In a previous post I narrated what I called the through-line of Reformed spirituality as one guided and governed by love. There is a long tradition in Reformed theology that didn’t hesitate to speak of God and his love in very romantic, even erotic ways. For many of us this is incredibly uncomfortable.

This hesitancy is a bit of a double-edged sword. There is probably something good about it. But at the same time there is certainly something undiscerning wrapped up in this hesitancy. Too often erotic love is sent abroad to the world, flesh, and devil as if it was not a part of the goodness of God’s creation. Too many cannot fathom this sort of love sanctified and ordered to God.

Jonathan Edwards, in an interesting passage, wrestles with the human temptation toward “carnal appetites” of the flesh (often just named as lust), and how those lusts are shadow-desires of the heart longing for God. Our desires have an infinite horizon, only able to be satisfied in the infinite fountain of love that is the Triune God of glory.

Listen to Edwards’s pastoral guidance as one being shepherded to their Lord:

Endeavor to promote spiritual appetites by laying yourself in the way of allurement. We are to avoid being in the way of temptation with respect to our carnal appetites. Job made a covenant with his eyes [Job 31:1]. But we ought to take all opportunities to lay ourselves in the way of enticement with respect to our gracious inclinations. Thus you should be often with God in prayer, and then you will be in the way of having your heart drawn forth to him. We ought to be frequent in reading and constant in hearing the Word. And particularly to this end, we ought carefully and with the utmost seriousness and consideration attend the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper: this was appointed for this end, to draw forth the longings of our souls towards Jesus Christ. Here are the glorious objects of spiritual desire by visible signs represented to our view. We have Christ evidently set forth crucified {in this sacrament}. Here we have that spiritual meat and drink represented and offered to excite our hunger and thirst; here we have all that spiritual feast represented which God has provided for poor souls; and here we may hope in some measure to have our longing souls satisfied in this world by the gracious communications of the Spirit of God.

The problem with our lust, for Edwards, is not enticement, but is being enticed by worldly lusts rather than godly ones. To put ourselves in the way of this allurement we have to partake of the means of grace as offered to us by Jesus himself, calling us near to rest in his grace, mercy, and love.

While we walk by faith and not by sight, in other words, God has still given us places to cast our vision. We look to our baptism. We look to the bread and cup offered to us by the Lord himself. We look to the communion of saints who can speak to us in our darkness. We look to the Word declared - the Word we stand under as those simultaneously undone by the law and raised in and by the Spirit - and stand there as hearers of the Word who are “made clean because of the Word” he has spoken to us (John 15:3).

We are those who stand before God justified because we have put our faith in him. We are his and he is ours. In the union we know in Christ, we stand as those who trust by faith that Christ is our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor. 1:30).

Therefore we stand as those undone by his kindness. We come as those captivated by his goodness and beauty. We declare with David, “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple” (Ps. 27:4).

Christians are those who gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and who inquire in his temple. This is the Christian task of contemplation. As Andrew Louth notes, “con” means “with,” and templum refers to the temple, such that contemplation means “to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.”

This is how we put ourselves in the allurement of God. This is how we set our minds on things above, even as we set our eyes on the means of grace placed before us.

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about the nature of desire and the Christian life. Take a look at the video below for more.

Share

Read more

There are a lot of false ideas about spiritual formation floating around. As Jonathan Edwards reminds, whenever God is at work, we should expect to find Satan hard at work reaping false ideas, doctrines, and excesses. The faithful response isn’t to reject that work of course. That would be rejecting a work of God and playing into Satan’s hands!

I won’t dive into the ugly underbelly of the fundamentalist podcasting and blogger crowd - divisive and uninformed in equal measure (and running over!) - but let me just remind us what we are talking about:

Furthermore, this also means that there is not a view called “spiritual formation.” You can never say, “Well, so and so believes in spiritual formation and therefore they must believe “x” since everyone who believes in spiritual formation believes x.” That’s gibberish.

Unfortunately, there is a not-so-small cottage industry of folks who are propagating false ideas about what spiritual formation means, using all sorts of scare tactics and doing a lot of damage to weaker brothers and sisters (if you want to see Paul get incredible vicious, read 1 Cor. 8 and 10 and Romans 14 where he talks about folks who damage weaker brothers and sisters).

Subscribe now

I have no doubt that these folks are well-intentioned but that does not negate how divisive they can be. Good intentions does not somehow mitigate against bearing false witness.

Spiritual formation, and here I am focusing explicitly on a broadly Protestant and a more narrowly evangelical vision of spiritual formation, will align with the nature of the gospel. We never leave the gospel behind to move on to “higher things.” By centering the gospel, we must focus deeply on what it means to be justified by faith as well as sanctified by the Spirit in Christ (remember, the gospel is not justification, but justification and sanctification, as any decent Protestant theologian would remind us).

This vision of spiritual formation requires us to grapple with the nature of a truly supernatural life - a life of grace lived in the Spirit - where we attend to key questions Scripture raises for us, like:

Notice that every Christian has to answer these questions. It is not like some Christians can avoid these issues as if we were talking about esoteric doctrine.

In light of this, I want to pause on a related question: Who should come and study spiritual formation? The answer may surprise you. Who actually comes to these programs? In my experience, it is a little bit of everyone. Sometimes we get people who are already on a seminary track, who, when we show them what spiritual theology is, think, “Wow! I can do this?!” And they transfer over.

The people who are in full-time vocational ministry, or who want to be, seem to understand that seminary makes sense. What has been particularly interesting though is to walk with the other folks through the idea of seminary. For many, seminary feels like something totally outside of possibility. For many, oddly, seminary feels like a luxury.

I want to think a bit about what is going on in these sorts of circumstances.

At the heart of spiritual formation, and any decent training in spiritual formation, is the desire to be faithful and to obey God and his Word from our hearts. This is not just for folks who want to go into full-time vocational ministry. This is for folks who are grappling with their life before God and are feeling the weight of faithfulness.

But it is profoundly counter-cultural.

With the popularity of spiritual formation, we find a lot of people asking questions about what Christian faithfulness entails, but are either doing so alone or are just reading a couple of books and trying some spiritual practices. But there is a desperation beneath this that isn’t being addressed. There is a longing for something more, but they are not being offered a coherent theology of Christian maturation anywhere else.

This is why, whether we are in full-time church-based ministry, the business world, or higher education, we cannot simply learn a theology divorced from the lived-reality of life with Jesus. We are always tempted by what Protestants used to call speculative theology, which is the kind of theology demons have (James 2:19), instead of affective theology. Theology is about life with God, and life with God should saturate every Christians’ vision of their vocation, family, and life.

Check out the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.

Check out my talks on spiritual formation that is shaped by the gospel.

For my paid subscribers, I want to name a bit more of what I see going on in the spiritual formation conversation today that I find unhelpful and why I think it has arisen. There is a lot going on right now that is misguided because so much of it is a-theological (i.e., simply void of theology). I want to name a bit of what happens in those cases, so take a look at the video below.

Share

Read more

The reason I want to the University of Aberdeen to study theology was that John Webster was the main professor in that department. He had just hired a series of younger theologians under him, one of whom became my supervisor, and he established an incredibly vibrant theological community in that place.

Those years at Aberdeen were incredible. But the lesson I learned at that place was not a short-term vision. It was a vision for a certain kind of life. A theological life.

By the time I had met John I already heard from the theologians I respected that he was the greatest living theologian of his day. But John’s legacy, in many ways, was about the recovery of a truly theological rationality. One of his main lines of inquiry in those years was: How can we think theologically in the university today?

But even beyond the university, Webster’s theological vision was about reasoning in the presence of God for the sake of his church. Webster argues that theology “is properly undertaken in the sphere of the Church, that is, in the region of human fellowship which is brought into being and sustained by the saving activity and presence of God.”

“Theology is one of the effects of that saving presence;” Webster argued, and “it is one of the activities of reason transfigured by the renewal of human life and history which the holy God effects in his works and makes manifest in his word.” In this sense, “theological reason is an activity of the regenerate mind turned towards the gospel of Jesus Christ, which constitutes the Church’s origin and vocation.”

Becoming a Theologian

Webster’s legacy establishes a path for becoming a theologian. Webster’s theological vision was one where God remained centered, not just formally but materially, in all that he did. The temptation of the theologian was to allow their thinking to gravitate away from God, or to make God into a really huge creature, and therefore fail to really consider God himself.

But Webster’s vision was not a disembodied ideal. John established in his own life, and in that community, a certain path to embrace the maturation of a theologian. Key to that path was a patient attention to Scripture, to be sure, but it was also the willingness to sit at the feet of the great minds of Christian history. The theological vision that Webster articulated was not merely taught; one had to absorb it by patiently attending to the contours of sanctified reason.

The picture of John above is exactly how I remember him in his office. John was incredibly gracious to me. Even though I wasn’t his student he agreed to meet with me regularly. I remember that edition of The Works of John Owen sitting on his desk. You could tell what was currently on his desk because of who he quoted in his recent work, and it ended up being incredibly wide-ranging (in those days it was a lot of Aquinas, Owen, and Edwards, along with his ever-present wrestling with Barth). In the task of theological reasoning, it didn’t really matter who you were sitting with, as long as you were sitting with one of the thinkers of the church who had been weighed by the church.

For many, Webster became the theologian who helped us think about doctrinal construction and location. He was always articulating, not only what a doctrine was about, but what sort of shape and size it was in a broader theological vision. But his enduring influence, I think, will be his vision for a truly theological theology. This was his refusal to leave the ground and rationality of theology for something else, often something more “cutting-edge” that the modern university was enamored with.

This is a vision for theology before the face of God.

This is why Webster himself, and his students, tend not to publish constructive work quickly. I am often asked why theological dissertations coming out of that school of thought almost always focus on a single individual. It is because the church needs nothing less than freshly minted PhD’s writing constructively. Theological reason is hard won over a life. The path to becoming a theologian is to patiently sit at the feet of Scripture and the way that the tradition has heard Scripture, allowing those voices to confront you with your flesh, your modern presuppositions, and your tendency to gravitate away from God to talk about other things.

But while Webster represents a kind of academic theology, albeit one that is explicitly churchly, I want to highlight the call for all Christians to embrace a theological rationality. Instead, what I often see, is an attempt to tack Christianity on to an already established way of reasoning. Instead of reason condemned and redeemed, I typically find reason simply affirmed. For example, what often goes by the name “integration” is just reason affirmed; what we call integration is too often secular reason with Bible verses pasted on the end.

