One aspect of spiritual formation that I never heard talked about is the difficulty in communicating it. This is important because when we get interested and excited about something we talk about it. But how we talk about it matters a lot; a lot more, I suggest, than we tend to think about.

In doing so, and after recommending the book, one caveat was given. The author noted our continual use of phrases like “draw near to God” and “abide in Christ,” and went on to say that, particularly early in the book, he would have liked to see more unpacking of these concepts.

This is a great reflection and critique.

It was something I sat with and struggled with in the editing phase of the book. I’ve said before that I never spent so much time, or done so much editing, as in the final stages of this book. The desire to say a lot, and to really shepherd people, balanced with the desire not to overwhelm readers really weighed on me.

Knowing that our series is meant to be developmental, and to take you somewhere, our plan is to take people to these very questions in the third volume. But I knew I needed to say something first (chapter 9 on how spiritual practices are about love was meant to be a kind of placeholder until the third book was written. That chapter is meant to orient you to the nature of a distinctively supernatural life that is beyond mere natural habit formation).

This gets to my point in this article, and it has more to do with you than you might initially think. Maybe you don’t plan on writing or speaking about spiritual formation much, and so you think this doesn’t really have much to do with you. But it does.

But since the spiritual formation conversation has been, in many ways, defined by the publishing industry, there is a temptation to avoid going deeper, and instead to just keeping saying more of the same thing. This is one of the reasons why the same book gets published every year that is almost identical to the one’s that came before (I could point to easily a dozen books written over the past 20 years that are almost identical restatements on spiritual disciplines or spiritual formation).

This is not just a failure, but a travesty.

When this happens, spiritual formation becomes a group of people with similar personality traits who either like, or have become convinced that Christians should like, certain ways “of being” over others (sorry extroverts!). But spiritual formation is not a interest group (too many ministries become just that).

This is one of the things I appreciate most about what my friend and mentor John Coe did. In a season of evangelicalism that saw conferences and publishing as the go-to answer for everything (not to undermine either, they certainly have their place, but alone they tend not to go deeper but to just do more of the same). Instead, John started a program where people could wrestle deeply about life in Christ in a community of believers.

In a time when even education is gravitating toward a buffet-line approach to education, we have doubled-down on the necessity for a developmental sequence of courses. If people are really going to grow we have to think developmentally - we actually have to start in one place and go to another place. If we don’t do this in the church, in seminary, and in publishing, we will simply be talking at folks who have lost hope that there really is a way of life that leads to depth.

One of the reasons I write so much is that I believe that the written word has an incredible ability to awaken people to the truth. I have seen and experienced how profoundly the Lord uses books.

But I have also seen how easy it is to read a book quickly and think, “Wow, that was really helpful,” only to put it down and move on without it shaping your life. A year later you can read another book, which is saying the exact same thing, and think, “Wow, yes, this is great,” and over and over and over again.

Spiritual formation isn’t a good publishing fad because it does not thrive in superficiality. It calls us into something more. Something deeper. It is a call to wrestle with the Lord’s calling to follow him in the midst of this present evil age, not remaining in infancy, but advancing into maturity in the faith.

The difficulty I struggle with, is whether or not it is possible today to write a series of books on spiritual formation that actually goes somewhere - that actually develops. This is what John and I are trying to do in our trilogy, starting with Where Prayer Becomes Real and then When God Seems Distant.

This is a hard task. But it is also a task I don’t see people doing (or, as far as I can tell, even trying to do). Instead of developing, there is often just more of the same. I hope you find that what we are doing takes you somewhere, precisely by leading you again and again back to your Lord and his Word. I also hope that this can be true with the levels of things I am doing on here at Substack.

In light of that, for my paid subscribers, here is a video focusing on the critique from the review: Why do I always talk about “drawing near” and what does that look like? I hope it is helpful! See more below.

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I didn’t want to make this a mini-series, but this post follows from the post last week on misunderstanding Protestant spirituality. Too often I hear critiques of Protestant spirituality that are total misunderstandings of what is being said. Recently I have heard several and so I am highlighting some of those in these posts.

Last week I focused on preaching the gospel to yourself, and how folks hear the wrong thing when they hear that.

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Today I want to get into something a bit more difficult, what is often called “worm theology.” “Worm theology,” as it is sometimes put, is not a theology of worms (which would undoubtedly be amazing!). Worm theology is speaking of oneself as a worm, as wretched, and, at times, using demeaning language about yourself.

So what is going on in all of this?

We too often think about the human person as an isolated and individual agent. Scripture does not think this way. In Scripture, you are either in Adam or in Christ, and your in-ness (if I can put it that way) determines who you are.

This is why it is wrong to translate the Greek “anthropos” as “self” when Scripture tells us to “put off the old man” and “put on the new man.”

When the Protestant tradition talked in terms that is now called “worm theology,” where the focus became a highly negative portrayal of the self, the focus was the self-in-Adam and was attending to the temptation, even for the Christian, to seek to self-create, self-define, and self-establish.

In other words, worm theology is naming the self in and of the self: the self in Adam.

But we still need to look at ourselves and the truth of our sin, depravity, and indwelling corruption. We need to do so because these things still mar us after conversion. We need to remember what we became in the flesh because the path of love requires we know how much we need forgiveness (Lk. 7:47). Or, with Peter, we need to remember what we’ve been forgiven because if we fail to see it, we “will grow so near-sighted that we are blind” (2 Pet. 1:9 - referencing a failure to grow in maturation while then forgetting what the Lord has cleansed us from).

