, we think we see everything at once. We think that we are holding nothing back, and that we are not clinging to ourselves or to anything else. We should rather die than hesitate to make a complete sacrifice. But, in the daily round, God constantly shows us new countries. We find in our hearts
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One of John Wesley’s guidelines for reading the Bible deals pointedly with this shift. Wesley suggests that we come to the text “with a single eye, to know the whole will of God, and a fixed resolution to do it.”
The unweaned child is at its mother’s breast for what it wants—milk. The weaned child, however, is content to rest in its loving mother’s arms and receive whatever she desires to give.
Again, Wesley puts it well: “Whatever light you then receive should be used to the uttermost, and that immediately. Let there be no delay. Whatever you resolve begin to execute the first moment you can.”
Dwight L. Moody visited a man who had expressed some interest at one of Moody’s meetings. Moody was ushered into a comfortable room with a fire blazing on the hearth. After some gracious preliminary conversation, the man began to argue that it was possible for a person to be a Christian without participating in the life of the church. As he made his elaborate and detailed arguments, Moody leaned forward in his chair, took the poker and pulled a flaming coal from the fire out onto the stone hearth. Moody watched as the coal slowly dimmed and went out. He then turned and looked at the man,
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Some people emphasize personal holiness, others emphasize social holiness. The problem is that neither group ends up with any holiness.