To embrace the call of a truly theological way of reasoning is to find oneself utter captivated by God and his gospel. It is a refusal to bypass this for other ground and a refusal to reason about your life apart from this fact. But this means that it is also a refusal to reason apart from the cross.

For my paid subscribers, I want to think a bit more about the nature of this sort of reasoning and what it takes to embrace this call. Take a look at the video below.

Share

Read more

For those who have read my work for a while know that I’m worried when spiritual formation is treated as if it is just doing spiritual practices.

We have to talk about spiritual practices of course - what we used to call means of grace - but we must not talk about these in a pragmatic, self-help, or idealized manner. Too often that is the case.

Subscribe now

One problem we address in When God Seems Distant, is that spiritual practices take on different shape and experience in different seasons of the soul. In early consolation spiritual practices often feel easy. We are animated by giving ourselves to these things and any problems we run into along the way are not debilitating, but are just a part of the process. We are excited and we often are fueling these practices with passion.

Spiritual practices in this season are weaning us off of our flesh and onto things of the Spirit. Like a parent who offers their child something delicious to help them leave milk aside, in this season our heavenly Father is giving us consolation to wean us off of the things of the world and the flesh to understand that he himself is our good.

In many ways this is such a wonderful season. Passionate about new things, our life is truly changed.

Notice that being people of the flesh and being an infant is the same. But it is not a vice for infants to be infants. The problem is when you are a teenager and are still on the bottle. Now it is a problem that you are being fleshly.

Paul assumes that we have to think about the Christian life developmentally. There are seasons of life with the Lord, and throughout each season the Lord is working with where we are in light of how he raises his children. In certain seasons the Lord dotes upon his people, lavishing them with his kindness. In others he might send us a thorn of the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass you (as he did with Paul, 2 Cor. 12:7-10).

Read how Charles Spurgeon wrote about this:

Now there are many who have rejoiced in the presence of God for a season; they have basked in the sunshine God has been pleased to give them in the earlier stages of their Christian career; they have walked along the “green pastures,” by the side of the “still waters,” and suddenly—in a month or two—they find that glorious sky is clouded: instead of “green pastures,” they have to tread the sandy desert; in the place of “still waters,” they find streams brackish to their taste and bitter to their spirits, and they say, “Surely, if I were a child of God this would not happen.” Oh! say not so, thou who art walking in darkness. The best of God’s saints have their nights; the dearest of his children have to walk through a weary wilderness. There is not a Christian who has enjoyed perpetual happiness, there is no believer who can always sing a song of joy. It is not every lark that can always carol. It is not every star that can always be seen. And not every Christian is always happy. Perhaps the King of Saints gave you a season of great joy at first because you were a raw recruit and he would not put you into the roughest part of the battle when you had first enlisted. You were a tender plant, and he nursed you in the hot-house till you could stand severe weather. You were a young child, and therefore he wrapped you in furs and clothed you in the softest mantle. But now you have become strong and the case is different.

When you are being doted upon, spiritual practices look a certain way. When you are in the middle of the desert and it seems like God has abandon you, those practices feel very different. Now they are more purgative. Instead of seeing growth in your life, it feels like you are going backwards. In the desert, things seem to get worse rather than better.

In all that God is doing he is leading you to himself, to know that he is the God of steadfast love and mercy. The Lord is leading you to himself to know his holiness and his glory, and to discover in him that you are still trying to animate your life in the flesh - even your Christian life in the flesh.

The Lord has more for you.

If you want a bit more about this theme of the desert, see the recent article I published at The Gospel Coalition here.

Share

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about the dynamics of spiritual practices in different seasons of the soul and why a developmental spirituality is necessary to understand these things. This is key for spiritual formation to be a task of shepherding, which I think it must be. I hope this is helpful.

Read more

After the initial wave of COVID had hit, and we were trying to figure o…

Read more

As of late I’ve seen a lot of people trying to map-out, in differing ways, something called “the spiritual formation movement.” The problem is, there is no such thing, nor has there ever been such a thing.

Typically, what ends up happening, is that folks begin narrating the publishing agenda over the past 50 years about spiritual formation. It is true that you can exposit, broadly, a publishing blitz under the rubric of “spiritual formation” or “spiritual disciplines.” But to equate “spiritual formation” with what books have done well is a failure to attend to what has actually happened over the past 50 years.

Instead of a movement, there has been conversations and emphases developed in tandem that created trajectories and tributaries in vastly different directions. In one sector you might find spiritual formation topics merged with missional emphases. In other you might find highly therapeutic accounts. In another still you might find historic retrieval.

Instead, there is a shared conviction that the church and her scholars have failed to attend to what maturation actually looks like in the granular. In other words, there is a conviction that the church and her scholars often just assert ideals without narrating any actual way to attain those ideals. What is left behind is a sort of magic view of sanctification, where people just begin to think: I need to pray harder. I need to do more. I need better liturgy.

I was introduced into these circles at an early age and grew up in these conversations after high school. John Ortberg, one of my pastors growing up, is the one who first handed me Devotional Classics, which became my foray into this discussion. I had the opportunity to read and meet with Dallas Willard over the years, studying with several of his former students, and got to know Richard Foster and his wife when we went to church with them for a couple of years when we lived in Colorado.

Because of all of this, however, it is impossible to speak meaningfully about what “spiritual formation” means. Instead, I see at least three totally different things going on:

First, there is the outsiders’ perception that there is something called “spiritual formation,” that names a view of something. This is not even remotely true. There is no “view” called spiritual formation. Spiritual formation is the Spirit’s work to form us ever-increasingly into the likeness of Jesus. Like all theological claims, there are many views that have arisen based on beliefs about salvation, sin, personhood, etc.

Second, there are those who have bought into the publishing hype, and these folks have come to believe that spiritual formation is about something called spiritual disciplines. Typically, this is understood as the need to become a more serious Christian - often called a “disciple” - and the emphasis is almost entirely on practices. Often these folks love Willard but their views are not actually all that close to Dallas’.

Third, there is the emphasis that Dallas Willard taught, along with a handful of others who are lesser known, that was an integrated, holistic account of Christian theology and philosophy centered on becoming like Jesus.

I am fairly uninterested in the first two emphases, but was catechized in the third. John Coe, my longtime friend and mentor (and in my mind the most integrated thinker who has worked in this area), is the one who cast the vision I grabbed onto as a seminary student. The focus was not on spiritual formation as a reductive conversation about spiritual disciplines, but something much richer.

In other words, his focus (and I would also say Willard’s focus) was on doing spiritual theology.

This is why, at Talbot School of Theology, every student does at least a year (and most a year and a half) of spiritual theology. On this vision, spiritual theology is not just one aspect of the task of theology or the calling of the Christian, but is what makes sure that the seminary serves the church and not the academy.

Spiritual theology is the guiding dynamic of the Christian life because theology is, to use an older Reformed definition, the art of living unto God by Christ.

When I was a student at the Institute for Spiritual Formation, I remember John Coe once saying, “What we do here is exactly what Jonathan Edwards was doing during the revivals.” At the time, I remember that sounding so totally odd. Edwards?! I had never read Edwards, but I was intrigued, and not slightly confused. When I thought of Edwards I didn’t think of what we were learning.

So after I dropped my proposed dissertation topic as a first-year PhD student in theology at the University of Aberdeen, and my supervisor asked me about studying Edwards, I remembered John’s comment. But I also remembered Willard’s advice to go back to the fountainheads of your own tradition and learn from them. As an evangelical I knew that Edwards was one of those fountainheads. So I devoted myself to studying Protestant theology and eventually more Puritan theology for the sake of spiritual renewal.

The spiritual formation conversation, if we can call it that, has, unfortunately, never fully seen or grasped this vision. Willard is often quoted but rarely imitated. Methodologies are often reductive, tacking spiritual disciplines onto whatever is currently a hot cultural topic or pop-psychological construct, instead of undertaking a real spiritual theology.

At the same time, many theologians continue on doing their work as if narrating the lived-reality of the Christian is not in the purview of their calling. So you can have theologians mastering the tradition with no ability to shepherd a soul to her Lord. [A focus of Simeon Zahl’s fascinating book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience.]

As John and I are writing a trilogy (Lord willing) of books on spiritual formation, our hope is that they reveal the depth of both spiritual theology and also a focus on the lived-reality of the Christian life. The last thing we need are articulations of the Christian life that are mere abstractions or ideals presented. We need people who can speak to the lived-reality of life with God. That is our hope.

If you are new to my Substack, see here for some talks I gave on the nature of spiritual formation. I hope these will help explain more what I am talking about here.

For my paid subscribers I want to narrate a bit more about why I am worried about the language of “movement,” and how I think we need to re-tradition the spiritual formation discussion.

Share

Read more

Dallas Willard has many famous one-liners. He worked hard on them. He knew that if you could speak a truth in a pithy and penetrating way it would would lodge in someone’s consciousness, inevitably forcing them to meditate on it.

One of those one-liners is that we should ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our life.

This is an oft-repeated line for good reason. As with many Willardisms, it was meant to provoke questions and contemplation. However it was not meant to serve as a kind of axiom.

I know someone who is one of the most frenetic people I have ever met who was an early adopter of ruthlessly eliminating hurry. They frenetically eliminated hurry but are still frenetic.

Subscribe now

You see, the goal is not to get rid of hurry. The goal is to be present. Presence, and not the elimination of hurry, is the point. But if you are going to be present you cannot be hurried.

Let me put this a different way. I have met people who wanted to be deep and wise and profound. But instead of taking the actual path required to become that kind of person, they just learned how to mimic certain behaviors.

Some of these behaviors had a kind of wisdom to them. They talked less and they were a bit more quiet, for instance. But in many cases, they just became awkward humans beings. They put on contemplative and guru-esque postures, if I can put it that way.

But this did not lead to them being present to others. In fact, it was a mode of being absent from them, and projecting a posture to appear to be other than what they truly are.

Much of what the Christian life requires of us is a training in presence. God’s presence to us, known in Christ by the Spirit, calls us to draw near to him (to be present to him). Our love of God creates the context to love our neighbor as ourselves, a call that has embedded into it the ability to be with another, and not merely to be at them.

Presence, and training in presence, is always the training of love, and this requires more than simply tacking on new information or new concepts or new practices.

