The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus

by Rich Villodas

What I’ve learned has reinforced the truth that 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.

I sometimes imagine a scenario in which someone is locked inside of a supermarket and dies of starvation. Can you imagine? You might say this is impossible. Yet in our spiritual lives, this happens every day. Whether we know it or not, we are locked inside the supermarket of God’s abundant life and love. It’s all available to us. Even so, people are spiritually starving. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

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.

There are instances when I spend time with God in silence and can sense his love and mercy, but then there are occasions when I feel that it was time wasted. But like with most of our closest relationships, even in the ordinary moments, our shared presence is a gift.

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 contemplative, silent prayer ushers us into union with God, distractions inevitably pull us away from this state of being. But they don’t have to have the final say. As I heard it said by Thomas Keating, if your mind gets distracted ten thousand times in twenty minutes of prayer, it’s “ten thousand opportunities to return to God.” Ever since I heard those words, I’ve seen distraction as an inescapable reality that positions me to come back to God.

When we closely examine the story of the prodigal son, we see an image of love that is to shape our image of God. The prodigal son doesn’t return with a renewed love for his father; he comes back simply to survive. And his father is perfectly fine with that. God just wants us home.

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.

I have found pastor and author Dr. Brenda Salter McNeil’s definition incredibly helpful. She succinctly captured the multifaceted nature of biblical reconciliation: “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.”5 In this definition, Dr. McNeil underscored a number of realities that must be engaged for true reconciliation to take place; namely, the personal and public dimensions of it.

Individual racial prejudice is about how we negatively and often violently perceive others, but institutional racism is about how power is used.

In one of his incisive articles, sociologist Dr. Michael Emerson remarked, “Whites tend to view racism as intended individual acts of overt prejudice and discrimination….Most people of color define racism quite differently. [For people of color], racism is, at a minimum, prejudice plus power, and that power comes not from being a prejudiced individual, but from being part of a group that controls the nation’s systems.”8

In truth, both individual racism and systemic racism are our realities. But systemic/institutional racism is a way that power in a society is ordered to give advantage to some and disadvantage to others. In the United States, institutional racism emerges from a sinful hierarchy that normalizes and prioritizes White people, and this might be hard to receive. But the residue of White normativity and White supremacy remains deeply at work in our society.

As American philosopher Dr. Cornel West said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”

There can be no true reconciliation without justice. For relationships to be fully restored, things have to be made right. Justice is the presence of right verdicts and right relationships, and it’s characterized by undoing power abuses and redressing sins against oppressed people.

When the gospel is deeply at work, racial reconciliation results in a diverse community that embraces the unique gifts and acknowledges the distinctive sins of their ethnic-racial-social makeup while experiencing loving communion with others under the lordship of Jesus.

1. Leave your world. Let go of the familiar, take the risk, and step out (especially with regard to race and culture). 2. Enter into someone else’s world. Practice active, humble, and curious listening. 3. Allow yourself to be formed by others. Open up to their worldviews while holding on to yourself. In this way, incarnation describes not only Jesus’s ministry to us but also how we can minister by listening to one another.

The sad truth about modern spirituality is that we often avoid feeling our own pain and in the process avoid feeling the pain of others. When this happens, it’s impossible to do the work of reconciliation. For good reason, Paul calls us to weep with those who weep (see Romans 12:15). Beyond the personal blessing of comfort for those who mourn, it is often our tears that serve as the foundation for spiritual transformation and for a new social imagination. The act of lamenting often results in prophetic vision to deeply name the powers that work against reconciliation. To lament is not simply to cry out but also to discern God’s direction through the tears.

A deep life with God is required when engaging the powers of racial hostility, because in our work to dismantle this power, we can be prone to using tactics that conform to the destructive ways of this world. A person working for racial justice and reconciliation without a deep spirituality of prayer is missing an important part of the healing process.

Interior examination is a way of life that considers the realities of our inner worlds for the sake of our own flourishing and the call to love well.

The genogram is a family systems theory resource to help people visually see the patterns, trauma, and scripts that have formed their place in the world. At New Life, we lead people at various points in the year to examine their families of origin through the genogram. The goal of the genogram is not simply to see the dysfunction of our families (and it’s definitely not to provoke us to hate our families). The goal of the genogram is to move toward greater healing for the purpose of loving well.3

To be anxious is to be human. But to be regularly shaped by anxiety diminishes our humanity.