You see, worm theology seeks to not forget what our sin and rebellion have done. It is an attempt to remember what we are capable of. If we forget these things, other people’s sin will strike us as unusually depraved and we imagine we could never be tempted by such sinfulness. As Peter warned, we will become so near-sighted that we are blind and will fail to remember what we are capable of doing in the flesh.

But worm theology is not the last word, but the first word in the declaration that I am Christ’s and he is mine. We might start with, “of all sinners I am the worst,” but we need to quickly turn to, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ in me” as our hope (Gal. 2:20). We should not demean the goodness of our creation or the fact that we are truly new in Christ, but should focus on the fact that the flesh is still desperately seeking to self-create.

Again, Luther is wonderful:

“[B]y [faith] you are so cemented to Christ that He and you are as one person, which cannot be separated but remains attached to Him forever and declares: ‘I am as Christ.’ And Christ, in turn, says: ‘I am as that sinner who is attached to Me, and I to him. For by faith we are joined together into one flesh and one bone.’ Thus Eph. 5:30 says, ‘We are members of the body of Christ, of His flesh and of His bones,’ in such a way that this faith couples Christ and me more intimately than a husband to his wife.”

As with our last post, this is the gospel we preach to ourselves as a way to shepherd our lives in the presence of the Lord. Whatever our theological take on personhood, we should be able to declare with Paul in his missive to Timothy:

“The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. To the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.” (1 Tim. 1:15)

We should not quibble with Paul, Are you really the foremost sinner? Come on Paul, be serious. Rather, we should recognize that Paul’s recognition of his sin - his being overwhelmed by his depravity - is the path to praising the Lord who saves. May we do so also.

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about what this means about being human and being a person, because this is fundamental to so much of what people are wrestling with today. So much hangs on this and yet we don’t talk about it nearly as much as is necessary.

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Every now and again I hear criticisms of what a person supposes to be Protestant spirituality. It has never once been accurate. That is not to say that there aren’t legitimate criticisms to be made from time to time, just that whenever I hear them the criticisms are 3-4 degrees removed from any actual primary source in Protestantism.

I hesitate to say this, but it it true, that even among scholars I find claims about “Protestantism” or “legal and forensic gospel” or even just “Martin Luther thought” that have no ground in reality. In most cases their criticisms are exactly the sort of things Protestants were always criticizing, and the supposedly “new” insights being advanced were the very things Protestants have always believed.

Even among scholars (we might say, especially among scholars) what is criticized in Protestantism is really just being critical of the church of one’s youth (or, more likely, the bold claims of their former youth pastor). Instead of being grounded in the actual Protestant tradition, folks have a tendency to just project their own experience and church onto the whole of Protestantism (or just Lutheran, Reformed, etc.).

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Recently I heard a critique that was less of an argument but more of a jab against Reformed spirituality and the call to preach the gospel to yourself every day. I just wanted to pick that up here because of the clear confusion that this person had, and the ways people might make the same mistakes.

There is a false narrative that was popularized in the mid twentieth century that Protestants rejected virtue ethics. There is a long history here, and people smarter and more informed than myself are thankfully working on it, but it is enough to say that this is false. Every major Protestant tradition had a clear account of the formation of virtue that is available by nature, and a parallel (albeit different) account of the formation of virtue by supernature.

Importantly, no one coming out of the Magisterial Reformation believed that nature had become so utterly depraved that there wasn’t a kind of goodness available in the natural ordering of reality. But, of course, the focus wasn’t on developing natural virtue since, as Paul tells us in Romans 14:23, “For whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” There is such a thing called natural virtue, but it cannot somehow be used as a replacement for holiness, and before the face of God it is revealed to be nothing.

The emphasis of Protestant spirituality, especially thinking here of Luther and Calvin, was on the fact that the gospel has a name and it is Jesus. By faith we embrace Christ, and therefore receive his benefits, and our walking by faith is the continual trust that he is our righteousness and our sanctification.

But the idea that this spirituality leads to a kind of spirituality where we are looking at ourselves in the mirror telling ourselves the gospel because we don’t really believe it, is a massive twisting of what we find in the tradition.

One might imagine a person who is captivated by other things just shouting facts into the void in their soul while they wonder why it doesn’t shape their lives. This isn’t what “preaching the gospel to yourself” is.

To preach the gospel to yourself is to pause, frame your life in the presence of the holy God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and come before the whirlwind like Job. Preaching the gospel to yourself is recognizing that this God determines your life. No other question is of the same weight as who this God is and what he has declared.

Before this Whirlwind we come to know that he has not left us alone, but has drawn near to us in Christ Jesus. Out of his steadfast love and mercy (praise God for the riches of Psalm 25) he draws near to us, not because of our sophistication and savvy, but because his mercy if “from of old.” On the ground of his own love he draws near and calls us to himself.

We preach the gospel to ourselves every day because we are a people inclined to wander, to create “self-made religion” (Col. 2), and to try to “begin in the Spirit while advancing ourselves in the flesh” (Gal. 3:3). Every day we do this, not because we have found a mantra we can use, but because we have found a God who has not remained distant.

To preach the gospel to ourselves is not self-talk. It is stepping into our experiences, failures, struggles, and the ebb and flow of our lives to shepherd ourselves to the one in whom we hope. Preaching the gospel to ourselves is ordering our lives Christward, trusting that true formation is only ever before his face. In preaching the gospel to ourselves we draw near to the God of the gospel in the truth of our lives to know as we have been known.

