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April 4 - April 10, 2022
this is our responsibility: to turn our attention to God all through our days and weeks. To think of him. To think deeply of him. And rightly of him, in line with Jesus’s vision of God as the trinitarian community of self-giving, creative, generous, calm, loving joy and delight. To let Jesus’s incredibly compelling vision of who God is give shape to who we become.
Part 1 step sheet Definitions: Truth—reality Lies—unreality Ideas—assumptions about reality Mental maps—a collection of ideas by which we navigate life Spiritual formation—the process by which we are formed from our spirits/inner persons to become like Jesus Three implications of Jesus’s teaching on the devil: He is a real, immaterial, but intelligent being. His end goal is to spread ruin in our souls and society. His primary means is lies. Key texts to meditate on: John 8; Genesis 1–3; and Luke 4 Working theory of the devil’s strategy: deceitful ideas that play to disordered desires that are
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In the Augustinian view, the problem of the human condition isn’t that we don’t love; it’s that we love either the wrong things or the right things but in the wrong order.
for Freud—and this is key—repression of desire is the basis for all neurosis. Translation: the reason you’re unhappy is because other people are telling you you can’t do stuff.
Happiness has become about feeling good, not being good. The good life has become about getting what we want, not becoming the kind of people who want truly good things.
But what’s easy to miss in the modern view of things is that our strongest desires are not actually our deepest desires. Let me say that again: our strongest desires are not actually our deepest desires.
When people die, we honor and celebrate the best parts of their character. Love, sacrifice, loyalty to family and friends, humility, joy, compassion. All of which required their denial of fleshly desires.
My point is simply this: our deepest desires—usually to become people of goodness and love—are often sabotaged by the stronger surface-level desires of our flesh.
giving in to the desires of our flesh does not lead us to freedom and life, as many people assume, but instead to slavery and, in the worst-case scenario, addiction, which is a kind of prolonged suicide by pleasure.
This is what separates us from the animals—not our opposable thumbs or even our prefrontal cortices but our ability to choose our courses of action.
Notice: if to love is to will the good, this means that to love people you need knowledge of reality—to know what is really good for them.
But that’s not Paul’s view of freedom. Or Jesus’s. Or most luminaries of the human condition prior to the modern era. They put more emphasis on positive freedom. Freedom not just to choose but to choose the good. For them, freedom isn’t about autonomy from authority but about liberating loving relationships from sin. And positive freedom means we need a kind of power from outside ourselves (think, the “higher power” of Alcoholics Anonymous) to overcome our (strong) desires for self-gratification and fulfill our (deep) desires for self-giving love.
We see…that freedom is not what the culture tells us. Real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order to gain others. It is not the absence of constraints but it is choosing the right constraints and the right freedoms to lose.
To gain intimacy, we have to give up autonomy.
With every decision we make to complain, criticize, play the victim, focus on the negative, and so on, we become more and more the kind of person who is by nature negative, grouchy, unhappy, and unpleasant to be around, until eventually we lose the very capacity to live happily, gratefully, and full of wonder at our lives in God’s good world.
our level of self-determining freedom does not stay the same over a lifetime; it goes up or down depending on the choices we make.
what’s often missing from the long-running debate over hell and how a loving God could send people there is the rather simple observation that, for some people, heaven would be a kind of hell. Whatever the kingdom of heaven turns out to be in all its fullness, it will be, for sure, a community of people who live under King Jesus’s rule.
I would argue a more helpful way to frame the dichotomy is to delineate between guilt and shame. Guilt is about the what; shame is about the who. Guilt says, “What I did was bad.” Shame: “I am bad.” Guilt thinks to itself, What I did was unloving, and I need to make it right. Shame thinks, I am unlovable, and there’s no hope for me.
But I would argue that guilt can actually be a good thing. There are times and situations when guilt is the emotionally healthy, mature, loving response to our own sin. Guilt is to the soul what pain is to the body. A kind of moral discomfort. Pain is bad only when it goes on indefinitely; in the short term, it’s a gift from God to our bodies, a messenger whose job is to tell us we need to fix something and fast. Guilt is unhealthy only when we wallow in it.
purgation.
All that to say, if all this talk about the flesh has you feeling bad, give careful thought to what you do with that feeling. If a certain habit, entertainment choice, budget line item, or relationship has been itching at the back of your mind, I invite you to pay attention to it. Not to wallow in it or muzzle it but to open your heart to however the Spirit of God is coming to you in it.
Willpower is at its best when it does what it can (direct my body into spiritual practices) so the Spirit’s power can do what willpower can’t (overcome the three enemies of the soul).
the practices aren’t just counterhabits to work out our willpower muscles. They are the means by which we access a power from beyond us. They enable us to live from an animating energy and pneumatic force that is far more powerful than any inner resource we could possibly draw on.
The solution to our flesh’s control over us isn’t to buck up but to rely on the Spirit. Paul then went on to say we live “according to the Spirit” through the simple act of setting our minds on God:
It’s as simple as that: small, regular habits/practices/disciplines that open our minds up to the Spirit and close them off to the flesh.
With fasting, we decide of our own accord to not give our bodies what they want (food); as a result, when somebody else decides to not give us what we want (or life circumstances decide, or even God decides…), we don’t freak out, rage, or go ballistic on Twitter. We’ve trained our souls to be happy and at peace, even when we don’t get our way.
