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December 23, 2020 - February 4, 2021
much contemporary Christian spirituality tends to view the spiritual life as a static possession rather than a dynamic and ever-developing growth toward wholeness in the image of Christ. 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.
there can be no personal holiness without social holiness.
In this section we will develop 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.
“God hides his work, in the spiritual order as in the natural order under an unnoticeable sequence of events.”
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.
[We] have used [our] knowledge to rearrange the world to satisfy [our] drive for power, distorting and deranging life rather than loving it for the gift it is.
Spiritual formation is the great reversal: from being the subject who controls all other things to being a person who is shaped by the presence, purpose and power of God in all things.
We learn from Jesus’ experience, however, that the most critical temptations attach themselves to the call and empowerment of God that defines the meaning, value and purpose of our existence.
We tend to evaluate our own meaning, value and purpose, as well as those of others, not by the quality of our being but by what we do and how effectively we do it.
Our doing flows out of our being.
Spiritual formation is the great reversal: from acting to bring about the desired results in our lives to being acted upon by God and responding in ways that allow God to bring about God’s purposes. So to lose one’s self in this context is to give up the deep inner informational-functional orientation that governs the lifestyle of our culture.
Jesus doesn’t contradict them. He does not say, “No, you didn’t.” He says, “I never knew you. Depart from me, you evildoers” (Mt 7:23). They had the works, the doing, but they didn’t have a relationship with Jesus, the being, as the foundational reality those works would flow out of.
the image of Christ is the fulfillment of the deepest hungers of the human heart for wholeness.
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. Paul is alluding to the account in Genesis where God speaks forth creation into being.
How much of our devotional life and our worship are designed simply to affirm, for ourselves, others and perhaps even God, those areas of our lives that we think are already well along the way? In fact, may not such practices become a defense mechanism against the areas that are not yet formed in the image of Christ?
Our cross is not that cantankerous person we have to deal with day by day. Our cross is not the employer we just can’t get along with. Our cross is not that neighbor or work colleague who cuts across the grain in every single time of relationship. Nor is our cross the difficulties and infirmities that the flow of life brings to us beyond our control. 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
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Spiritual disciplines are the act of releasing ourselves in a consistent manner to God, opening those doors in a regular way to allow God’s transforming work in our lives.
The primary focus must be trinitarian—God, self, others—if we are to grow holistically into the image of Christ.
“God is present to us in the most destructive aspects of our cultural captivity . . . in the imprisoning bondage of our brokenness . . . those places in our lives that are most alienated from God.”
There is no holistic spirituality for the individual outside of the community of faith.
Or take the thinking-type persons whose special temptation is emotional explosion. Why? Because if they do not bring their feeling side into their spiritual life and deal with their feelings and emotions in a holistic way, those pent-up emotions will sooner or later explode in damaging ways.
Biblically, anxiety and care are symptoms of a failure of trust (see Mt 6:25-34).
Care arises when we are driven by the need to order and control our own lives. In a world where such order and control are partial at best, anxious care can become a consuming passion that misshapes all relationships, all events and all activities of one’s life. When this happens, anxiety-driven persons tend to become manipulative and dehumanizing in their relationships with others. Others must conform to their pathological attempts to order the world and maintain control of their lives. Anxiety-driven persons are also compelled to impose their own order on the events of their lives. Layer
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The Christian’s identity and value do not reside in the fragile order and tenuous control that she or he imposes on life. Identity and value are found in a vital and living relationship with Christ as Lord. This relationship liberates Christians from dependence on their little systems of order and fragile structures of control. Not that believers live without order or control, but they are liberated from dependency on those systems and structures for their sense of self.
If we have not first entered into the posture of prayer and supplication, our requests tend to be very narrowly focused on our own agenda and have their center in our self-referenced matrix of life.
In one sense the most vital and genuine worship of God is bringing our lives into harmony with God’s will. How often is our formal worship merely an attempt to appease God for lives that are lived essentially with no real reference to God’s purposes?
I think what Paul speaks of as unceasing prayer is a life that is increasingly attuned to God in all things—not in a privatized withdrawal from the world but in the midst of the hustle and bustle, busyness and pain, hurt and brokenness of our life and the world around us.
What happens in illumination is a paradigm shift in our motivation. Rather than a self-referenced, self-concerned motivation for our relationship with God, our motivation becomes a heart burning with love for God, the opening of our very being to the One we love, and living our life in the world out of that love.