I have a prior post on this you can find here, along with a sermon I gave on this topic.

For my paid subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about this feature of Protestant spirituality, what we tend to miss about it, and why it is so fundamental to the growth of grace. See that video below.

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For those who know my story and my work know how profound an impact Dallas Willard has had on me. Both through his writing and in person, Willard rescued me from a kind of biblical and theological abstraction that failed to recognize the call into the presence and action of God.

But one of the things I continue to appreciate and love about Dallas is often ignored by those who follow him. When Dallas would go to a conference he would often encourage people to push back on him to show him ways he is wrong and to teach him so that he could learn. Dallas was a profoundly humble man and wasn’t deluded into thinking he had it all together. He even went so far as to articulate his failures personally in very corporate settings.

But I find that when I raise questions or offer critiques of things he said, I hear from folks about “the takedown piece you wrote about Willard” or “your rejection of Willard’s thought.” But this assumption actually stems from a failure to follow him faithfully.

If you accept wholesale everything he said without critically engaging you are failing to do as he asked. If you think any disagreement with him is a “takedown piece,” you are not following the sturdiness he had in the Lord but are reacting from your own fragility.

What is this mistake?

It is the tendency in the spiritual formation world to say things like “the gospel people have heard is too small,” or, “the gospel presented today is justification without a life,” or “the gospel is depicted today is half of a gospel.”

Willard had a very in-depth historical understanding of these sorts of things. This wasn’t just an off-hand critique, or an angsty rebuttal to how the church failed him. This was a claim about how, in certain segments of evangelicalism, there was a tendency to preach a gospel that offered forgiveness in exchange for mental consent (and mental consent was called “faith”).

Today, however, folks that follow him tend to throw these phrases around without the knowledge he had, the understanding of the Christian tradition, and the broader context of teaching in which he situated these sorts of claims.

Too often, as well, they don’t have his humility.

Pause for a second and just think about that.

Is it possible to say something true that is still not a proper way to approach others? Yes.

Just go and sit with 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 and think about how Paul talks about the weaker brother or sister, or consider Romans 14 and ask why Paul tells us to “decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother or sister.”

How so?

To tell someone that they have been given half of a gospel, or something like that, is to say that they have been given a false gospel. It is to question their pastors, elders, and leaders, and will probably lead them to question their entire church tradition.

Even if it is true in their context and experience, we should expect one of two things to happen: 1. Either they are incredibly wary of what you are saying and think you are a false teacher, or 2. They accept what you say and it erodes their trust in their leaders, their prior teaching, and could very well awaken questions of whether they are even a part of a Christian church.

In fact, I would say that if someone isn’t troubled and a bit incredulous at someone who says this to them, that is exactly the kind of thing that should trouble us!

But I can’t even begin to count the times I’ve heard someone say something absurd like “We lost the gospel after World War II and maybe even the Reformation,” and then act as if it is shocking that people relate to them as false teachers. That is exactly what you should expect, because this is exactly how false teachers relate to people (even if they are not, in this case, actually false teachers).

Unfortunately, not only do we say this at coffee shops and in the purgatory that is the comment sections of YouTube, but I increasingly see people make these kind of remarks and assertions on podcasts and social media broadly (one of the many reasons I believe that engaging in theological debates on social media is what Paul warns against when he talks about gossip and arguing about words).

Proper Christian faithfulness should lead us to show them that they have the truth, but they have just failed to fully hear and internalize it. As Dallas himself would tell people, we need to go back to the original visions of whatever denomination of people we are engaging and remind them of the depths that their tradition offers.

Willard also liked to remind people that he wasn’t doing anything that couldn’t be found in Luther or Calvin (whether that is entirely true is a different question, but the broad scope of it, which is how he meant it I think, is exactly right).

The idea that there is a Protestant gospel that doesn’t call you to a life is utter fantasy. There simply isn’t, nor has there ever been, a Protestant gospel that separates justification from sanctification. You wouldn’t find that in Luther, Calvin, Vermigli, Melanchthon, Turretin, Owen, Wesley, or Edwards (for more on Calvin and Wesley specifically, see my book that is coming out soon, Sanctification and the Life of Faith, which is on sale here).

If we meet a Protestant pastor who is teaching that the gospel is reducible to justification, we should’t argue that they only have half of a gospel. We should argue that they have failed to articulate the full gospel as both Scripture and the Protestant tradition have articulated it, which is the very gospel they claim to believe! If they don’t claim to believe it, that leads us to a different conversation, but I don’t tend to find that to be the case.

Employing guilt, shame, and a decent amount of fear, people hear that they haven’t really received the good news only inevitably leads them to believe they have to generate a life that looks like Jesus. Embracing a new law, because they are unable to understand how their good works relate to Jesus, they turn to spiritual disciplines to somehow “complete the gospel” they have received.

There is a deeper and more historically informed way to understand the gospel. For Calvin and Luther, for instance, Christ is salvation, and in him we know justification and sanctification for a continual life of abiding in Christ in the presence of our heavenly Father.

On this vision, faith, hope, and love continually orient a person, not to their formation, but to Christ, in whom they are formed.

We don’t need a new gospel.