What Scripture reading is to our fight with the devil (a way to fill our minds with truth to combat his lies), fasting is to our fight with the flesh (a way to starve our flesh and weaken its hold over us).
For confession to yield not just forgiveness but freedom, it must drag our sins into the light, not keep them in solitary confinement.
Because we find our deepest intimacies in our greatest vulnerabilities. Jesus’s brother James commanded us to “confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”20 Notice: to each other.
If you hear nothing else, hear this: we all face a war with our flesh. It’s inescapable. But it doesn’t have to be a tug-of-war where both sides are equally matched and, no matter how hard you fight, you just remain in a kind of stasis, exhausted and resigned to mediocrity.
Remember, the key to spiritual formation is to change what we can control (our habits) to influence what we can’t control (our flesh).
Part 2 step sheet Definitions: The flesh—our base, primal, animalistic drives for self-gratification, especially as pertains to sensuality and survival The Spirit—God’s empowering presence in us Freedom in modern Western use—the permission to do whatever we want Freedom in the New Testament—the power to want and do what is good Love in the modern Western use—desire; often sexual desire Love in the New Testament—the compassionate commitment of the heart to delight in the soul of another and to will that person’s good ahead of your own, no matter the cost to yourself The law of returns—every
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I would define the world as a system of ideas, values, morals, practices, and social norms that are integrated into the mainstream and eventually institutionalized in a culture corrupted by the twin sins of rebellion against God and the redefinition of good and evil.
The church was marked by five distinctive features, all of which made it stand out against the backdrop of the empire: The church was multiracial and multiethnic, with a high value for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The church was spread across socioeconomic lines as well, and there was a high value for caring for the poor; those with extra were expected to share with those with less. It was staunch in its active resistance to infanticide and abortion. It was resolute in its vision of marriage and sexuality as between one man and one woman for life. It was nonviolent, both on a personal
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For years, I read this in a hellfire-and-brimstone tone of voice, the bullhorn turned up to eleven—“Woe to those who call evil good!” And, honestly, that could be right. But the more time I spend around the Father, the Son, and the Spirit and experience their love and compassion, the more I hear it in the tone of a weeping parent, heart rent open by the child’s folly and the consequences it will inevitably reap.
Now, let me be very clear: the people of the world are not our enemy; they are the object of Jesus’s love. As Paul wrote, “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood,”49 including people of differing religious, ethical, or political perspectives. “God so loved [the people of] the world that he gave his one and only Son”;50 our fight is not against them but for them.
Post-Christian culture is an attempt to move beyond the Christian vision while still retaining much of its scaffolding. It’s a reaction against Christianity—the West’s rebellious teenager moment. We’re the stereotypical adolescent, kicking against our parents’ authority and railing against all their flaws while still living in their house and eating all their food.
Post-Christianity intuitively yearns for the justice and shalom of the kingdom, whilst defending the reign of the individual will.3
we want the kingdom without the King.4
The West inherited from Christianity incredibly high standards for human rights, but without Christ’s presence and power, it’s increasingly devoid of the necessary resources to achieve its moral goals. The result is a culture that can rarely live up to its own standards. And without any means of atonement, as well as an increasing hostility toward the idea of forgiveness, once you sin (as defined by the new morality), you’re a pariah.
The postmodern view sees all injustice as happening on a human level and so demonizes human beings rather than recognizing the evil forces—“the world, the flesh, and the devil”—at work through all human life, including your own. Adherents of this view also end up being utopian—they see themselves as saviors rather than recognizing that only a true, divine Savior will be able to finally bring in justice.5
As followers of Jesus, we are the epitome of a cognitive minority, whatever our ethnicity is. And the gravitational pull of the world is hard to resist. In part, because it’s often so subtle that we miss it.
The cultural analyst Rod Dreher called the emerging culture of the West a “soft totalitarianism,” and wrote, “This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s. It’s not establishing itself though ‘hard’ means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.”8
Everything starts with deceptive ideas, or lies we believe (put our trust in and live by) about reality—mental maps that come from the devil, not Jesus, and lead to death, not life. But deceptive ideas get as far as they do because they appeal to our disordered desires, or our flesh.
our working theory has been that spiritual disciplines are spiritual warfare. Or said another way: the practices of Jesus are how we fight the world, the flesh, and the devil.
we can’t follow Jesus alone.
by following Jesus together, not alone, we are able to (1) discern Jesus’s truth from the devil’s lies, (2) help one another override our flesh by the Spirit, and (3) form a robust community of deep relationships that functions as a counterculture to the world. In doing so, we’re able to resist the gravitational pull of all three enemies of the soul.
The word church itself ( in Greek) means those who are “called out.”13 It’s not a community of comfort but of calling.
But while church is not less than Sunday services, it is far more. It must be more to survive the Western spiritual apocalypse. Church must become a thick web of interdependent relationships between resilient disciples of Jesus deeply loyal to the Way.
we must move beyond Sunday services and a network of loose ties to become a robust counter-anti-culture not just against the world but for the world. Because we’re not just against evil; we’re for good. We’re for love, joy, thriving marriages and families, children brought up in loving delight, adults moving off the egocentric operating system to become people of love, true freedom, justice for all, and unity in diversity.