The presence of love requires the love of God poured into our hearts (Rom. 5:5).

The presence of love requires union with Christ who is our righteousness and sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30), such that we embrace the access we have to the Father, in the Son, and by the Spirit (Eph. 2:18).

But along the lines of eliminating hurry, it is important to pay attention to how our lifestyle shapes us in and for presence or away from it. We recently had one of our church missionaries back home sharing about her time thus far on the field, and she said something profound as she contrasted life in the US with life on the mission field where she is. She said, “Nothing is convenient. Everything is relational.”

There is something of an axiom there. Every time we opt for convenience we are probably also choosing a path that isn’t inherently relational. Repeatedly, over a long period of time, we’ll discover that we just stopped living distinctively human lives at all.

Share

For my paid subscribers, I want to think a bit more about how we can eliminate hurry and still miss the point (and, I think, miss Willard’s point). I hope this is helpful. Also, after the video I have begun to include quick links to the mini-courses I provide on this Substack and a reminder about where you can access the extra content. I hope that is helpful!

Read more

The primary question I hear when I go to conferences, or when people in full-time ministry reach out to me, is “What does spiritual formation look like in the church?”

They often want a simple answer, but it isn’t. There are many who will provide a simple answer, to be sure, but it ends up being no more than “here are some practices you should be doing.”

Spiritual theology is the term we use at the Institute for Spiritual Formation, mostly because all of our older terms are either out-of-date or misunderstood. Terms like Christian ethics, practical theology, or experimental divinity used to cover what we call spiritual theology. The problem is that the modern seminary never included a place in the curriculum for this kind of study and expertise.

Subscribe now

Our contemporary conversation in spiritual formation emerged out of this neglect. As often happens in church history, we see cyclical movements of renewal because the church has lost something fundamental to its life. The first wave of the spiritual formation movement never even tried to give a holistic account of what needed to happen (that simply isn’t what they were doing), but tried to name all of the things that we have neglected.

When we advance a vision of spiritual formation divorced from spiritual theology what we tend to get is overly pragmatic, overly individualized, and overly self-funded visions of spiritual growth. They end up looking no different than the life-hacks of the world with a thin Christian glaze spread over the whole.

Let me say something a bit bold here.

If Jonathan Edwards was right, and I think he was, that whenever God is at work we should expect to find Satan at work mimicking and undermining that work, then we need to have a wise, theologically-grounded, and distinctively Christian vision of spiritual formation that can expose false spirituality for what it is (I gave a talk for The Gospel Coalition West Coast Conference on this topic that can be heard here).

Since Jamin Goggin is now at Talbot heading up our pastoral care and counseling program, we have been cooking up a way to partner our programs for a degree in spiritual formation for the church. It actually turns out that we already have that program, but people don’t tend to know what it is.

But more directly, until now we haven’t been able to provide the level of pastoral and churchly integration that we wanted. Now that Jamin is on faculty, we can do that.

You can read about our vision in the new Talbot Magazine here.

The advantage of having an alum of your program who is also one of your closest friends who you do ministry with and write with, is that you can really integrate well across a curriculum. A curriculum is never just classes of course. The professors who teach those classes end of determining, for good or for bad, what that curriculum actually amounts to.

At the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology, we have two MA degrees in spiritual formation, an MDiv, and a DMin program in spiritual formation, along with a Marriage and Family Therapy masters degree with a unique focus on spiritual formation (and, finally, a certificate in spiritual formation).

The focus of all of these programs is on the formation of the soul of the student, not as a side-feature of the curriculum, but as its core defining focus. What this means is that rather than focusing narrowly on knowledge and skill only, these programs are aimed at wisdom and love.

For a long time our most popular degree has been the Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation and Soul Care. This is the degree that focuses on spiritual theology for the sake of becoming a spiritual director, the training of which can be utilized in a wide-variety of soul care modalities. Central to this degree is a two-year (four semester) practicum sequence in spiritual direction.

The other masters degree is called the Master of Arts (Spiritual Formation), because it is a part of Talbot’s general master of arts degrees. In other words, this degree is more like a masters in New Testament, Old Testament, or Theology. It has always been the track that was aimed at folks who wanted to teach spiritual formation in the church or go on to a PhD. This is the degree I want to reintroduce to folks.

The heart of our two spiritual formation degrees are identical. In fact, students wouldn’t know the difference between who is in what program, because the two MA degrees and the MDiv students take the same core classes before moving on to their various tracks (and for the MDiv, to all of the other classes they take).

What we are now able to do now that Jamin is the main professor for our pastoral care program is to provide a higher degree of integration across our curriculum for our Master of Arts (Spiritual Formation) degree.

So what does this degree provide?

In short, this degree focuses on spiritual theology for the sake of ministry in the church. It includes the full-track of spiritual theology courses and the ability to do the full sequence of courses in pastoral care, remembering that the term “pastoral” can refer both to the office and tasks of full-time pastors, but also to those in the church called to other types of relational shepherding.

In my mind, the most important question confronting spiritual formation today is what spiritual formation looks like in the church. To address this well we need a real spiritual theology that does not neglect the practical features of life in the presence of God with his people. What Jamin brings with 20+ years in pastoral ministry, a background in spiritual formation and soul care, and a PhD in theology is a way to think Christianly about shepherding.

If you or anyone you know is interested in embracing a life dedicated to the Spirit’s work to form you increasingly into the likeness of Jesus for the sake of the church, please check out what we’re doing.

But also, if you never imagined that you would go to seminary, or if you are a professional who simply can’t drop these questions and yet could never imagine going to seminary, just know that many of our students here are in that same boat. The Institute for Spiritual Formation is a highly diverse group of students from various backgrounds and with various purposes who want to devote their life more deeply to Jesus for whatever he will call them into.

Come and study with Jamin and me, along with John Coe, Berry Bishop, David Merrill, and Megen Phillips.

Share

For my paid subscribers, remember that you can see the mini-courses and extra content under “Office Hours” here. Also, for the mini-courses, you can just click here:

1. Why Discipleship Doesn’t Work

2. For the Renewal of Your Mind

3. Bringing Spiritual Formation to the Church

4. Preaching for Formation

5. Where Prayer Becomes Real Video Guide

There are many things that sound right that are not.

I find that for many there is a kind of feeling that is used when reading Scripture or asserting a theological position, that if a claim fits the overarching sense they have about God, the world, and judgment then they assume it has to be true. For example, there can be a hidden and unspoken assumption, particularly in fundamentalism, that the gnarlier something sounds the more likely it is true. But I want to hit this from a different angle.

Subscribe now

Take this quote from David Benner:

This just kind of sounds right doesn’t it?

But is this true?

I think it has the ring of truth to an evangelical tradition that has been influenced so profoundly (while simultaneously being totally unaware of this fact) by the Theologica Germanica (see my post on the Theological Germanica here).

But no. This isn’t right.

New Testament scholar John Barclay gets closer to the heart of the biblical logic of love when talking about Paul’s view of what is required in our self-giving. For Paul, the

“opposite to selfishness (that is, the ‘self-apart’ or the ‘self-against’) is not the loss of self, but the ‘self-for’ that is also the ‘self-with,’ the self whose commitment to the other is not ultimately at the expense of the self (properly configured) but aims at shared benefit and conjoint flourishing.[1]

For the past several years I have been wrestling with some of these questions about love and the odd way Scripture speaks of love.

For Edwards, we are to enlarge ourselves to move toward others in love (one key biblical text here is 2 Cor. 6:11-12; 7:2). The self-enlargement is not moving at others who are somehow other than ourselves, but sharing ourselves such that we can truly love our neighbors as ourselves.

I had the opportunity to spend a week with Barclay wrestling through this topic, as well as the broad features of grace, and my project for that week was to articulate a vision of love where we are not set in a competitive relationship to others when we truly love them. It is not either you or me in love. I give you myself to you by enlarging my heart in love, just as I must receive your self-giving presence.

On this framework, which is more faithful, in my mind, to the biblical text, we are called to be self-full and not self-less. It is in the fullness of self in Christ by the Spirit that we have whole-hearted lives, and therefore can truly offer ourselves.

Too often we advance a virtue of selflessness that seems to call for self-giving from a depleted, diminished self - a self that is increasingly called to draw on diminishing resources - who cannot enlarge in love. “Faithfulness,” in this sense, leads to a kind of increasing poverty of self (shrinking as they try to draw from a dry well).

Jesus’ call to embrace weakness is not to embrace weakness as a good, but to know that God’s power is found in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). Likewise, the call to be last is the call to be first (Matt. 20:16). Even Jesus did not just grit his teeth to do the good, but he set his face on the joy set before him, and in doing so, Jesus endured the cross (Heb. 12:2).

To stand face to face with others in love - brothers or sisters in Christ, spouses with whom we are one, neighbors we are called to love as ourselves - is not to stand before an isolated other, but one with whom we are called to be with as one. Love is what binds together in perfect harmony (Col. 3:14), and we are called to be one in love (John 17:21).

Benner is certainly not wrong that we will be called to say no to our selfish desires and that the life of love will be a kind of death to selfishness. Of course this is true.

But what the call of Jesus is not is a call to become less, or to decrease, so that others can increase. Even when John the Baptist says that about his pre-cursor ministry, that he must decrease that Jesus would increase, that was not a claim about his person, but his ministry. And perhaps more importantly, John the Baptist’s forerunner ministry has nothing to do with you.

In Jesus we do not become less. That is not the gospel, nor is it the truth of what we find in Scripture. But it is interesting that many Christians feel like it is right.

It feels right to folks who assume that creation isn’t good, and we have to become less than what we are to really be received, instead of seeing that the problem is not creation, but sin, rebellion, and brokenness. We are not called to become less that what we are, we are called to become ourselves in and through Christ.

Our call is to lose our lives and find them in Christ. This is why “decreasing” isn’t nearly enough! You don’t need to decrease. You need to die and trust that our God is the resurrecting God.

Christianity is not a vision of life in competition with God, it is a vision of life that is always a life of death and resurrection. By faith in Christ we have died, and been raised, and therefore are able to become the fullness of who we are. Our call is not to become less, but to know our life hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3).

For my paid subscribers I want to highlight a bit of what my own research has led me into and where I see the struggles of many who have been offered reductive understandings of these things.