We need to learn the gospel that Scripture articulates and that defines Protestantism. If you think you are beyond such things, or if you have declared to others that they just don’t have the full gospel, you need to really step back and look into the mirror of the Word and discern your motivations. The damage that has been done by folks who erode the trust in the church and in Protestant theological traditions is immense.

And for what?

In none of the cases I have heard over the past decade, where someone speaks against the Protestant vision of the gospel, has the person actually had knowledge about what they asserted so confidently. Too often the spiritual formation conversation has turned to these sorts of claims, reacting more from a place of their own angst and frustration than resting in Christ and embracing the call of faithfulness.

There is a deeper and more faithful way. For more on this, seem my mini-class on bringing spiritual formation to the church.

For a more recent discussion of a Protestant understanding of spiritual formation, see my discussion with Mike Horton here:

For my paid Subscribers, I want to talk a bit more about the nature of the gospel as it was understood by Calvin and Luther and the broadly Protestant theological tradition and why that matters for spiritual formation. See the video below for more on that.

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I have been reflecting on spiritual practices for a while now, and so I wanted to collect together a series of these posts to provide a mini-course on the nature and task of spiritual practices. I’m sure I will update this along the way, and when I do I’ll make sure to let you all know. For now, here is a mini-course on …

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Now, admittedly, the spiritual formation conversation has done a good job of rejecting that. I don’t know anyone in that conversation who thinks that spiritual disciplines form us and I can’t think of any book where that view isn’t explicitly rejected. But what I will say is that this isn’t enough.

Let’s be honest, almost everyone knows that they should be honest in prayer. I rarely meet someone who doesn’t already know that to some degree - or at least assert that it is obviously true. I also rarely meet someone who actually is honest with God in prayer. But it is also true that I rarely meet someone who is aware of how dishonest they truly are.

To speak well about spiritual practices requires that understand that means of grace are means of grace. God has given himself to you in Christ Jesus by the Spirit, such that the means of grace are not simply “working out” to get stronger spiritually, but are means of receiving, embracing, and offering.

Receiving: In the means of grace (spiritual practices) we are first and foremost receivers. Not just once, however. Even in our actions and discipline we recognize that we do not move from a foundation in and of ourselves. We move from his grace in us - Christ in us - so that by his Spirit we are able to walk by the Spirit.

Embracing: There is no movement of the Christian life that can make a direct line from our action to our formation. Any such thought would be a failure to walk by faith. We no longer stand under a law that says “do this and live,” but we recognize that the righteous shall live by faith. Faith leads us to Christ to be conformed to his life.

Offering: In Romans 6 we hear the call to “present yourselves” and in Romans 12 to “present your bodies as living sacrifices.” As a proper sacrifice, our self-presentation is with and through a broken and contrite heart as we offer ourselves to the Lord by drawing near to him in our practices. Means of grace are ways to present our lives to God. This is not just in thought but in deed.

Spiritual practices are not somehow protected from this. This is why we cannot simply offer spiritual disciplines to people and then send them off to grow. True Christian growth is always the growth that comes from God as we grow into Christ who is our head (Col. 2:19).

This is the life we need to shepherd people into.

Because holiness is about life in God’s presence, and because, after the Fall, God’s presence is something we seek to protect ourselves from in the flesh, what people need is not simply a path of growth, but life in the household of faith. As we partake in God’s presence in the people of God we need to be shepherded - pastored - as we draw near to him.

This is why John Coe and I are writing our series on spiritual formation the way that we are. If we just lead with spiritual practices then people will inevitably use them in the flesh. That is exactly what happened in the earliest churches (Col. 2:23; Gal. 3:3). It doesn’t take generations for this problem to emerge. It happens immediately.

We need a deeper form of guidance that shepherds people to their Lord, and does not merely give them a path to walk. We have a way, but because our way is a person, spiritual practices are not merely means of growth.

For my paid subscribers I want to talk a bit more explicitly and personally about the nature of spiritual practices and the potential failure of hearing the call of Christ as we participate in these things. Take a look at the video below.

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If you want to watch the video from this episode, go to Kyle’s YouTube channel here.

One of the pervasive temptations of the flesh is to embrace a false way to grow that is untethered from the gospel. We see this happen in the very earliest churches. Right away in Gal. 3:3 we find Christians trying to begin with the Spirit to only be perfected by the flesh.

But there is an opposite error as well that I sometimes see today. When people hear that we cannot grow ourselves many assume we don’t have to do anything. Or, to be more specific, we all have a tendency either to believe that spiritual practices grow us in the same way that physical practices do (“working out”), or else assume they do nothing and we just wait around until God “zaps” us into action and formation.

Overreaction and reduction.

Interestingly, even though I’ve written a book on spiritual practices, people sometimes react to my emphasis on God’s action and grace as undermining any of our work. That is far from the case. Sometimes, oddly enough, the responses to what I argue (which is just reasserting what Protestants have historically said about means of grace) are absolutely unhinged. On the fundamentalist side, I hear that since I teach on spiritual disciplines I must believe in new age practices! On the other side, I hear that I reject spiritual disciplines.

Overreaction and reduction.

Part of the confusion, I have no doubt, stems from the form of my teaching. Unlike the 70s when Richard Foster wrote his Celebration of Discipline, we live in a day obsessed with life-hacks, life optimization, and the self-obsessed desire to squeeze advantage out of every situation. We cannot simply present spiritual disciplines to people and expect that they can pull these apart from this new cultural orthodoxy.