I have found a helpful question to consider when identifying and examining anxiety: Who and what situations make me anxious?

The examination of our feelings as a whole is an integral practice for deeply formed lives. To that end, I have found Alice Miller’s distinction between emotions and feelings to be enlightening. She wrote, “Emotion is a more or less unconscious, but at the same time vitally important physical response to internal or external events—such things as fear of thunderstorms, rage at having been deceived, or the pleasure that results from a present we really desire. By contrast, the word ‘feeling’ designates a conscious perception of an emotion.”

powerful tool called Explore the Iceberg.6 The tool offers four simple questions that the most intelligent and educated have struggled to respond to. It’s a helpful guide for cultivating a life of interior examination. The four questions are: 1. What are you mad about? 2. What are you sad about? 3. What are you anxious about? 4. What are you glad about?

In the examination of our reactions, we live from a place of depth, wisdom, and discernment. We find ourselves in a better place to reject the lies and stories that often distort our vision. Our perceptions become clearer; we make fewer assumptions and live without the heavy burden of self-justification, self-condemnation, and the need to judge others.

The world is in desperate need of people willing to examine their own selves before examining others. The work of “other-examination” comes all too naturally. We are accustomed to viewing, judging, and comparing others rather than ourselves. That’s easy. The way of self-examination is hard. But by God’s grace, the Spirit can help us.

say yes to this invitation requires you to surrender a way of being on mission that compartmentalizes doing from being. In some Christian traditions, doing is often at the expense of being. In others, being is often at the expense of doing. We need a life of doing that flows from being.

Certainly, there are seasons for recovery, rest, and disengagement, but there is to be an interplay at work. We are not to be Mary to the exclusion of Martha, nor are we to be Martha at the exclusion of Mary (see Luke 10:38–42). We are called to be active contemplatives or contemplative activists, holding together the invitation to be and to do. This is what we see with the God revealed in Scripture. The invitation to deeply formed mission is one that starts with the liberating understanding that he is always on mission but from a place of being. From the quality of God’s life, God acts.

Bring up any divisive issue in our world—politics, sexuality, race, immigration, and so on—and what you’ll find are Christians clearly asserting what they are against. But any conversation regarding the nature of God must begin with him being for all. Mission for a Christian must begin not with human fallenness but with God’s posture toward the world.

Our world is often marked by a level of such hostility, animus, and vitriol that compassion feels like impossible reality. As Mother Teresa famously stated, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”4 The attacking that permeates our souls and cities is fueled by deep fear and suspicion. The posture of being against the world is one that has marked Christian witness for centuries, but what makes genuine Christian engagement with the world different is that we don’t hate the people we are trying to change.

God invites us to consider our personalities, context, and experiences and, out of who we are, discerningly participate in what he is already doing. Being on mission doesn’t require us to be intrusive, awkward, and coercive. It should be a normal experience.

I don’t know what happened next in her life, but I do know this: the more we create spaces for people who don’t look like us, think like us, or believe like us,

As theologian Henri Nouwen said, “Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.”

In Jesus’s first sermon in Luke 4, he says that the Spirit of God is upon him to announce good news. Notably, the good news (in this portion of Scripture) is not the promise of a disembodied salvation located in heaven upon death. Jesus’s gospel in Luke 4 is a very worldly one. He proclaimed, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (verses 18–19). This passage has often been so spiritualized that we miss the material urgency in Jesus’s words and consequently the urgency and passion that will characterize Christ followers. The “poor” Jesus spoke of are certainly those who are spiritually destitute, but they are also those who are materially impoverished. The “captives” he proclaims freedom to are not just those in personal bondage to demonic powers but also those who are captive to demonic ideologies. The recovery of sight for “the blind” is not just an act of private healing but also a miracle of justice, joining the infirmed to the larger community. The “oppressed” who are set free are those who are oppressed by not only their own sin but also the sinful powers that marginalize people.

Novelist and theologian Frederick Buechner captured this truth well: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”