More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
May 6, 2023
When spirituality is viewed as a static possession, the way to spiritual wholeness is seen as the acquisition of information and techniques that enable us to gain possession of the desired state of spirituality. Discipleship is perceived as “my” spiritual life and tends to be defined by actions that ensure its possession.
Thus the endless quest for techniques, methods, programs by which we hope to “achieve” spiritual fulfillment. The hidden premise behind all of this is the unquestioned assumption that we alone are in control of our spirituality. In brief, we assume we are in control of our relationship with God.
When spirituality is viewed as a journey, however, the way to spiritual wholeness is seen to lie in an increasingly faithful response to the One whose purpose shapes our path, whose grace redeems our detours, whose power liberates us from crippling bondages of the prior jo...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Spiritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.
Too often spiritual formation is seen as something “added on” to our personality that solves all our emotional, psychological, physical and mental problems. When this happens, potentially serious emotional, psychological, physical or mental problems can be repressed or covered over with a veneer of “spirituality” that claims to solve the problem. In such instances, persons are often told, “You just need to pray more, go to church more, read your Bible more, be more obedient to God, deal with unconfessed sin in your life, and everything will be fine.” This is like telling persons with broken
...more
As John Wesley constantly emphasized, there can be no personal holiness without social holiness. Much of what passes for spiritual formation these days is a very privatized, individualized experience. It does not enliven and enrich the body of Christ, nor is it vitally dependent on the body of Christ for its own wholeness. Neither does it play itself out in the dynamics of life in the world. It doesn’t bring the reality of relationship with God and Jesus Christ to bear on the brokenness and the pain in the world around us. Thus corporate and social spirituality is an essential part of our
...more
a fourfold definition of spiritual formation as (1) a process (2) of being formed (3) in the image of Christ (4) for the sake of others.
Scripture is quite clear in its insistence that we have fallen short of God’s purposes for our creation. It is equally clear in its revelation that God works graciously through all the aspects of human life to bring us to the fulfillment of God’s will for our wholeness. Thus spiritual formation is a process of involvement with God’s gracious work. But spiritual formation as a process will be seen to move against the grain of our instant gratification culture and the possessiveness of an acquisitive society. Once we understand spiritual formation as a process, all of life becomes spiritual
...more
Cooperation with God’s gracious work moves us toward the wholeness of Christ. Rebellion against God’s gracious work moves us into destructive and dehumanizing emptiness, into increasingly dysfunctional lives that are self-destructive and treat o...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Scripture is also clear in its witness to the fact that only God can liberate us from our bondage, heal our brokenness, cleanse us from our uncleanness and bring life out of our deadness. We cannot do it by ourselves. Thus spiritual formation is the experience of being shaped by God toward wholeness. But spiritual formation as “being formed” will also be seen to move agains...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Scripture reveals that human wholeness is always actualized in nurturing one another toward wholeness, whether within the covenant community of God’s people or in the role of God’s people in healing brokenness and injustice in the world.
Spiritual formation “for the sake of others” will be seen to move against the grain of a privatized and individualized religion and the deep-seated belief that spiritual life is a matter between the individual and God.
There can be no wholeness in the image of Christ which is not incarnate in our relationships with others, both in the...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
If you ask most Christians about their spiritual pilgrimage, they will say that it is a day-by-day experience with its ups and downs, its victories and defeats, its successes and failures. In brief, it is a process. But if you were to ask them how God works transformation in their lives, many would indicate that God zaps them at some point and instantly changes them. How often Christians struggle to create the setting in which God can zap them out of their brokenness and into wholeness!
Often our spiritual quest becomes a search for the right technique, the proper method, the perfect program that can immediately deliver the desired results of spiritual maturity and wholeness.
What we don’t realize is that often a period of apparent spiritual stagnation, a time in which we don’t feel as if we are going anywhere, a phase of life in which our relationship with God seems weak or nonexistent, the time of dryness, of darkness—what the mothers and fathers of the church speak of as the desert experience—is filled with nurturing down below the surface that we never see.
When and how has God’s grace redeemed your detours? God’s power liberated you from the crippling bondage of your prior journey? God’s transforming presence met you at each turn in the road?
S piritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ, a journey into becoming persons of compassion, persons who forgive, persons who care deeply for others and the world, persons who offer themselves to God to become agents of divine grace in the lives of others and their world—in brief, persons who love and serve as Jesus did. Now, if I had said spiritual formation was a process of “forming ourselves” in the image of Christ, I suspect we would have been much more comfortable. The difference between forming ourselves and being formed is the vital issue of control.
If you do not believe that control is a major issue in your life, study the ways you respond when someone or something disrupts your plan for the day.
Our constant struggle with the issue of control is a crucial part of our spiritual pilgrimage. I don’t mind spiritual formation at all as long as I can be in control of it. As long as I can set the limits on its pace and its direction, I have no problem. What I do have a problem with is getting my control structures out of the way of my spiritual formation and letting God take control.
there is an even deeper dimension of this need to control. We tend to see such control as essential to the meaning, value and purpose of our being. How much of the compulsive workaholism of our activities serves to authenticate ourselves as persons (to ourselves and others) and to prove that we have value, meaning and purpose in the world! To put it simply, we live as though our doing determined our being.
We live in a culture that has reversed the biblical order of being and doing. Being and doing are integrally related, to be sure, but we have to have the order straight. Our doing flows out of our being. In spiritual formation the problem with being formed is that we have a strong tendency to think that if only we do the right things we will be the right kind of Christian, as though our doing would bring about our being.