The other of my emphases that might confuse people, admittedly, is that I tend to dislike the language of “spiritual disciplines.” I prefer the historic language “means of grace” because it locates our efforts within a Christian vision of life. But instead of using that phrase, recognizing that it might be confusing to some, I tend to talk about spiritual practices. But when I do so, I mean means of grace (none of these semantic decisions are set in stone, but I made these decisions in 2010 when I started working on Formed for the Glory of God where I talk about these things).

Rather, as I lay out in Formed for the Glory of God, when we think about the Christian life we need to recognize that the nature of our spiritual practices are not akin to our formation at the gym. That would be an Aristotelean model of formation that the church has always rejected as Pelagian, but that has reinserted itself in American Christianity.

As an aside, there are two major forms of Pelagianism that are highly influential in American Christianity right now. There is your garden variety moral formation of the self, built on self-help projects and habit formation. But there is also its more bougie cousin, what I call “liturgical-Pelagianism.”

But there is another problem here as well that I think leads people to misunderstand my view. I have been reading, discussing, and engaging the spiritual formation conversation for 30 years, ever since my pastor at the time, John Ortberg, introduced me to the work of Richard Foster. Much later I got to know Richard and Dallas and take part in what ministries like Renovare were doing.

As I got to know them both a bit more in person, I expected them to emphasis spiritual practices more and bristle at my worries, but what I found instead was that they simply nodded their heads. In fact, when I gave my address at the Renovare National Conference thirteen years ago, on this very point, Richard bounded on stage with affirmation.

But I worry that people who read folks like Foster confuse what he was up to, because they read him in light of our new cultural context of life-hacks and self-help projects.

Importantly, the first generation of the spiritual formation movement was not attempting to start from the ground-up to give an account of spiritual practices. We don’t find a full account of what the Christian life is and how spiritual disciplines function within that. We find books that point that direction and that attempt to respond to where the church is. But there are no examples of what we might call a full-fledged “spiritual theology.” That simply isn’t what they were up to.

This shouldn’t surprise us because the first generation of movements always do this. This is the prophetic call of these forerunners. Their call is not to provide a holistic construction of something, but to name the problems, failures, and limitations of what has been going on and point to a new way that is actually an old way.

So here is the problem: Folks who read these books and heard these talks often confused what they were doing. They took their emphases as providing the proper order of things.

They were right. But they were misheard.

If you are an evangelical in the 80s, wanting to highlight features of the Christian life that other evangelicals have missed, you wouldn’t lead with going to church, listening to sermons, praise God together, etc. Everyone assumed that as obvious. So you would talk about the real possibility that folks are doing all of these things in the flesh.

So we should be the kinds of people who can listen, attend, and be present. This is why silence and solitude are so important. Their importance is not because they are somehow more fundamental than the “normal means of grace,” like the Lord’s Supper, listening to a sermon, praising God communally, etc., but because they attend to who we are as people who have built a life ordered by these things.

I will say more in the next post about the role of spiritual practices as means of grace, but for my paid subscribers, I have a video below talking about how these things have been confused in the spiritual formation conversation and what we need to do about it.

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Hi all,

I decided to pull together a collection of my posts on spiritual formation to provide a mini-class on spiritual formation. Unlike most of my other mini-courses, this one is not primarily video based, but there will be videos as well in some of them.

Some of these posts are older posts, so this helps collect them in …

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One of the weirder impulses in evangelicalism today is the idea that sinning makes you an expert. At the heart of this issue is the weaker brother and sister arguments in Paul (mostly from 1 Cor. 8 and 10 and Romans 14).

So how do we think sinning makes you an expert?

Think about the absurd stories that get shared around Halloween on social media, where someone says something like, “I have a friend who was involved in witchcraft who just became a Christian and was shocked that Christians celebrate Halloween. He says that they have no idea what they are getting into and shouldn’t be celebrating it because it is demonic.”

In many ways, this is a great example of what Paul says about the weaker brother or sister in 1 Corinthians 8. In this section we see a new convert who isn’t sure what to do about meat sold at the meat market out of fear that he might accidentally eat meat that was sacrificed at a pagan sacrificial service. He is troubled that he may unknowingly participate once again in the pagan rituals he left behind when he converted to Christianity.

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Paul’s response is to re-ground them in the truth:

“Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that “an idol has no real existence,” and that “there is no God but one.” For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords”— yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” 1 Corinthians 8:4-6.

Paul then goes on to explain: “However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled” (1 Cor. 8:7).

This is why many recent converts don’t share the same freedom that people who have grown up in the faith do. It is not that this freedom has been held back from them, but that they need to have this relational and experiential knowledge transformed, or else they will continue to defile their conscience.

Perhaps more important and less obvious, the answer to the weaker brothers lack of knowledge is not to merely teach him information, because information is not the primarily problem. The knowledge he fails to have was hard-earned through his “former association” with idols; this is experiential knowing.

But it is this very notion that evangelicals are so often duped by.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard things like:

• Yoga isn’t really stretching. Christians don’t really know what they are opening themselves up to by stretching in those sorts of ways.

• Christians shouldn’t believe in meditation because I have a friend who just converted from the new age who told me what is really going on when we meditate.

Sadly, I could go on and on. In fact, in many ways, instead of naming weaker brothers and sisters as “weaker,” evangelicals are more likely to just platform them, failing to remember that Scripture warns us against pushing people beyond their maturity and knowledge into places of leadership and teaching.