Share

[1] John M. G. Barclay, “Kenosis and the Drama of Salvation in Philippians 2” in Kenosis: The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture and Theology, edited by Paul T. Nimmo and Keith L. Johnson (Eerdmans, 2022), 21-22.

Read more

When I first came to seminary I called myself an Arminian. That wasn’t true really. The reality was that I just didn’t like people I knew who called themselves Calvinists! I simply knew too many folks who were far too arrogant and far too unconcerned about embracing a life conformed to Jesus, who boasted in doctrinal supremacy under the banner of “Calvinist” but who only had learned second-hand summaries of an overly reductive vision of Reformed thought (I should note that this is not true of many who are Reformed or all who use the term Calvinist, but only that I knew too many who were like this).

And, of course, much of the friction I had with these folks was due to my own arrogance as well.

When I eventually started reading the history of Reformed theology I fell in love with it and was astonished by what I discovered. It was so rich and refreshing to what I was seeing in those who called themselves Calvinist or Reformed (it also led me to discover a much richer understanding of the term “Reformed”).

As an aside, many of you have asked about Michael Horton’s video on Sola Media about spiritual formation. Mike is a friend of mine and he has asked me to come on the show and talk with him about spiritual formation as a sort of follow-up. I’ll let you know when that happens and when it is put on air.

Subscribe now

In all of this, one weird aspect to my own story, not unlike Richard Lovelace’s, is that I came to Reformed theology through Reformed spirituality. I fell in love with the tradition that refused to bifurcate the theoretical from the spiritual and that adamantly advanced an integrated theological vision rather than merely a speculative theology divorced from a life lived with God.

But one of the biggest differences between what I was hearing by preachers, contemporary writers, and friends who called themselves Calvinists, compared to the Reformed tradition I was reading in the primary sources, was the centrality of love.

I didn’t hear much about love from the Calvinists I knew or the preachers they told me to listen to. I could listen to whole presentations of the Gospel and the work of Christ without ever hearing the word love mentioned.

In contrast, let me suggest that the true heart of Reformed spirituality is love, precisely because the God who stands at the center of all things is the fountain of love.

Calvin writes,

“It is of great importance that we should be told what is necessary for us to know, and what the Lord desires us to contemplate, above and below, on the right hand and on the left, before and behind. The love of Christ is held out to us as the subject which ought to occupy our daily and nightly meditations, and in which we ought to be wholly plunged. He who is in possession of this alone has enough. Beyond it there is nothing solid, nothing useful, - nothing, in short, that is proper or sound. Though you survey the heaven and earth and sea, you will never go beyond this without over-stepping the lawful boundary of wisdom.”

Likewise, Henry Scougal, whose The Life of God in the Soul of Man is one of the great Reformed spiritual classics as well as one of the great fountainheads of Methodist spirituality, devotes much of his work to love (Scougal was also a professor at my alma mater, the University of Aberdeen, and so I’ve long felt a unique kinship with him).

Furthermore, as with all things in this life, we weigh the earthly, present, and visible things with the heavenly, future, and invisible perfection of those things.

Along these lines, Jonathan Edwards can write that the saints in eternity “shall eat and drink abundantly, and swim in the ocean of love, and be eternally swallowed up in the infinitely bright, and infinitely mild and sweet beams of divine love,” and, furthermore, “the soul hereby shall be inflamed with love,” and “...the soul shall, as it were, all dissolve in love in the arms of the glorious Son of God and breath itself wholly in ecstasies of divine love into his bosom...”

The language of being “swallowed up” does not fall victim to our modern worries, as if Edwards believed that God’s self-giving love was somehow in competition with our persons and identity. Rather, as we are swallowed up in God we are most fully ourselves, for the same reason that where the Spirit is, there is freedom (2 Cor. 3:17).

Furthermore, the language of ecstasy can sound odd or troubling to our ears, but ecstasy names the movement of love that draws us out of ourselves (“ecstasy” is about being drawn out of oneself). True love, and more particularly, divine love, so grounds us that we can offer all we have and are back to God. To be with God is to be filled with him to overflowing.

In explaining this, Scougal waxes similarly, writing, “What an infinite pleasure it must be, as it were, to lose ourselves in Him, and, being swallowed up in the overcoming sense of His goodness, to offer ourselves a living sacrifice, always ascending unto Him in flames of love!”

This is why the Christian longs to dwell with God, as Edwards writes, “to be ravished with his love, favour, delight, forever.”

But this might not be what you’ve heard about these stuffy Reformed scholars. Maybe you hear about the Puritans and all that comes to mind are uptight people who were fixated on rules. Comically, Edwards has similar worries! “We drink in strange notions of holiness from our childhood,” Edwards writes, “as if it were a melancholy, morose, sour and unpleasant thing; but there is nothing in it but what is sweet and ravishingly lovely.” (WJE 10:429)

While humans have always been captivated by love, and seduced by worldly loves, the love of God is of a different order. Edwards proclaims, “The love of so glorious a Being is infinitely valuable, and the discoveries of it are capable of ravishing the soul above all other loves.”

Thomas Watson, in his book The Godly Man’s Picture: Drawn with a Scripture Pencil (a truly great title), which is a wonderful little meditation on the love of God in the heart, explains, “A holy heart is the garden where God plants the flower of his love. God’s love to his people is an ancient love, it dates from eternity (Eph. 1:4). He loves them with a choice, distinguishing love; they are the ‘early beloved of his soul’ (Jer. 12:7).”

As if this picture were not profound enough, Watson continues, “He loves the godly as he loves Christ (John 17:26). It is the same love in kind, though not in degree. Here the saints merely sip God’s love; in heaven they shall drink of rivers of pleasure (Psa. 36:8).” Later, Watson writes, “You who are enriched with the treasures of godliness, bless God for it. This flower does not grow in nature’s garden.”

In my Easter sermon this year I noticed that the texts I was choosing tended to have the phrase “much more” in them. I was trying to articulate the fullness of the Gospel beyond what we normally look for or embrace. In a similar way, these writers are all saying, “You think you’ve understood the love of God?! How much more is his love beyond anything you’ve fathomed?!”

Those of you who know my work will know that I find Edwards particularly insightful here. The image of this reciprocating love, poured into our hearts by the Spirit (Rom. 5:5) that fills us to overflowing, is writ large by Edwards concerning the eternal city of love. Heaven is a world of love, declares Edwards, because the God of love stands at the center:

“All shall stand about the God of glory, the fountain of love, as it were opening their bosoms to be filled with those effusions of love which are poured forth from thence, as the flowers on the earth in a pleasant spring day open their bosoms to the sun to be filled with his warmth and light, and to flourish in beauty and fragrancy by his rays. Every saint is as a flower in the garden of God, and holy love is the fragrancy and sweet odor which they all send forth, and with which they fill that paradise. Every saint there is as a note in a concert of music which sweetly harmonizes with every other note, and all together employed wholly in praising God and the Lamb; and so all helping one another to their utmost to express their love of the whole society to the glorious Father and Head of it, and [[to pour back]] love into the fountain of love, whence they are supplied and filled with love and with glory.”

For those who have read When God Seems Distant you may remember how we reframed what spiritual practices are around the idea of being transformed in love, by love, and for love. This vision (in chapter 9) stems from this tradition that makes love the defining feature of God’s recharacterization of our souls.

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about this tradition of love and relate it to spiritual practices. One of the key differences between natural habits and spiritual habits has to do with love, and I think our own tradition speaks profoundly about these things.

Share

Read more

There is an odd legacy in the Christian tradition. The legacy is the way guilt, shame, fear, and anxiety end up fueling life and ministry. The examples are legion:

A monk running out to the desert to avoid the shame of trying to seduce a woman away from her fiance.

A missionary trying to secure God’s favor by doing radical work for God.

A preacher angrily railing at his audience because he is insecure, unstable, and worried that God won’t accept him.

The word “unstable” is an important one here.

Rather than fueling the Christian life and ministry from grace through faith - a stability resting on gratitude in the work of God - we can easily use our instability as a way to animate our faith.

Subscribe now

In this post I am thinking, in particular, about those in ministry whose ministry is derailed not primary for what we think of as “moral” issues (although they are still no doubt moral), but for an inability to minister or lead like Jesus. This can look a lot of different ways, from what we often think of as toxic to the less obvious but equally destructive inability to relate in love.

One of the reasons we see so many people in ministry (even those who seem to have a profoundly fruitful ministry), who turn out to not be at all what they seem (to put it generously), is that they are often animating their ministry apart from the way of Jesus. We need to recognize that it is not only possible, but is the way of humankind; being “merely human” is to seek to use the flesh to fuel our ministries and even grapple with our sin (see Gal. 3:1-3).

But sin “defeated” with the flesh will only beget more sin (it won’t be a defeat at all but a rerouting our sin through other channels).

In every case I know of, the people whose sin derailed their ministry started with a lot of excitement, passion, and deep desire to do good for God. But they were never able to see how much of this was a very immature and self-funded activity.

What often really hurts these folks is that instead of being given room to grow they are thrust into ministry beyond their maturity. In this place, the average Christian begins to think, “I’ve got to make it happen.” The fantasy is that if I fake holiness long enough it will be true of me.

Confronted with the demands of ministry and the desire to be faithful, many Christians look to the same mechanisms of action a they would with a new diet or a new regimen at the gym. They turn to self-deception, self-shaming, and natural habit formation to try to generate faithfulness.

Unsurprisingly, this does not cultivate a character in love and for love.

Too often, what passes as spiritual formation are simply ways of managing one’s guilt or shame, or ways of deceiving oneself to try to construct a life seen as faithful. As John Coe and I share in our book, When God Seems Absent, there is a deeper way. In fact, there is only one way, but that way will require you to walk with God in the desert.

As the author of Hebrews reminds us, “But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Heb. 3:13). It is never not today, and today is the day to stop, look in the mirror of the Word, and refuse to turn around and forget what you look like (Jas. 1:23-24).

It is not enough to just see something you want to be like and mimic it. The Christian life is not just getting the right example and then acting it out. We can do this in the flesh rather than the Spirit (Gal. 3:1-3). We can do this in our own power rather than knowing God’s power in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9-10).

The Lord asks for more, but not in a way that depletes us, but in such a way that fills us to overflowing, even though, counter-intuitively, it can feel like being depleted (this is what makes the desert or desertion so disorienting). One reason for this is that the Lord calls us to know more and more deeply how much we have been forgiven so that we can overflow in love (see, for instance Luke 7:47). Too often we see an ideal we can’t achieve and despair, rather than turn to the Lord who is the fountain of life, in whom, if we abide, we will bear the fruit of his life in our lives.