The doing is an outflow, the result, of a being that exists in relationship with Jesus as Lord. So spiritual formation is not something that we do to ourselves or for ourselves, but something we allow God to do in us and for us as we yield ourselves to the work of God’s transforming grace.
Silence is one of the primary disciplines that help us give up control—at least for a few moments! It helps us actually practice that patient, open-ended yieldedness Mulholland describes. “For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation,” the psalmist says in Psalm 62:1.
simply be in God’s presence, utterly yielded to whatever God wants to do or say. 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.
This is a profound and powerful affirmation of the nature of our being. Its focus is found in the affirmation that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.” The word chose translates a compound Greek term that literally means “spoke forth.” Paul is not saying that God chooses some and does not choose others. Paul is saying that every human being has been “spoken forth” by God before the foundation of the world.
Sometimes we suffer under the illusion that our incompleteness, our brokenness, our deadness is something like a sweater that we can easily unbutton and slip off. It is not that easy. Our brokenness is us. Like Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.” This is what Jesus indicates when he speaks about losing yourself. That part of you which has not yet been formed in the image of Christ is not simply a thing in you—it is an essential part of who you are. This is what Jesus is pointing to when he calls us to take up our cross. Our cross is not that cantankerous person we have to deal with day
...more
the love of God’s grace will knock and knock and knock with the knock of confrontation on those doors, but God will not force open the doors. As George MacDonald says, “He watches to see the door move from within.”1 There must be a consecration, a release of ourselves to God at each point of our unlikeness to Christ. When there is, the process of being formed in the image of Christ begins.
Everything that God has done, is doing and ever will do in our lives to conform us to the image of Christ (which is the image of our wholeness) is not so that we may someday be set in a display case in heaven as trophies of grace. 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.
the points of our unlikeness to Christ are areas of our life where we are lord and Christ isn’t—areas where our agenda, our will, our desire, our purpose rules. Wherever this is the case, our relationship with others will be controlled not by God’s will but by our own agenda. Our relationship with others at that point will become manipulative as we attempt to impose our agenda on them. If others do not readily succumb to our manipulations, we will tend to become abusive with them or break the relationship entirely.
The primary focus must be trinitarian—God, self, others—if we are to grow holistically into the image of Christ. Every relationship has the potential of becoming the place of transforming encounter with God, and every advance in the spiritual life has its necessary and immediate corollary in the transformation of our relationships with others.
ask God to show you where you fell short of Christlikeness—where you fell short of God’s created purpose for you to be a compassionate person “whose relationships are characterized by love and forgiveness, persons whose lives are a healing, liberating, transforming touch of God’s grace upon their world.”
Confess it as a place of unlikeness to Christ and receive God’s forgiveness. Open yourself to the process of spiritual transformation by saying yes and giving God permission to do the work God wants to do in you right there.
The great promise of the Christian life is that “God is there, in grace, offering the forgiveness, the cleansing, the liberation, the healing we need to begin the journey toward wholeness and fulfillment in Christ.”
One of the marks of Christian maturity described in Romans 12:3-7 and 1 Corinthians 12 is the ability to think with sober judgment about ourselves and others. This involves not thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think while at the same time embracing the gifts each of us brings to the body of Christ.
Thank you, gracious God, for your steadfast love and patience with me. Even though I persist in the misuse of the creation gifts you have given me, you continue to call me out of my incompleteness into the wholeness you have for me in Christ. Even when I try to hide behind a “spirituality” that confirms me in my incompleteness and brokenness, your love neither abandons me nor tolerates my evasions. Your love becomes troubling grace that shakes my foundations and breaches my defenses. Help me to let you do your disturbing work in my life in this chapter. Let it become for me a mirror in which
...more
Many people ride this spiritual rollercoaster throughout their Christian pilgrimage, because no one ever tells them that their shadow side needs equal time and attention in their spiritual activities.
O God of wholeness, when I consider the lack of balance and wholeness in my life, the one-sided spiritualities with which I attempt to appease you, to appear good in the eyes of others and to please myself, I come face to face with my need for a holistic spiritual life. Help me, I pray, to hunger and thirst for the wholeness you have for me in Christ. Help me to be willing to surrender to you whatever stands in the way of such wholeness.
For extraverts, of course, it’s the world and others. Their focus of attention is outward, and so their natural spiritual path is activity. These are people who will manifest their faith by their works. For introverts, the primary arena is ideas and self. Their center tends to be within, and their natural spiritual path is, consequently, reflective.
For sensing persons the primary arena of the spiritual path is the body, because they rely on their senses for the primary data that they work with to relate to the world around them. 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; in a feeling person the heart is the primary arena of the spiritual l...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
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. For the person whose preference is perception, the primary arena is awareness, an openness and responsiveness to the ebb and flow of ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The natural spiritual path for an extravert is action; for an introvert, it is reflection. But what does the extravert need for wholeness? Reflection! What does the introvert need for wholeness? Action or participation!
for the sensing preference the natural spiritual path is service; for the intuitive preference it is awareness. Each needs the opposite for wholeness;
Some of the negative expressions for extraverts are anger and attack. Extraverts have their primary focus in the world, and when the world irritates them they will tend to respond in anger, attacking the cause of their difficulty. Introverts, however, whose primary focus is within, will tend to respond with fear and withdrawal, distancing themselves from the cause of their discomfort.
For persons whose preference is judgment, a negative expression is inappropriate control or judging of others. This emerges from their desire to maintain control, to have closure, especially closure according to their own perspectives and purposes. By contrast, for persons whose preference is perception, a negative expression is failure to take responsibility. They can go with the flow to such an extent that they never take control.