Think about how many people’s platforms are based on their sin. I cannot tell you how many Christians I have met who were duped by radically progressive ideologies, realize their mistake, and then immediately see themselves as prophets of the truth. But when they do so, what is platforming them really is the fact that they were duped, and their new found zeal is animated by that fact. In a quest to not be duped again, they immediately become supposed experts on what Christian truth requires.

I don’t have the space here to get into all of the specifics of what Paul says in response to these sorts of things, which would get us into the nature of the conscience and the nature of Christian freedom (I have a chapter on the conscience in When God Seems Distant for those who are interested).

But importantly, we do have Paul’s pastoral wisdom on what happens when weaker brothers and sisters raise these sorts of issues in the church. For most of the Christians in Corinth, perhaps, they hadn’t considered that they might be participating in demonic sacrifice when they went down to the meat market for some nice steak! But now they wonder.

Here is what Paul says to them: “Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience.”

Paul’s pastoral wisdom is basically, “For goodness sake, stop asking questions. You have the truth. You know who God is.”

But he, of course, does not end there. It turns out that our freedom in these things is not just freedom to be able to do something you want to do. Mature Christian freedom is freedom to care well for our weaker brothers and sisters.

But let me also suggest that one way we sin against our weaker brothers and sisters, and maybe even destroy them (as Paul warns), is to platform them. In doing so, we have not wrestled through the implications of allowing them to believe that their sin gains them expertise in the reality of things.

It does not.

We don’t go to the sexually deviant to figure out what sexual sin is and what sexual health entails.

We don’t go to new age converts to discern boundaries in spiritual formation.

We don’t go to a recent convert from paganism to discern proper worship.

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Hello all! I haven’t done a more personal post in a while and so I wanted to give you all an update. But first, an invitation:

On Tuesday, July 28th at 7:30PM we are doing another live event at Biola. If you are in the area we would love to have you come to this event, where I will give a talk on the future of spiritual formation. There will also be dessert and a kind of open house where you can come and see the Institute for Spiritual Formation and chat with me and my colleagues and others who are wrestling through these things.

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Click here to register for free, and please let anyone you think would be interested know. I appreciate the help since we’re a bit behind on letting people know!

One of the things that has been really great over the past year and a half on Substack has been the opportunity to meet some of you in person. Just this last week I had the chance to sit down with two of you and it was such a rich and encouraging time. With my role as the director of ISF, I am hoping that I can host events that bring that world and this one together.

These open house events are something I am cultivating because one aspect of my own calling, as I have discerned it, is that I am supposed to be a spiritual theologian for the sake of the church. These events are opportunities to bring in folks from the church, the community, and sometimes the broader academy who are not in places where they can have these sorts of conversations.

So these open houses gives us space to ask questions like:

• What is the history of spiritual formation and why do we talk about it the way we do?

• What does spiritual formation look like in the church?

• Why does my mind wander when I pray, or why did I used to feel excited about my faith but now everything feels dry?

If you remember in the Fall we held our first one of these and Rich Villodas and I talked about our differences in background and church tradition, while also the vast areas of likeness and encouragement we find in one another. It was a really rich time (you see what I did there).

We have decided to keep these events in-person only, and to keep them free, because we are wanting to cultivate places where we can come together to discuss these things face to face. I’m so sorry if you cannot make it, but if you can’t, please let know others about it so they can come.

As I’ve been hinting (and sometimes doing more than hinting) on Substack, I think the spiritual formation conversation is at its most important and vulnerable place. I think the decisions we made today will impact whether or not this is even a discussion in twenty years, or if the past 40 years will be another renewal movement in the history of the church that fails to make lasting change in the church itself.

Unfortunately, the Christian tradition is full of examples of this. My hope is to name why and to point a path forward.

Even though I’ll be giving a talk, my hope is not to just leave you with more information. Rather, my hope is that we prayerfully consider what the Lord is calling us to as we seek to walk in the Spirit and trust that Christ truly is our righteousness. My hope is that folks will leave encouraged and uplifted and that all will have a chance to meet folks who share these same interests.

Ongoing, I am looking for ways to bring what we do at Talbot into the church and to individuals seeking for answers to the questions of their faith. One of my goals for these events is to hear from folks about ways we can do that better, as well as to introduce you to things we are already providing.

I also hope that I get to meet some of you in person!

On a more personal note, including a prayer request, I have been pondering my life and calling a lot these days after my first year as the director of ISF. This year was a bit overwhelming for several reasons, some good and some bad.

It is profoundly unusual for me to have two books coming out in the same year, but that was mostly because one was about 5 years overdue! haha. Later this year, as you probably know by now, a long-term project is coming out on the doctrine of sanctification.

In particular, I hope to help the church and academy understand how the doctrine of sanctification guides and governs spiritual formation, even though those terms are not synonymous. That last sentence will be provocative for some of you, but don’t worry, I’ll be posting more on that soon.

The book is on sale here for about $14.00 for preorder if you are interested.

I have been struggling to figure out how to juggle my new administrative role, which has brought with it a lot of extra pressures and time, which has been quite taxing. The biggest question for me right now is how do I figure out how to write, which I believe to be my primary calling, in light of the other roles I have.

The really bad (or at least difficult realities) this past year has been some weird health issues. For about 6 months I was having severe back spasms daily, sometimes so bad that I was getting out of bed and immediately hitting the ground (I’ve been in physical therapy for a while now that has been helpful), and I’ve been navigating a relatively new list - a very long list - of allergies. I often tell people I am allergic to everything, and in the short term it has limited my travel (I am allergic to a lot of food). I am the guy that when I go to a new allergist they always comes in looking at my chart and say, “Whoa! We get one of you every now and again.”

