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November 23, 2021
You can see the metaphor: sooner or later the issues on life’s lower decks, though we remain oblivious, will nevertheless rise to the top.
The iceberg brings to mind the goal of spiritual formation in Christ—namely, that Jesus wants to form his life in us. Significantly, about 90 percent of an iceberg remains unseen beneath the surface.2 And Jesus wants to transform our entire beings, not just the 10 percent that shows.
Christianity in the Western world is often marginalized as a life accessory rather than the means of powerful life transformation.
Because we are covertly and consistently being formed by a culture fashioned by shallowness. In short, we are being shallowly formed.
Your gifts can take you only so far. But there are no such limits when it comes to a life marked by deep character.”
What use are the superficial changes we make if we neglect the deep work God wants to do inside us?
I learned with great clarity that the spiritually, emotionally, and socially poor mattered to God and should matter to me.
A deeply formed life is a life marked by integration, intersection, intertwining, and interweaving, holding together multiple layers of spiritual formation.
We are all, in some area of our lives, like the paralyzed man in the Gospels (see Mark 2:1–12). From time to time, we need friends who have the strength to bring us before Jesus.
As long as we remain enslaved to a culture of speed, superficiality, and distraction, we will not be the people God longs for us to be.
N. T. Wright similarly affirmed, “It is only when we slow down our lives that we can catch up to God.”
unless we live with an intentional commitment to slow down, we have no hope for a quality of life that allows Jesus to form us into his image.
Christianity had experienced a drastic cultural shift whereby people purported to enter into life with God and the church not by renunciation of the ways of the world system but by appropriating it through political and cultural power.
In short, the way of worldly power, values, and priorities can easily take precedence in our lives, with Christianity being either complicit in the perpetuation of the world system or irrelevant in the social landscape.
For a disciple, to leave the world is to enter back into it from another door: the door of God’s love and acceptance, the door of God’s way of being. This is how, in the leaving, I found myself arriving at home.
The more familiar you are with someone, the easier it is to be silent in that person’s presence.
One could argue that discomfort with being silent before God just might reveal how unfamiliar we are with God.
In basic terms, silent prayer is the practice of focusing our attention upon God through the simplicity of shared presence. It’s a surrender of our words to be present with the Word (with Jesus).
silent prayer is not a technique to master but a relationship to enter into.
Think of boredom during silent prayer as an act of purification. In this uneventful moment, God purifies us of the false god of good feelings. While good feelings are gifts, they can easily become ends in themselves. We can move from worshipping the living God to worshipping our spiritual experiences. This is a fine line we must be mindful of. The ever-urgent need for people growing in relationship with God is the willingness to endure moments that are far from inspirational.
if your mind gets distracted ten thousand times in twenty minutes of prayer, it’s “ten thousand opportunities to return to God.”
But I want you to know that Sabbath is not a reward for hard work. Sabbath is a gift that precedes work and enables us to work.
As with God’s grace, rest is never a reward; it’s a gift.
We are often so used to producing that we forget to be present.
But we keep Sabbath not because it makes us more productive at work but to resist the idol of productivity. We are more than what we produce.
Sabbath is not just rest from making things. It’s rest from the need to make something of ourselves.
when we place our faith in Jesus, we exchange our exhaustion for his rest.
The righteous are those who are directed by God’s instruction. The unrighteous in this psalm have no room for his instruction in their lives.
In the first movement of lectio, there is a recognition that Scripture “is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow” (Hebrews 4:12, NIV).
In this first movement, then, we ask the Lord to help us locate a word or phrase in a short passage of Scripture as we read it two or three times. As we read, we ask, “Lord, what does it say?”
In this movement, we are particularly focused on the word or phrase that one believes has been identified by the Spirit for this moment.
In this moment, we are essentially asking, “Lord, what are you saying to me?”
In oratio, we speak freely to God (whether verbally or in writing), calling out the ways we have been addressed.
In this moment, we ask ourselves, “What do I want to say to God?”
Much like the practice of silent prayer, contemplation in this moment is not for the purpose of further rumination and examination. God has spoken to us. We have spoken in return. Now we are called to simply rest in God’s abiding love. No more questions are required.
In silent prayer, we are called to withstand the inner disturbances and annoyances of ourselves for the sake of union with God. In a commitment to stability, we withstand the disturbances and annoyances of others for the sake of union with God and union with each other.
the Cross of Christ isn’t just a bridge that gets us to God; it’s a sledgehammer that breaks down walls that separate us.
“The Gospel must not only offer a personal salvation in the future life to those who believe; it must also transform all of the relationships of life here and now and thus cause the Kingdom of God to prevail in all the world.”3
God is not simply in the business of saving souls; he is in the business of creating a new family.
We are increasingly distanced from people with whom we disagree. But this was not Jesus’s approach.
In the calling of his disciples, Jesus put people together who would most certainly not follow each other on Twitter.
Matthew worked for the government; Simon hated the government. Matthew was a tax collector; Simon was a tax protester. Matthew collected revenue for the Romans; Simon was a rebel against the Romans. Matthew was wealthy; Simon was working class. Matthew made a living taking advantage of people like Simon; Simon made a living trying to kill people like Matthew.
Reconciliation in community will always cost us something, and in Christ the barriers that separate us can come down in his name.
“Reconciliation is an ongoing spiritual process involving forgiveness, repentance and justice that restores broken relationships and systems to reflect God’s original intention for all creation to flourish.”
Race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality often are used as interchangeable words, but each one has a different shade of meaning…. Ethnicity is biblical (Hebrew: goy or am; Greek: ethnos). Ethnicity is created by God as people groups move together through space and time…. Culture is implicit in Scripture, but the word itself is never used. Culture is a sociological and anthropological term that refers to the beliefs, norms, rituals, arts, and worldviews of particular people groups in a particular place at a particular time. Culture is fluid…. Nationality indicates the sovereign nation/state
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There can be no true reconciliation without justice.
On the surface, diversity looks wonderful, especially in church settings. However, as with justice, the temptation is for us to stop there. When we make diversity the end goal, we are no different from New York City subway cars. New York City subway cars are crowds of diverse, anonymous people in close proximity. But the church is called to be more than a sanctified subway car.
You can’t understand the current experience of racial hostility, especially in the United States, without also honestly facing the racial discrimination that’s taken place throughout history, including racial oppression experienced by Native Americans and slavery experienced by African Americans.
Our refusal to honestly look at the dark history of the United States often reveals an idolatry of the heart.