Seek the Lord. Rest in him. Grasp him and trust him in every situation of your life. But also, refuse to project a fantasy about who you are; refuse to project your spiritual avatar in prayer instead of coming to the Lord in the truth.

If you are in ministry leadership in some way, find people to confess to, wrestle with, and open your heart to. Find a context where you can share your anxieties, worries, and frustrations. But do all of this as a way to present your bodies to the Lord (Rom 12:1). Offer yourself to God by giving yourself to his people and entrusting yourself to their care and love.

Share

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about the nature of spiritual formation as wisdom, and how forgetting that often leads us into simplistic solutions that fails to attend to the real issues of our formation. I hope it helps to concretely engage this content and cast a vision for the way forward.

Read more

Those of you who know my work, and who know about the Institute for Spiritual Formation, know that our goal is a highly integrative account of spiritual formation. What does this mean? For us it means that we are doing deep readings of Scripture, theological engagement across both doctrines and historical accounts of theology, as well as conversing with psychology and philosophy.

In short, we want a holistic account of Christian maturation that takes seriously the fact that theology is the queen of the sciences but not the only science. Theology reigns over the disciplines not in a way that “lords it over them,” but that integrates their insights into a vision of life before the face of God.

But this is hard work. Ultimately, it is the work of wisdom.

All are tempted to something less. It is easier to just reiterate truths we have heard than it is to really internalize them. It is easier to look for shortcuts that are too impatient to grow in wisdom turning to more simplistic and reductive answers.

It is important to draw near to the Lord in the truth of your life and consider with him: Lord, how am I tempted to bypass wisdom and just seek techniques and technologies to grow? How am I tempted to just construct “self-made religion,” as Paul warns against (Col. 2:23) instead of really coming to understand “the growth that is from God” (Col. 2:19)?

Not everyone is called to this in the same way I am. That is important to both emphasize and remember. But all Christians are called to wisdom. All Christians should ask the Lord for wisdom and draw near to Jesus who is wisdom himself (Col. 1:30). We are all called to be conformed to him, but we are not all called into the same kind of work.

Given the basic features of our lives, such as whether we are married, if we are parents, the ways we are serving (or should be serving) in our church, etc., the question we need to ask is: Lord, what kind of life do I need to live to be the kind of person who can point others to you? But even prior we need to ask: Lord, what kind of life do I need to live so that everything I do is oriented to you, where I am constantly drawing near to you, navigating your presence, and “presenting my body as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1).

When we don’t do this we often gravitate toward what is either cheap or lazy.

We outsource our calling and instead of seeking wisdom we just seek for tricks that make us appear wise.

Instead of giving a life, maybe we just grasp for nuggets of insight that leave others seeing us a gurus of secret knowledge.

Maybe we steal others’ work (a surprisingly “normal” activity in publishing today) because we are more focused on looking insightful than becoming insightful.

Think about the absolute tidal wave of AI use among students. It is amazing. Wouldn’t we rather fail? Wouldn’t it be better to write something badly than to claim writing that isn’t your own? I can hear Paul’s words echoing in my mind, “Wouldn’t you rather be wronged,” and the collective chorus of the age screaming, “NEVER!”

As with all things, our spiritual formation, our social media presence, our teaching, posting, writing, speaking, podcasting, driving, voting, and everything else falls under the same inevitability: What you sow you will reap. Those who sow to the flesh will reap in the flesh, and those who sow in the Spirit will reap in the Spirit.

It is better to fail than to cheat.

It is better to be seen as mediocre than to be cloaked in a fake wisdom.

It is better to not post than to post something cheap, aimed to get subscribers rather than building up the body of Christ.

It is better to be seen as ignorant than it is to soak in the rage of podcasters who trade in gossip, bearing false witness, and gatekeeping.

It is better to quietly go about your life trading in the economy of faith, hope, and love than it is to sow to the flesh fantasizing that you will still reap in the Spirit.

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit about one the most significant things my father has taught me about publishing that has really shaped how I approach publishing, and I do this to talk more about our callings and the temptation to what is cheap. What do we believe we are called to give ourselves to, and what kind of person and life is required of me? Take a look at that video below.

Share

Read more

That project became The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that has Abandoned It (love me a long subtitle).

I have been convinced for the past 15 years, around the time we started working on it, that power is the most significant conversation that the church refuses to talk about, and it is the topic that Christians are, perhaps, the most sub-Christian in their reasoning. Put differently, when confronted with what power is and how it functions, we are often practical atheists (to use the older terminology).

Instead of walking by faith, we were shown how to walk by sight. This part was, however, very explicit. The amount of times we were told to “Look at this, look how great we’re doing,” is genuinely astonishing for a people who are supposed to be defined by the cross.

What that inevitably meant was that we employed worldly power to try to advance the kingdom of God. We failed to remember that what you sow you will reap. We failed to understand that you can sow ministry, devotion, and mission to the world, the flesh, and the devil, and that only a fool would think they could do so and still reap in the Spirit (James 3:13ff., Gal. 6:7).

This is perhaps the greatest lie that has warped the church over the past several generations.

Subscribe now

For the past decade or two, continuing into our context today, we are seeing what happens when we reap what we have sowed. We are seeing astonishing sick fruit from a diseased tree, and are regularly being confronted with fact. How will we respond? Will we continue to sow to the world, the flesh, and the devil, or will we take up our crosses and walk in the way of the lamb?

That is the question before us.

Using the language of James 3, will we walk according to the way from below - the way defined by what is unspiritual, earthly, and demonic (flesh, world, devil) - or will be abide by the way from above, the way of Jesus?

Eugene Peterson, one of the people we interviewed, in a way only he could depict, compares and contrasts these two ways (it was this passage that led us to title the book the way we did):

“We choose: we follow the dragon and his beasts along their parade route, conspicuous with the worship of splendid images, elaborated in mysterious symbols, fond of statistics, taking on whatever role is necessary to make a good show and get the applause of the crowds in order to get access to power and become self-important. Or we follow the Lamb along a farmyard route, worshipping the invisible, listening to the foolishness of preaching, practicing a holy life that involves heroically difficult acts that no one will ever notice, in order to become, simply, our eternal selves in an eternal city. It is the difference, politically, between wanting to use the people around us to become powerful (or, if unskilled, getting used by them), and entering into covenants with the people around us so that the power of salvation extends into every part of the neighborhood, the society, and the world that God loves.” – Eugene Peterson

As an aside, I found some old videos we made about our time with the folks we visited in our quest to discern Jesus’ way of power. Here is the video where we talk about spending the day with Eugene Peterson (what is going on with my hair?!):

When we set out to write this book we weren’t driven by the desire to prove to people that we were right. Instead, we wanted to honor the work of folks whose work and ministry had impacted us so deeply, and we wanted people to struggle with the way of Jesus.

So we interviewed Marva Dawn (1948-2021), Dallas Willard (1935-2013), Eugene Peterson (1932-2018), J.I. Packer (1926-2020), John Perkins (1930-2026), and James Houston (1922-2026). Jim Houston was 103 years old when he died, and while, perhaps, the least known among those we interviewed, the impact of his life and ministry has been absolutely profound.

Our original conversations around the book project, even before landing on power as the main theme, was how we might honor these folks. We felt the weight of a generation passing whose impact and faithfulness were a kind of guiding light for our own ministry desires. So we wanted to take people on a journey to meet them and to see what shaped their lives.

While we wanted people to know the life, ministry, and teaching of these faithful followers of Jesus, it became clear to us that we also wanted the church to wrestle honestly with power. We wanted people to look at themselves, their ministries, and their churches in the mirror of the Word and not turn around and forget what they look like (James 1:23-25).

It turns out that Willard was right, it is not enough to do “Jesus-things,” we need to do them in “Jesus’ ways.” Too often we allow the ends to justify the means, and so we foolishly or naively allow ourselves to adopt worldly, fleshly, and demonic strategies to further our lives, ministries, and the church, hoping that we can sow in evil and reap in the Spirit.

Here is another old video we made as a reflection on our time with Willard:

I wanted to conclude this post with my favorite scene of the book, a scene that continues to come to mind since I’ve heard about Jim’s passing. When we travelled to meet Jim and Rita Houston, they allowed us to spend a couple of days with them in their home, and we were able to go to church with them, go out to eat, and see a couple of days of their life. We didn’t have long, but we grew to love them deeply, and their impact in that short time reframed for us what aging faithfully looks like.

But the most profound moment of our time with them was off-script. Our questions helped create it, but we didn’t anticipate getting such a significant glimpse into their marriage and what the reality of aging was for them.

Here is what we wrote:

When we talked with James it was clear that he had been on this path with Christ for decades, and the work of wisdom in his life was palpable. But the most profound moment wasn’t in his brilliant analysis of theology, his stories about how C.S. Lewis mentored him and what it was like meeting with Lewis at Oxford, or even his pastoral counsel to us (and those were all profound). What was most profound was his love for Rita.

Since our conversation with James, Rita has passed away. At the time of our visit with the Houstons, Rita was struggling with dementia. Rita was an incredibly sharp and witty woman, chiding James for saying something “just because it sounded good,” and holding her own in any conversation. So she was able to hide her sickness well.

But when she left the room for a nap and returned, she would want to know why James hadn’t told her he had people over, and asked to be introduced to us. This happened a handful of times. When Rita went to rest we asked James how they were doing, and his answer was somewhat shocking.

At that moment James knew that their union of love was what held them together even as her memory failed. Growing old may appear tragic, but it is a part of the rhythm of reality. The real tragedy is the person who has lived a lifetime in fantasy, trying to deny weakness, and is left with nothing because they failed to become weighty of soul. But when weakness is the way, these days are not tragedies, but opportunities.

He saw a person in full, not in part, when he looked at his wife. This view is impossible if we continue to buy into the lie that human flourishing is about self-actualization. That lie, James explained, has impacted the way we view the mind. We believe the truly flourishing person is bright, socially adept, and healthy. But what do we do with people who have dementia or Alzheimer’s? Or what about those in our churches who have physical or mental disabilities?

According to our cultural values of power, their lives have functionally ended. Yet if our identity and personhood are not defined by our power, but by God’s grace, then we are in a different position. If we lose our mental or physical capacities, a thorn in the flesh remains, but we are still capable of flourishing in dependence upon God. In fact, it is here where we are often most open to the way of life God calls us to.