What is weird about being allergic to food is that it is a kind of social disability. I never want to eat in someone’s home because I don’t want to dictate what they can make and how they can make it. Travel is hard because I often can’t find places safe for me to eat. When I travel I feel a bit like I’m on high-alert because if I eat the wrong thing I might derail the entire trip.

As with the chronic pain I’ve known my whole life, I have a strange relationship with these sorts of things. There are aspects where I know this is a gift. Like Paul’s thorn in the flesh, I have learned that I am not my own, and that God’s power is found in my weakness, and I can see the ways the Lord has used it. I feel the weakness part these days immensely. But other times I feel so tired and defeated with it all.

It is truly humbling to leave a lecture and have almost no voice left (my environmental allergies are to blame for that one) and then have trouble walking up stairs. All of that hit a particular low point in January when I was driving home and someone turned in front of me as I was entering an intersection at 45 miles per hour. I tried to avoid the accident but it was impossible and my car was totaled (along with a good amount of my progress in physical therapy!).

Thankfully I’m feeling much more encouraged these days. But there are still many questions I have about navigating these sorts of things along with how I understand my calling.

So if you think of me, your prayers are appreciated for wisdom and patience in all of this.

I hope to see many of you at the event later this month. But if you can’t make it, and you send it to someone who can, have them come and tell me! I would love to meet you via proxy!

Some Other Updates:

In case you are interested in some new stuff I have out these days online, here are some things I’ve been up to:

• I had a great discussion on the nature of virtue with Myles Werntz focusing on the nature of infusion. Check that out here.

• I was on the Shifting Culture podcast talking about being with God in the desert.

• I was on Pilgrim Radio talking about humility and the desert, which you can hear on YouTube here or Apple Podcasts here. Lots of desert stuff these days!

• I rarely do radio, preferring podcasts, but Chris Brooks asked me to come back on his show to talk about When God Seems Distant. What he didn’t tell me beforehand was how much it spoke into the current moment of his life. We ended up having a really wonderful discussion of what it means to walk with God. You can listen here.

• I was also on with my colleagues Sean McDowell and Scott Rae on the Think Biblically podcast. I always have a good time with them and they ask some really great questions. Listen here if you are interested.

• I also wrote an article for The Gospel Coalition on “The Missing Reformed Doctrine of Spiritual Formation” that you can read here.

As you can probably tell, one side-effect of writing a book is that the next 6 months is pretty full! I enjoy these conversations a lot though and they actually really help me think through how to communicate the message of my writing.

The other two are closer to being done, but I don’t think either will be done any time soon. I’m inheriting a new class this Fall that I’ve never taught before and developing a new class is the things that takes more time than anything else I do. From beginning to end, developing a new class can be a 3-5 year task, because it requires that I entirely change my research agenda.

That isn’t always true for professors, but it is one of the gifts and difficulties of being a spiritual theologian. I don’t get handed classes that I normally would as a theologian (Theology 1 and 2, or a class on the doctrine of the atonement, etc.). Instead, I get handed classes that seek to integrate all of these things with theological psychology, what we know of human formation and psychology in general, as well as speaking into the lived-reality of life with God.

This has been such a wonderful gift to me to teach in, but it is also an incredibly arduous task. It has led me into some really rich research that has truly been life-changing for me, but, as I’ve noted, it is hard to know how to balance it all because the academy is no longer set up for this kind of work.

The two books that are front and center for me right now, that I have been thinking through and wrestling over for the past couple of years now, are on the doctrine of sanctification (again!) and the nature of love. There was much more to say on sanctification than I could include in the intro book coming out in October, and so this one is a bit more of an academic book. The book on love has been a labor of love, and I’m so excited about it, but right now I don’t have any time to attend to it.

If you have read this far, bless you. I hope to see you at the event!

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

A long time ago now I wrote in a post that I wanted to spend some time unpacking what I mean by “cultural Shibboleths.” The notion of “Shibboleth” comes from Judges 12, where by using a difficult word to pronounce they were able to tell who was with them and who was not. It was a test of orthodoxy we might say.

Today, we are facing a problem of how Christians are wielding cultural Shibboleths in an online age. But first, an explanation.

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This impulse does not seek depth but aims to replace it with something easy to name, sell, and use to determine who is safe and who is dangerous.

So what’s wrong with a cultural Shibboleth?

In short, when we advance slogans as cultural markers of who is safe and who is dangerous, people don’t bother learning what these slogans are actually about and the issues related to them, which would require patience, depth, and empathy. Instead we use slogans as a way to determine who is “in” and who is “out.” It is a way to avoid having to relate to someone as a Christian and to reject their Christianity without weighing their confession.

Instead of a creedal statement, forged through centuries of debate and rigorous weighing against Scripture, we turn to much more simplistic and reductive ways to either ignore or even condemn other followers of Christ. It is this sin that is on offer so broadly in the world today.

In a context where the overflow of rage from the heart is poured out online, and where the passions of the flesh are weaponized to draw tight boundaries of orthodoxy, what is quickly left behind is having to look like Jesus.

This is a continual problem in evangelicalism because there is a kind of authority and power vacuum in non-denominational contexts. In these spaces, it is often the loudest and angriest voice that wins.

