What Is Spiritual Formation? Part 2

Aug 23

{This is Part 2 in a 3-Part series on Spiritual Formation. Read Part 1 here.}

Spiritual Formation

With this background, we can begin to understand what spiritual formation is. By the time you’ve begun to think about it, you already have a way of interacting in the world. Your internal wiring and your experiences of life have combined to form in you a default way of living, which quite often does not reflect the reality of who you are in Christ. So spiritual formation is really the work of transformation, where the Spirit of God re-forms us from the inside out so that the things that are true of us because of our justification come to more and more reflect that way that we actually live our lives. Spiritual formation is the process of transformation such that, in any given situation, the words and thoughts and actions that come out of us authentically are the words and thoughts and actions of Jesus that would come out of Christ were he in the same circumstance. The Bible talks about this reality in a variety of ways:

Galatians 5 says the “fruit of the Spirit is love — joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” You could actually become a patient person. We could actually become gentle people.
1 Corinthians 13 says “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” We could actually become loving people. I could actually become the sort of person who bears all things, instead of yelling at every idiot who drives his car like an idiot. I could love people. Amazing!
Romans 12:2 says “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” so that we more fully understand the good and perfect will of God.
Colossians 3 and Ephesians 4 both talk about “putting off the old self” (our first formation, or former way of living) and “putting on the new self”, “which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.”

The whole New Testament points to this truth: the goal of the Christian life is to be transformed so that we look more and more like Jesus, so that our responses and reactions to the people and circumstances of our lives more naturally resemble the life of Christ. This is the work the Spirit of God is doing in us, and though it is never complete in this life, we can expect to see real progress as we walk with Jesus.

The Problem

The obvious question at this point is “how does this happen?” But before we consider that question, we have to confront a troubling reality: The problem the church faces today is that actually living like Jesus is considered an impossibility by most Christians. More than that, it’s not even a desirable outcome. For the most part, Christians today believe a worldly lifestyle is to be preferred to a Christian one, so we pick and choose the areas in which we will suck it up and follow the “lesser way” of Christ. How tragic!

Beginning some time after World War II, discipleship began to be thought of as an “extra-credit elective” for churches and individual Christians. How and why this happened is beyond the scope of this essay (but see my podcast for more), but it is now beyond dispute that many people (both inside and outside the church) believe that there is a version of Christianity that involves something less than learning to do all of the things Jesus taught us. Indeed, most people would believe that such an expectation is the height of legalism; somehow we have forgotten that teaching people to do everything that Jesus taught us was literally the last thing Jesus told his followers to do before he ascended into heaven.

Believing that we are saved by grace, many of us are now paralyzed by grace. Rather than following in the pathways of formation the church has employed for 2000 years, because we believe we are saved by grace, we don’t do anything. But the Spirit who applies the work of Christ on the cross to us intends to “carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6). It’s impossible to function in our modern world without being immersed in our culture. Technology pumps the world’s values into us at an unprecedented rate. I’m no Luddite, but it’s naive to ignore the reality that most of us are being formed by our culture far more than we are being formed by the Spirit through his chosen instrument — the church. Simply considering how much time we spent immersed in scripture versus how easily we lose ourselves in social media shows us the extent to which our culture is forming us. As a parent of adolescents, I’m wrestling through the ways we’ll allow our kids to navigate this brave new world, and there are no simple answers. But what is clear is this: we live in a time where the world has unprecedented resources to form us into its mold, at the same time that the church has largely abdicated its formational role in the hopes of merely retaining our engagement. Going with the flow of the culture will only take us downstream; while the Scriptures call us to set our minds on things above, where Christ — who is the very essence of our life — is seated with God (Colossians 3:1–4).

In short, the promise of the New Testament is that there is another version of you — a you who is free from doing that thing that you swore you would never do again, but somehow you can’t seem to help — a you who doesn’t even want to look at porn or drink too much; a you who can anticipate the allure of money made less-than-honestly, or a shopping splurge you can’t really afford, and decides in advance to just not walk into that room. There is a version of yourself that truly delights in goodness, beauty and truth, and who in fact refuses to be satisfied with anything short of Perfection Incarnate. Do you want to meet that version of yourself? Because the Spirit of God is hellbent on introducing you.

What would that look like? How might that happen?

{This if Part 2 of a 3-Part series on Spiritual Formation. Come back next week for Part 3, or read and comment on the whole thing now here…}