The French writer Adolphe Tanquerey provides an uncomfortable list of signs of a bad spirit: “to practice showy virtues . . . contempt for little things and the desire to be sanctified in a grand manner . . . false humility . . . false meekness . . . to complain, to lose patience.”11
If we can’t know or feel God, we customarily doubt our relationship with God. But such “knowing” and “feeling” restrict God to the narrow limits of our minds and senses and reduce our relationship with God to the maintenance of such feedback.
ultimately God must be in our life who God is, unrestricted by the narrow limits of our thought or feeling.
It is the anguish and darkness of losing our last grasp on the handhold that keeps us from falling into the fiery abyss of Love.
Somewhere between the extremes of avoidance of discipline and the imprisonment of discipline is the holistic practice of balanced spiritual disciplines that become a means of God’s grace to shape us in the image of Christ for others.
am I to work, or do I wait for God to do it? Paul’s response would be yes! You see, both sides of the equation are essential for balanced spiritual disciplines. If we destroy the paradox by opting for working out our own salvation, the disciplines by which we seek to do this work will become our prisons. If we destroy the paradox by opting for God to do everything, the absence of disciplines becomes a barrier that precludes God’s opportunity to effect any consistent transformation in our lives.
Prayer is the act by which we divest ourselves of all false belongings and become free to belong to God and God alone.3
Prayer therefore is the act of dying to all that we consider to be our own and of being born to a new existence which is not of this world.
Prayer is the act by which the people of God become incorporated into the presence and action of God in the world. 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. How different this is from the idea of prayer as asking God to change our situation without any involvement on our part!
The community of faith is the primary and essential means by which individual believers are nurtured to understand and live their lives as citizens of God’s New Jerusalem in the midst of a fallen-Babylon world.
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.
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. Contemplatio is the posture of the weaned child. We abandon ourselves to God and to whatever God wants to do with us.
The liturgy is thus a deeply subversive act, a spiritual force working within the fallen world to undermine it and renew it. . . . To take part in the Christian liturgy is to take on one’s role in a new kingdom: one that “shall have no end.” It is the political act of all time and is therefore potentially seditious within the secular politics of a specific time and place. . . . Liturgy should be an act of festivity, of joy, of liberation, an act in which the powers of the age to come are celebrated in anticipation.
Worship, whether corporate or individual (and there needs to be both in our liturgical discipline), is the practice of regularly seeking to bring the complete focus of our being on God.
With the discipline of study, however, we must be alert to the temptation to enter into the discipline as a means to help us exert greater control over our lives, the lives of others and the problems of the world. The liturgy of study, as with all the elements of liturgy, is a means of offering ourselves to God, willing for God to do with us as God chooses.
One of the main purposes of fasting is to wean us from our dependence on God’s gifts and enable us to become dependent on God alone. We have a powerful tendency to grasp for ourselves the gifts God gives for the meeting of life’s needs. We constantly succumb to the temptation to become dependent on these things for our well-being and wholeness. Whenever our grasp of something God has given for our sustenance and well-being becomes a destructive bondage of dependence—an idol—a discipline of fasting is needed.
We need to stand aside from our discipleship so as to be able to see more clearly the direction we are going and the course corrections God would have us make.
I suspect you may have experienced something like the kind of experience I once heard a young man describe. He had had one of those radical, 180-degree conversion experiences, and for about three weeks or so he sort of floated along in a third heaven, his feet hardly touching the ground in the euphoria of that experience of joy and release as his spirit came alive in Christ. But, he said, one day he woke up and discovered that there were whole areas of his life that had never even heard of Jesus Christ. He was discovering the reality of what Paul speaks of as the “dead body.” Yes, his spirit
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Here is the great work of God in the process of spiritual formation. God is at work in the areas of our deadness to transform them into life in the image of Christ. This is the essential nature of our pilgrimage. Here is where God is working to form each of us to the image of Christ for the sake of others.
Death, for Paul, is the condition of the unredeemed person: “Once you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” (Eph 2:1-2; see also Col 2:13). For those whose spirits have come alive (Rom 8:10) to continue to allow the “dead body” to rule their lives is to gradually slip back into the deadness out of which they were called to life.
the process of being formed in the image of Christ takes place at those points where we are not formed. God’s approach, God’s touch, is at the points of our unlikeness to Christ—our “dead body.” Here is where the Spirit probes us.
That dead body of your being wants to continue to express itself in the old, destructive behaviors, and through the discipline you are doing the opposite; you have got a war going on. This is what Paul is talking about when he says, “The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh” (Gal 5:17 RSV).