The sun was setting and we were about to leave. James and Rita sat side by side on the couch while Jamin and I listened intently to James talk about living in weakness. Our final question was only meant to put a period at the end of a profound couple of days with the Houstons, but the answer took us off guard. We asked, “Where have you learned most significantly that strength really does come in weakness?”

As James leaned forward to answer, Rita muttered under her breath, “I could tell you after a few years.” Jamin and I sat silently, knowing that this disease was the great trial of her life, but then James inserted his own thought.

There, in summary, is the flourishing human being. As James and Rita pressed into frailty and disability, they were shifting their identity and value more and more onto Jesus. But this is not an ability that just comes to us. They were able to see the end of life as an opportunity because they had lived lives of dependence.

Many years ago they left all the comforts and certainties of life in the UK and ventured into the unknown of starting a school in Canada, trusting in God the whole way through. That posture of trust had marked there journey from that point until now. They were weighty souls, so they were able to embrace the end as a gift for love.

James and Rita were free because they knew that their lives rested on Christ and not in themselves. “Our lives are hidden with Christ in God,” Paul tells us (Col. 3:3). When we embrace the way from below, as Christians, we not only reject the way of Christ, we reject the truth of ourselves, warping our souls and rewiring our hearts to a world that isn’t real. In doing so we embrace fantasy, and our hearts, souls, and minds are recalibrated for a world that isn’t real. We had to find help distinguishing our fantasy from reality, which meant that we needed to ask deeper questions about the nature of kingdom power against the backdrop of worldly power.

That was what we wrote after our time with them, which struck us as particularly meaningful knowing that Rita had died, and not knowing how long James would still live without her. Now that he is gone - now that they are all gone - I feel even more deeply the importance of their witness and how weighty of a question power really is.

You see, power is not just about getting things done. Power is about what it means to be human. Our world presents visions of power to us today that erode our humanity from us even as it pretends it offers life. But this has always been the way of the dragon.

I will miss Jim, but I’m not sad at his death. His was a life well lived. I think of John Perkins and the profound witness to the way of Jesus that defined his life, receiving abuse and using it to grasp a deeper gospel, one that could even save his abusers. Let us remember their witness. These are images of the way of the lamb.

For my paid subscribers I want to reflect a bit more on the time we got to spend with these folks and why I think this question is such a pressing one. I remain convinced that this question is ignored by the church precisely because it is the mirror we need to look in. I am also convinced that we are in a Deuteronomy 13 moment, where the Lord tests his people by sending false prophets who will ultimately reveal if God’s people are interested in his way or not. For more on that, see below.

Share

Read more

As many of you know, I am the director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation here at Talbot School of Theology, which means that I oversee two major programs (among others). One of these programs trains spiritual directors and another trains marriage and family therapists. But I was also a part of a new initiative to bring my dear friend Jamin Goggin on faculty to lead our Pastoral Care and Counseling program.

This immediately raises a question for folks: What is the difference between therapy, spiritual direction, and pastoral care?

Obviously, in having each of these three modalities of soul care, we believe they can all be valuable and have a unique purpose in the life of a Christian. But it is also true that each of these are defined differently by different people. It is not obvious what “therapy” is just by hearing someone say, “I go to therapy.”

Likewise, I have seen a lot of different things - some good and some bad - done under the banner of “spiritual direction,” just as I have seen profoundly wise pastoral care, and I have seen profoundly foolish pastoral care (along with deeply sinful and wicked abuses of pastoral care).

Subscribe now

Given that Talbot has become a place where we have these discussions, I wanted to bring in some friends and colleagues to discuss these things. Starting with a focus on pastoral care, Jamin and I sit down in my office to wrestle through how this particular modality differs from the others:

Jamin is a uniquely gifted pastor and theologian, who brings decades of pastoral experience (and training in spiritual direction from our Institute) that gives shape to his vision of pastoral care.

Also…and this is a secret so don’t tell anyone…Jamin and I are working on a program that combines two of our masters degrees so that you can do a degree in spiritual formation for the church that focuses on the intersection between spiritual formation and pastoral care.

I’m kidding about it being a secret of course. Tell everyone!

But it would be unfortunate to talk about these sorts of things without bringing in a therapist and spiritual director, and fortunately, my friend and colleague Berry Bishop is both. Berry is uniquely situated to talk about these things because she is not only a profound therapist, and is a profoundly Christian therapist who has a very clear sense of what that means, but she is also a spiritual director whose doctoral dissertation focused on the modality of spiritual direction.

Along with being the associate director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation, Berry runs our practical sequence in spiritual direction and focuses most of her attention on the Marriage and Family Therapy program.

So I want to pick up this same question with Berry here:

[Why is the cover photo always of me doing weird hand gestures?!]

One of the things that is easy to miss in all of this, especially when we talk about training for soul care, is that all modes of soul care that Christians pursue is done within our love of God as we embrace the call to love our neighbors as ourselves. The training of love is a unique kind of training. But more so, the training of love in specific contexts in a fallen world requires wisdom, discernment, and a deep knowledge of the Lord’s work to mature his people.

This is why the Institute for Spiritual Formation is a unique sort of place. We have students go through in cohorts - and we shepherd those cohorts - because if seminary is a place of our formation for the sake of faithfulness to Jesus, that formation is always a kind of communal abiding. Learning to love our neighbor as ourself is not done in the abstract, in other words, and it is not just information we learn but is something we have to enter in to.

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about these three modalities and how they can be utilized (and by whom), especially in relation to one another.

Share

Read more

For a while now I’ve been operating my Substack under the creative and original name, “Kyle’s Formation Substack.” It was the name I chose when I realized that I needed to put something in that box when I started Substack! Since then I’ve wanted to change it numerous times, but never really landed on anything.

Until now.

What I’ve landed on is just as simple but provides a bit more clarity: Spiritual Formation: A Substack by Kyle Strobel.

My Substack has been focused almost entirely on spiritual formation since its inception. There are many reasons for that, most which I won’t share now, but it was driven by a desire to bring some clarity into an area that is often a bit too theological murky.

If I can focus on just one major issue I’ve explored it would be this: too often spiritual formation is portrayed as if it is about individual growth. But that would be a reductive approach the full-breadth of what spiritual formation is.

While this is true of every age, I think we can agree that this season in particular is desperate for guidance. We have forgotten our own spiritual tradition such that people no longer know basic teaching about life with God and the growth of grace. This is what Richard Lovelace called “The Sanctification Gap.” For Lovelace, this was a gap in knowledge (John Coe is the one who adopted and adapted this term to talk about the experiential gap in Christian experience).

We hav to relearn the fact that we have teaching on spiritual formation in the evangelical tradition - deep and profound teaching - and yet it is totally unknown in the church today. There is a massive gap in knowledge between what we used to know and what we know now.

In all of this, the absolute last thing we need are spiritual gurus. We don’t need any more of those. We need folks in small groups, youth ministries, missions, welcoming ministries, pastors, and Christians of all sorts who can recognize and name the temptations toward fleshly formation and the call to point others to Jesus (these temptations are outlined in our section, “Unlearning a Self-Willed Spirituality” in When God Seems Distant).

Put differently, we need people who have lived life with Jesus so profoundly through the various season of the soul the Lord guides us into, that they can help others navigate these troubling waters. When someone feels like they have sailed off the edge of the map, we need folks who can help ground them in the truth of Christ in those places.

Since I’ve taken over as director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University, I keep getting asked what my vision for this place is. It is simple really. We are focused on leading others to Christ in the Spirit to be formed deeply by his grace and mercy so that they can serve as little lights illumining to others the ways of that grace and mercy. Our call, in short, is the way of love.

The unique focus of the institute is that we are first and foremost invested in the formation of our students. We don’t want them leaving only having learned new information. Information is great, but it isn’t enough. We want more than knowledge and skill; our focus is on wisdom and love. We want people to leave our program with a deeper dependence on Jesus for their entire life, a deeper knowledge of him and his ways, and a wisdom and love that leads them toward others in wisdom and love.

If I could name my worry for the church right now it would be that legions are becoming interested in something they call “spiritual formation” that is really just a superficial understanding of spiritual disciplines. This won’t lead to wisdom and love.

Furthermore, because they are not typically surrounded by folks who can or will narrate the different ways and seasons in which God works, people will eventually hit the wall of the desert and will start spinning. It will feel like they were sold a false bill of goods and will feel in their deep that “none of this spiritual disciplines stuff” seems to be working. Confused, and perhaps angry, I worry that they will just move on to something else that promises much but cannot deliver, or will just spin off of the faith entirely.

In that place of confusion, what they need are folks who can name the truth of God’s means of grace and who can shepherd souls to their Lord in the messy dynamics of life with God.

Spiritual practices will crack open the truth of a person’s heart - that is one of the main goals of a spiritual practice - but unfortunately most discussions of spiritual disciplines do not prepare a person for that. Most are so convinced that the opposite will happen, that seeing their unformed and sinful selves more clearly will be perceived as failure or abandonment and ultimately will lead them to despair.

Even more so, as John Coe and I narrate in our book, spiritual practices will take on different purposes depending on what the Lord is doing in our life. Sometimes they will be (and even feel like) a pure building up of our spiritual strength. Other seasons will be purgative, where engaging in these practices only seems to awaken our sin and brokenness. Without actual guidance and teaching, the spiritual disciplines discussion becomes self-help.

My vision for our Institute for Spiritual Formation is to provide a place where people can be shepherded in wisdom and in love so that they too can shepherd in wisdom and in love. My hope for our students is that they will receive a profound theological education, but also much more than that. I hope that they will embrace the profound call to care for souls that God loves - image bearers all - who long to know and be known, as they love and are loved.

If you are interested in this kind of care, please check out the Institute for Spiritual Formation. For more on what we do, take a look at these talks. Also, for our study in spiritual formation for the church, The Journey, check it out here.

For now, know that my Substack is devoted to this kind of conversation about spiritual formation. For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about the reality of spiritual formation and, in particular, what training in formation must entail, but rarely does. I hope this is a meaningful discussion!

Share

Read more

[Yes, this is a picture of me]

When I was in high school I was a hot mess. Really…a total mess. While I always had relatively severe social anxiety, what ended up being profoundly self-destructive were my strategies to navigate that anxiety (which were, as with most strategies, self-defeating).

