Spiritual Formation

Adam and Eve were created very good and with rightly ordered loves – they loved the right things in the right order. They enjoyed fulfillment of their loves in the Garden of Eden (literally, the Garden of Pleasure).

Their love of God was fulfilled by God’s intimate presence. Adam’s love for a partner was fulfilled in Eve. Their love of good work was fulfilled in their tending of the garden.

However, tragically their rightly ordered loves  became disordered (loving the wrong things or the right things but in the wrong order). Their lives of holiness and perfect communion with God were shattered by sin, resulting in alienation.

The introduction of disordered loves (by the Serpent) and the living out of disordered loves (the Fall) spread disordered loves to every human ever born thereafter (total depravity). 

Only by God’s initiation and saving work can a human heart ever love him and thus begin to have rightly ordered loves (a lifelong process). This means every human action before saving grace is most deeply motivated by a disordered love and thus unable to please God (we are born as enemies of God and spiritually dead). 

Because every action we take and every decision we make is always governed by our most deeply held loves, we are never free to choose something contrary to those deepest loves. Therefore, we are always a slave to our loves, from birth to death.

Christ-bought freedom is the grace to act in accordance with loves that are being rightly ordered by the Spirit (the process of sanctification). Because of Jesus, no longer are we slaves only to loves that lead to death (the human condition), but we are freed to loves that lead to life (work of the Spirit)!

The eternal hope of the Christian is fully enjoying God forever by having loves that are wholly rightly ordered, similar to Adam and Eve at creation but most ultimately like Jesus (being conformed into the image of the Son). This is the ultimate Christian prize that begins imperfectly at conversion, grows over the course of the Christian life, and finds fulfillment in eternity – restored perfect communion with God himself forever!

Our role in our spiritual formation is to regularly place ourselves in spaces God commonly uses to show us more of himself. Like we might look out a window to see the rays of the sun, we intentionally gaze at these “windows of God’s grace” regularly, anticipating God graciously showing us more of himself.

While there are various “angles” to gaze at each window, each rhythm is unique and vital to a healthy Christian’s formation and is best enjoyed if engaged in regularly.

The rhythms include:

Bible Intake and Prayer

The Bible is the clearest and primary way God reveals himself. Prayer is the primary way we communicate with him.

We enjoy the freedom to explore various ways to engage with Scripture and to pray as long as the main point of seeing more of God is kept central – read / listen, read broadly / read for depth, pray aloud / pray silently, sit / walk, write prayers / sing prayers, use the Psalms / compose your own, etc.

Corporate Worship

There is something utterly unique about corporate worship not replicated in small groups, classes, or times of personal devotion. Worship is both a means (grows our love for God) as well as an end (this is what we were made to do!).

In corporate worship we give, we receive. We participate, we are led. We encourage each other, we are encouraged by each other. We receive more of God, we respond with worship. We worship with others not like us. We celebrate the ordinances. The Spirit simply moves.

Christian Community

This sort of biblical fellowship has a depth of relationship where you both give and receive things like deep encouragement, the sharing of burdens, confessing and warning of sin, and prayer. This requires us to be known and to know others.

The Spirit communicates Jesus to us in relationships with others not just like us (ie gender, season of life, maturity, etc.) as well as even deeper relationships that tend to be a very small inner-circle of those of our same gender producing the deepest levels of trust by God’s grace (where we can even receive a rebuke as a gift!).

Doctrinal Formation

We all believe something about God. Doctrinal formation is all about those beliefs becoming more and more accurate to who the biblical God truly is. We use our minds well to know God better SO THAT we love him more deeply over time.

• The Christian life is NOT primarily about doing more of the right things and less of the wrong things, but about growing in enjoyment of God himself, which shapes our loves which govern our actions.
• Focusing primarily upon OUR behavior, OUR feelings, OUR thoughts, OUR struggles is counter-productive – it takes our focus off of the only One to whom our hearts respond with a growing right love and thus obedience.
• Intentionally being attentive to the Spirit is absolutely crucial. This requires us to slow down and make head and heart space. It is his job to communicate to us Jesus – the clearest expression of the very thing to which our hearts most greatly respond with a growing love for God!
• It is possible to idolize good things rather than using them as means to a greater end – ie Bible, prayer, service, community, common grace gifts, etc. For example, it is possible to make becoming a better student of the Bible or a person who regularly prays as the goal rather than becoming a student of the Bible and a person who regularly prays as ways to more deeply know and love God.
• Our formation includes both  individual essential rhythms (ie times of personal Bible intake, prayer, doctrinal formation) and gathered essential rhythms (ie corporate worship, Christian community and times of group Bible intake, prayer and doctrinal formation).
• Not “feeling the right emotions / motives” should not paralyze us from engaging in the rhythms, but motivate us to engage with the hope that the rhythm by God’s grace will shape our emotions / motives in the right way.
• We should not expect deep formation if we engage in the rhythms sporadically at best. We should also not expect deep formation instantaneously.
• Busyness / constant activity / always producing are formidable enemies of our formation. Sabbath is a gift God gives us in the battle. In our formation we are not primary producers but receivers.