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Perhaps selection is not the correct step. It may be better for me to develop a working definition of spiritual formation that has integrity with the scriptural witness to life in relationship with God, and let you work out its relationship to whatever other definition of spiritual formation you may have adopted.
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 others as objects to be manipulated and used for our own purposes.
We have generally come to expect immediate returns on our investments of time and resources.
We expect that infant to grow into maturity according to the processes that God has ordained for physical growth to wholeness.
There simply is no instantaneous event of putting your quarter in the slot and seeing spiritual formation drop down where you can reach it, whole and complete.
lives-all of these things, little by little, are shaping us into some kind of being.
Spiritual formation is not an option! The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development.
Spiritual formation is a process of being conformed to 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.
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.
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.
But we must always realize that it is God, not we ourselves, who is the source of the transformation of our being into wholeness in the image of Christ.
They had the works, the "doing," but they didn't have a relationship with Jesus, the "being," as the foundational reality out of which those works would flow.
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.
It is only in Christ that we find our individuality.
The image of Christ is that which brings cleansing, healing, restoration, renewal, transformation and wholeness into the unclean, diseased, broken, imprisoned, dead incompleteness of our lives. It brings compassion in place of indifference, forgiveness in place of resentment, kindness in place of coldness, openness in place of protective defensiveness or manipulation, a life lived for God and not self.
The word chose translates a compound Greek term which literally means "spoke forth."
God meets us in those places of our lives that are most alienated from God.
God is there, in grace, offering us the forgiveness, the cleansing, the liberation, the healing we need to begin the journey toward our wholeness and fulfillment in Christ.
Our brokenness is us. Like Pogo, "we have met the enemy and he is us."
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.
God calls us out of that unlikeness (awakening) and moves us to an increasing relinquishment of that unlikeness (purgation); this leads to a new structure of being and doing (illumination) and eventually culminates in Christlikeness of spirit and behavior at that particular point of our life (union).
in that awakening, we recognize that we are not what we ought to be and that God is something far more than we thought.
Purgation is the process of becoming integrated into the new order of being in Christ.
In this stage, purgation leads us to deal with behaviors that may be "normal" and "acceptable" in our culture but which the Scripture and the Spirit of God tell us are not part of God's will for our wholeness.
Next, purgation probes the unconscious sins and omissions of our life.
Finally, purgation deals with the deep-seated attitudes and inner orientations of our being out of which our behavior patterns flow.
Identity and value are found in a vital and living relationship with Christ as Lord.
Supplication reminds us of the nature of a suppliant-one who recognizes his or her condition of inadequacy and impotence, an utter inability to provide what is needed.
totally and completely in God's love and care without demands, conditions or prior expectations.
The casting of the crowns (an image of authority and control) represents illumination, the continual and consistent yielding the control of one's life totally and completely to God.
Good works are a hallmark of the illuminative way, not as a responsibility or a duty but, again, as a response of love.
But union is not an escapist kind of experience. It is the experience
of being at last in the kind of relationship with God for which we were created and for which our beings yearn.
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.
awakening, purgation and illumination to union
Holistic spiritual disciplines are acts of loving obedience that we offer to God steadily and consistently, to be used for whatever work God purposes to do in and through our lives.