With the other kids in school I was aloof and standoffish, mostly because I was too insecure about social relationships (broadly) and very insecure with engaging non-Christians (I led with the assumption that I wouldn’t be understood and would ultimately be mocked and so I didn’t allow many close).

In short, I didn’t know how to act. I didn’t know what to do. So I took the path of many before me. I became the class clown. As with most class clowns, it was my anxiety and desire not to be looked at that made me stand out and be noticed. The impulse behind this, left somewhat subconscious, was that it was far better to have control than it was to not have control.

Most of what I did was relatively harmless. I had pizza ordered to class and ate it with friends without the teacher noticing (it was, admittedly, a substitute teacher).

My French teacher was gone and so we had a sub (I got a bit bolder when subs were teaching!), and so I traded places with a guy in the advanced Spanish class next door for the period. Everyone thought this was kind of fun until the sub, who happened to be a college Spanish professor, had me do group work, board work, and give a speech in a class I had never been in (that was rough, but the class thought it was hilarious. My friend who I replaced thought it was less so when he saw his grade).

I got in trouble for sending notes to a friend, which might seem normal, but we were sending notes and silly drawings via fax machine through the principal’s office since my friend was at another high school. Eventually the office workers grew suspicious about why I was receiving faxes regularly from another high school in our district!

I programmed a mechanical arm to pick up a wooden plank and start beating a computer and a mill in our electronics lab (long story). So as the class lined up outside of the glassed-in cubicle I worked in it looked like the arm was trying to start the robot rebellion.

I once had a teacher scream, “I hate you and I never want to talk to you again,” and it was, and remains, a totally reasonable response to my in-class behavior.

The worst of it was when I was arrested out of class with my friend Mike, and spent the afternoon in an interrogation room, holding cell, and then Police Chief’s office getting screamed at, but that is a story too long to tell here.

Subscribe now

What is weird about this is that it felt that it happened to me as much as from me. My strategy for navigating my anxiety led me into highly anxious places, like that holding cell of the local police station or, more typically, the principal’s office. But I kept on with the same strategy because I didn’t know it was a strategy, and more significantly, because I was too afraid to do anything else. So after getting sent to the principal’s office, sitting in the outer room waiting to be rebuked, it just made sense to start signing for documents at the window and answering the phone as if I worked there.

Folly begets folly.

I should note that we need to bless my parents. I was not an easy child to parent.

But why do I talk about all of this? I want to attend for a minute on how many of us bump along life and develop strategies of survival that become intimate features of our character. They may start as knee-jerk reactions to anxiety, fear, or even just things like fatigue, but eventually they become the deep dispositions of a soul.

But this does not happen in a minute. This takes years of habitation. I had years of habituating this way of life, and because of that, no one ever expected me to go to college. I never actually applied when I was in high school. It seemed absurd. I was going to go into electronics (if I could program a mechanical arm to look like it was losing its mind maybe I had a future in the robot rebellion?!) My plan after graduating was to receive some technical training and tinker with things that I didn’t have to relate to.

But here is the point. As you probably know, I did end up going to college (and then on to two masters and a PhD). But I didn’t have the character for college. I didn’t have the sort of dispositions that could fuel a disciplined life. I was tossed by the waves of my anxiety. So I did what most of us do.

And this is where I really want to pause.

I did what we all have to do in one season or another. I tapped into a deep reservoir of fear and anxiety in my soul and harnessed it for achievement.

I pressurized my life, cultivating the sense that if I didn’t study more, write more, and read more than I would end up homeless.

The problem with this strategy is that it works so well. In less than two years I went from being the class clown to the academic. But it came at a cost. After my body and mind became habituated to study and I no longer needed a high-pressurized anxiety to get things done, it had already become a disposition in my soul. That was now a gear churning away in my deep. You can’t let up. If you take your foot off the gas the whole thing will come apart.

This leads me to my point:

I didn’t really feel much of this in my spiritual life until the Lord led me into the desert, revealing the deep currents of a broken and fragmented life. I had to grapple with an anxiety-fueled devotional life, whose character was veined with my attempts to fix my life, and whose drive was animated by fear.

I had to deal with a habituated character defined by pressure and a neurotic drive that I no longer needed, but that continued, now beyond my control, as the deep undercurrent of my soul.

The call in all of this, which is the call of all who embrace Jesus, is to have our character re-characterized by faith, hope, and love. This is where we lead in When God Seems Distant, in our chapter on being transformed by love.

I had to come to see that my character had been fueled by my own attempts to have life on my terms. Even though I was somewhat trapped and made captive by my strategies, they were still ultimately an attempt to self-generate a life. They were from myself and for myself. What I needed to discover by grace is that God is both the foundation and the goal of the Christian life.

But this raised a question for me. Am I willing? Will I follow him into the darkness of the truth? Will I navigate the messy pains and fears that became the undercurrent of my soul?

This is my invitation to you. Are you willing to trust that the way of life is found through death, the way of power is known in weakness, and the way of love is known by seeing, ever increasingly, how much you need forgiveness (Luke 7:47)?

May the Lord meet you in your false and debilitating strategies and reveal a deeper way.

For my paid subscribers, I want to reflect a bit more on what drove my desire to go into ministry, and how that too was deeply veined with vice. There is a common story of those who go into ministry because of grandiosity that it important to name here, but not generally. I want to name it in myself.

Share

Read more

In a wonderful recent episode of the Dallas Willard Podcast, we get to listen to Dallas teach about what it looks like to bring spiritual formation to the church. In so many ways this is a wonderful listen. I encourage you all to check it out.

One of the things I love about this talk is that is serves as a sort of “Dallas Willard’s Greatest Hits” album.

You get: “Grace is not opposed to effort, it’s opposed to earning.”

You get: “Life in the kingdom is not about trying its about training.”

You get: “Spiritual formation is not about behavior modification.”

It is great.

But we also get a front row seat to Dallas asking one of the most pressing questions of spiritual formation: How does spiritual formation help the church?

Subscribe now

For those of you who don’t know my story very well, Dallas Willard rescued me from a lot. Mostly through his writings, but also through the times I was able to spend with him, Dallas helped me navigate my way out of a mere academic study of Scripture and theology to recognize what our tradition has always known: there is a speculative knowledge of God, a knowledge shared by demons, and there is an affectionate knowledge of God (that specific language, however, I found in my study of Jonathan Edwards).

Willard, of course, has impacted a lot of people, but I’ve met few who actually followed his advice. He didn’t hesitate to tell you what to do when you asked him, and I did. His advice was typically some form of: 1. Memorize Scripture, and 2. Go back to the founders of your denomination (or theological tradition) and drink deeply from that well.

So I did.

One reason I did my PhD in the theology of Jonathan Edwards is that Edwards is one of the deepest wells of American evangelicalism. The initial fruit of that endeavor was the riches I found concerning Edwards’s view of spiritual formation that I published as Formed for the Glory of God.

Importantly though, it was taking Dallas’ advice that led me into a stream of thinking about spiritual formation that looked very different from where I started. But that is the gift of working within a broad-minded evangelicalism. When we are deeply impacted by someone, we often seek to become the kind of person they were - and to do the kind of work they did - and in doing so I was led into a Protestant spiritual tradition that I didn’t know even existed.

In light of this, I want to start by saying how much I appreciate what Dallas was doing in this talk. Three things in particular:

First, the realism of his account.

Dallas believed Scripture taught that we can grow and overcome sin; so Dallas believed that we could grow and overcome sin. There is a realism to all of this that is rarely attended to. Too often, both with sin and with transformation, we have a tendency to talk about them as if they are a black-box (a “black-box” is a box you can’t look in but can only see what goes in and what comes out of it).

When growth is a black box is that it feels like alchemy to people. They hear the Christian ideal preached without any sort of path of training articulated and they imagine that one day they will just wake up and not be angry anymore, or lustful anymore, or greedy anymore. When sin is a black-box, we don’t actually look at our sin directly, and therefore fail to see the deep desires and beliefs that fund it. We live lives driven by desires and beliefs we have no idea we have, imagining that one day God will zap us and we’ll be transformed.

When sin is a black box, we just try hard not to sin and fail to address the fact that we long to sin. When growth is a black box, the Christian life inevitably becomes self-help.

Second, the centrality of Bible exposition in his account.

The second thing that is clear in Dallas’ account is that we need teaching, not just any teaching, but a deep biblical exposition about life with God. Dallas had a realism about transformation but also a realism about the biblical claims on our life (I’ve talked about this through Dallas’ claims about “the kingdom of God as realism” here). He really believed what the Bible said about life and he believed it was something available to us.

Third, the developmental nature of his account.

Finally, Dallas understood that there is a developmental nature of the Christian life. He even mentions about how the beginning of the Christian life is filled with consolation, and how God weans us off of consolation to mature us faith (this is the theme of my most recent book When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws us Near). [Also, as a total side comment, Trevin Wax wrote an article on this at The Gospel Coalition that was really great.]

What Willard highlights is that God’s work of maturation is surprising to us. Even though this maturation is exactly what Scripture portrays we are still often blindsided by it. Willard’s response is to call us into the reality of the life of faith, which is a life beyond trying. But what does this mean?

One of Willard’s emphases is that we are not merely called to try in the Christian life. Too many leave a sermon thinking, “I guess I need to try that.” On this kind of account, the Christian life is just something we need to learn how to do correctly. It is like learning a new way to fold your suit in a suitcase so it doesn’t wrinkle (I should try that). This is what too many accounts of spiritual disciplines devolves into. In other words, “trying” is the life-hack approach to formation.

Instead, Willard emphasizes that the Christian life requires a transformation of the person, and that we need to take part in this transformation. Transformation, however, is not something we just do. In fact, we have no power in ourselves to do it. Rather, this is a transformation that is from God (Col. 2:19) even if it is still a transformation that requires training.

In short, I love so much of what Willard is doing in this talk. But, as many of you know, I tend to do this differently (and below I explain how and why). Even though we have a broadly similar overall framework, our differences will be apparent particularly in places where we offer practical advice. So below I want to focus on the advice Willard gave the church about embracing spiritual formation.

I also want you to know why I put this behind a paywall. While this might not be true of most of you, praise God, I find online communities to lack charity and to engage in disagreements and debates in a way that is sub-Christian. Furthermore, polemics are by far the cheapest and least faithful way to generate an audience. I’m not interested in doing that. I trust my paid subscribers with a bit more critical engagement on issues because they have invested in longer term growth and knowledge and not sound-bite discourse. I know that is not all, or even most, of you, but I also know that this sort of engagement reigns online.

So below I provide an account of how I approach the question of spiritual formation in the church and why it differs from the advice Willard gives here. Also, I have a series of posts on Willard’s understanding of spiritual formation that I am collating on my pain page in the post “Office Hours” that can be seen here.

Share

Read more

This is going to be a very different sort of post. As of late I have been working on introducing people to what we do at the Institute for Spiritual Formation, because I find that most people hear the wrong sorts of things when they hear the words “spiritual formation.” There are all sorts of false views bouncing around and so I wanted to help articulate what we mean when we talk about spiritual formation.

I was able to do two lectures with Q&A over zoom to articulate how Talbot approaches, not just spiritual formation, but a distinctly spiritual theology, and I wanted to share them with you. I ended up doing two related talks:

Talk 1: What if spiritual formation is not what you think?

Talk 2: How does the gospel shape spiritual formation?

If you are interested in potentially studying spiritual formation, check out the Institute for Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University.

If you are curious about what this vision entails, I have articulated it in these books:

Formed for the Glory of God: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards (IVP, 2013). This gives a basic overview of what a distinctively evangelical vision of spiritual formation looks like.

Where Prayer Becomes Real: How Honesty with God Transforms Your Soul with John Coe (Baker Books, 2021).

When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws us Near with John Coe (Baker Books, 2026).

Share

For the first eight years of my time as a professor at Talbot, I had a weekly meeting with my friend and mentor John Coe. John was my immediate supervisor, being the director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation (a position I now hold). These meetings were often about teaching, but they were also often about things like marriage and parenting and friendship. Our focus was on life with God in this present age and what it means to faithfully navigate our lives with the Lord.

I don’t take this time for granted. I know many in academic positions who have felt somewhat abandoned into their role with little to no guidance and shepherding (teaching can be a very difficult experience to navigate and far too many are left to navigate it alone).

Subscribe now

In one of these meetings John was reflecting on parenting now that he has adult children. In a particularly reflective moment, John paused and said something that struck me deeply:

The more I thought about this the more it made sense to me. The things we focus on, the books we read, the family devotions we do, the strategic conversations we have, and much else besides are all driven by our intentions to raise our children faithfully.

I feel my parenting intentions a lot. They are ever-present to me. My desire to be present. My desire to “teach them up in the way they should go.” My longing to teach them about the faith in a way that doesn’t end up pushing them away from God or the church. I have very strong and very clear intentions in my parenting, and they are so strong and clear to me, that I can easily assume they are obvious to everyone.

But kids do not see them. Children do not know them. Our children see and experience the event - the fruit - of these intentions, without the rose-colored intentions giving them their specific meaning.

But it is also true that Kids don’t have direct access to the events of being parented any more than we do. Whereas parents look at events through the lens of our intention, kids experience these things through the lens of their expectation. Expectations, often left unspecified and undefined, colors what we experience and can leave us feeling unseen, unknown, and misunderstood.

Instead of focusing on parenting, however, I want to think about the dynamic of looking through the lenses of our intentions and expectations. Our intentions and expectations are constant in our lives and both color how we interpret reality. Many naively assume that they directly access objective fact constantly, with no subjectivity in their lives, but in doing so they fail to recognize the truth of their humanity and the reality of what it means to be a person navigating the personal realities of our world.

Now, in light of all of that, think about the expectations you develop in the early years of your faith. Think about those seasons early on when everything seems to work and you are filled with excitement, passion, and purpose. In those years, you are captivated with God but often see little of the ongoing sin, brokenness, and immaturity that remains in your soul.

This is what John and I narrate in When God Seems Distant, that even though this is exactly what this season is for, it also was not meant to continue. You are not meant to relive your honeymoon. You are meant to move on to what is deeper, and often more mundane-feeling. In our immaturity this can feel like less, but in our maturity we should recognize it is more.

But this is all easy to say in the abstract. The reality in the moment is different.

When suddenly you find yourself bored, or just lacking excitement, we naturally look at this through the lenses of your expectation and think: This isn’t right. This isn’t supposed to happen. I’m still devoted and serving but it is no longer working.

The phrase “it is no longer working” is worth while to attend to.

When we say this we are seeing a sort of equation that we have written on our souls. What these equations reveals is how the flesh has blinded us to the truth and how much we are trying to use God to grow rather than abandoning our lives to God.

But the same is true with intention.

We can be blinded by our intentions because we imagine our good intentions lead us to see the truth of our spiritual practices. We not only see, but feel the strength of our intention - the passion behind it, the desire to be faithful, the longing to have faith - so that we miss how much this colors what we do. Instead of seeing the act itself, we see it through the lens of our intention that colors it with a faithfulness that might not be true.

If you are having a hard time understanding this, try to imagine a pastor who does not see that he is wielding himself and his flesh to try to grow his church. When the end is good and the means (preaching, service, ministry, etc.) are good, we just imagine it must be good. We fail to truly believe that God’s power is known in our weakness, and therefore assume we must find our own power for God in our strength.

Share

For my paid subscribers, I want to go a bit deeper into how our expectations and intentions end up leading us to avoid God in the very places we imagine we are being faithful. I hope it ministers to you!

Read more

I always felt so bad for my kids when they would wander into our room complaining about how much their legs hurt while they tried to sleep. Growing pains are hard. But once they heard they were growing pains, that made the pain a bit easier. Kids like the idea of growth, and while it doesn’t decrease the pain, knowing it had a greater purpose for a better end made it seem more manageable.

Scripture often uses the notion of physical growth from childhood into adolescence and then adulthood as the framework within which we should consider spiritual growth. This is why we talk about Christian growth as maturation, or why Paul can use imagery like starting with milk and then moving onto solid food.

The problem however is that we still experience growing pains in the growth of grace. Like puberty, we are often surrounded by people experiencing the same things without anyone actually talking about it. For instance, Christians have always noticed that young believers are often filled with passion and excitement beyond their maturity. This excitement is not mature, but it is good. It is good because it is by grace, but we often confuse it as an experience of God’s acceptance and not simply a sign of God’s gracious kindness. In other words, we think this pleasure and passion are signals that God is pleased with us, rather than the fact that God, in his steadfast love and mercy, lavishes upon his children for the sake of his name.

When this happens we subconsciously begin to equate the feeling of excitement with God’s pleasure. These things are bound together in our spiritual infancy, but as we grow they have to be pulled apart. Maturity always requires us to untether things we have melded into one.

Subscribe now

So as we grow, and our excitement wanes, we have to learn that this too is a gift from the Lord. This gift is to show us what is in our hearts (Deut. 8:2) so that we can come to him in the truth and learn to truly rely upon him in all things. Instead, many Christians interpret the experience of losing excitement differently. Many grow bored, tired, or just feel consumed by the pace of their Christian service, and instead of coming to God, they assume that their lack of excitement is a sign of God’s disappointment. Too often folks turn to themselves and strategies of growth that only ultimately lead them away from God rather than to him.

There are many things we turn to when we experience our excitement waning. Some believe that they need to become more passionate, when that is really a strategy of the flesh. Others seek to become better, more devoted, and more engaged, not realizing that they are doing exactly what Paul warned the Galatians about, beginning with the Spirit but trying to perfect themselves in the flesh (Gal. 3:3).

Today, perhaps more than in recent memory, people turn to spiritual disciplines, having read a book or listened to a podcast that was supposedly on spiritual formation. These folks, feeling consumed already, begin to think that this is the missing piece they have been looking for. Having been sold a vision of spiritual formation with a clear path of growth, they throw themselves into formation and trust that this will finally recover what has been lost.

Unfortunately, it is often this focus on spiritual disciplines that is simply a recovery of the error of the Colossians, who Paul warns have developed a “self-made religion” with the “appearance of wisdom” that is based on “asceticism of the body” (spiritual discipline) but no ability to deal with the flesh (Col. 2:23). This formation has “let go of Christ,” and is not, therefore, the kind of formation that knows the “growth that is from God” (Col. 2:19).

I focus on this topic today because I worry that this last temptation is going to hit the church like a tidal wave. The current interest in spiritual disciplines, I worry, will simply result in another agenda to “fix my life,” and won’t actually be about losing one’s life to find it in Christ. It will confuse the nature of the Christian life and will end up being another form of self-made religion that is an attempt to perfect ourselves with the flesh.

But also, I write about this today because this week is the release week for When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near.

The reason we called this book When God Seems Distant is because we wanted to name for folks what is really going on when we struggle with our faith. We wanted people to see the temptation to avoid God or to manage him rather than being with him. We wanted to show how easy it is to allow the growth pains of faith to lead us to ourselves and our own self-help strategies of the flesh.

We are often unfortunately naive to the ways that the flesh can manipulate and undermine our life with God. We too often assume that as long as we have good intentions then that must mean our spiritual practices are pure. But this isn’t the case.

One of the reasons many of us feel so consumed these days is that we have bought into consumeristic assumptions about our Christian lives. Instead of laying aside that whole program - recognizing that it is a failure to embrace the ways and the economy of Jesus - we just swap out the various products we are using.

When we were first discussing title options for this book, one title we kept coming back to, but didn’t end up using, was Spiritual Formation Beyond Willpower. That really does get to the core message of this book. We ended up going with When God Seems Distant because we wanted to name a common confusing experience in the Christian life that would awaken folks to the questions we all struggle with.

But not all effort is the same. We have to talk about a developmental spirituality so we can come to understand the nature of Christian maturation. In doing so, we cannot simply talk about spiritual disciplines. We have to talk about Christian transformation by grace that is always the transformation in love and for love.

What John Coe and I are articulating through Where Prayer Becomes Real and When God Seems Distant is a vision of spiritual formation that rests on the truth of the gospel and the reality that the growth we are called to is the “growth that is from God” (Col. 2:19).

I hope that these books can minister to you, but also, help to model what it means to shepherd souls to their Lord in the truth of their life. Also, for those of you looking for a Lent reading to prepare your hearts for Easter, we put together a daily reading plan through When God Seems Distant that you can download here.

Share

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about this feeling of being consumed, and how so many find themselves in places of feeling harnessed for activity and achievement rather than knowing the peace of Christ in abiding.

Read more