Furthermore, the internet preferences speaking more and drawing clear in-and-out boundaries, such that the very context of our speech is often antithetical to the Scriptural imperative: “let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20).

Just think about the speed in which people quote their opinion on whatever debate is raging or whatever click-bait headline is gaining traction.

It is here that we need to consider how we relate to the current social media culture. Social media context, podcasts, and YouTube often flourish by bearing false witness. It is not hard to know why. Fallen human persons love to justify ourselves by condemning others.

As an aside, I purposefully talk in generalities on most of my Substack posts about these things. There are spaces we need to “name names,” although we better weigh that before the face of God. But on here I want to paint pictures that might appear overly stark because I want to help provide a sort of archetype of how evil penetrates God’s people. Scripture is not silent on these matters. The tongue is set on fire by Hell as James reminds us.

So as I paint a stark picture, the question we have to wrestle with is: How should I judge who to listen to?

In contrast, an elder is supposed to be “not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome” (1 Tim. 3:3). Furthermore, and interestingly, Paul writes that an elder should not be a recent convert. The worry is that pride and conceit will erode them (1 Tim. 3:6).

Just pause and consider Paul saying, “Well, sure, an elder shouldn’t be a recent convert and shouldn’t quarrel about words, but it is totally fine if you’re doing that on a podcast.”

But there is more to the warning about a recent convert being an elder. Recent converts are often characterized by what had previously duped them, whether that is a political, philosophical, or theological ideology that they now recognize as evil. In response, they imagine that just doing the opposite is biblical.

Have we, as a people, considered how to care for the weaker brother and sister in a podcasting age? Have we considered our responses to these weaker brothers and sisters online? If you have never sat with these passages before, sit with how vicious Paul is about those who “destroy the work of God” and “sin against Christ” in how they react.

One of the virtues in evangelicalism is its deep belief that we can all read and understand Scripture. The shadow side of this, however, is when that feeds a sort of mob culture who determines what is true, safe, and orthodox because it can wield enough cultural influence to apply pressure on people and institutions.

Faithfulness requires that we weigh people’s words because it turns out that the way Scripture calls us to discern someone’s faithfulness is often determined by how people use words:

• Luke 6:45: “the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”

• Romans 3:13-14: “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”

• James 1:26: “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.”

• Finally, in John 8:44, Jesus explains to the scribes and pharisees that when they lie they reveal the truth of their character, and therefore the truth of who their true Father is - the Devil. For when “he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

One of the most disturbing trends today is when a professing Christian is revealed to be a liar how many simply shrug their shoulders as if it isn’t a sign of their rejection of the way of Jesus. How often do professing evangelicals simply think, “This is just how business is done.” How often do we sow to the world, the flesh, and the devil, and in our fantasy imagine we will reap in the Spirit? (see James 3:13ff. and Gal. 6:7-8).

Most of us, I assume, are not a part of generating this kind of material, but we still might be implicated. All of us have to determine what we do in response, because this kind of faithlessness is ubiquitous. It is everywhere you look.

You see, we are implicated if we share these false, divisive, and manipulative words. Platforming those bearing false witness is participating in these systems of evil and is another way we embrace the role of “teacher” and “elder” of the church. To platform another is to take on these mantels as one who has done the work to truly understand. But rarely that is the case.

Imagine going online and condemning a group of people who claim that Christ is Lord - who are fellow Protestants even - and not bother even reading what they say? This happens all the time. ALL THE TIME. It happens on major podcasts touted by evangelicals.

My challenge to us is this: Stop listening to anyone who doesn’t embody James’ claim that we should be “quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (Jas. 1:19-20).

The complacency of God’s people here is very sick fruit from a profoundly diseased tree. Here are some questions we need to ask:

• How can we tell if someone is writing from a posture of slowness to speak, slowness to anger, and a kind of quickness to hear?

• What would it look like to know whether or not they bear false witness?

• How do they disagree with other Christians, and is it done with humility?

• What sort of “virtues” advance their writing or speaking?

• Do they seek to have the first and last word? Do they publish on something quickly?

Too many cannot fathom that they could ever be on the wrong side of God, and there is a failure to recognize how indwelling corruption works, to use the old language, as well as how hypocrisy works. Hypocrisy, in the Protestant tradition, is first and foremost a kind of self-denial before it is about fooling others.

Hypocrites are the last ones to know about it.

In Luke 18:9, when Jesus is setting up the parable of the two men who go to the temple to pray, the Pharisee and the tax collector, he starts by saying, “He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt.” It is these that prayed in their goodness rather than the tax collector who would not even lift his eyes to heaven but beat his breast and said, “Lord have mercy on me a sinner.” It is this man who leaves justified, we are told, and not the other.

Instead of responding quickly or assuming that the things you hear about online are true (it is astonishing how often they are not), what would it look like to use these things are mirrors to see the truth of your life?

In what follows, for my paid subscribers I reflect a bit on this and address some questions about the Christian life in an online age. Let’s consider what it means to walk by faith and not by sight in an outrage culture.

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This post is going to begin a series of wrestling through our speech, which means it is going to begin a series of reflection where we think about being online. If social media has shown us anything, it is that when given the chance to ignore Scripture’s teaching about speech, many Christians boldly go where angels fear to tread.

In James 3:1, for instance, we hear that not many should become teachers. But if someone is using social media to try to convince people of a theological, biblical, or political point of view, then they are obviously taking up the mantel of a teacher. Even using these accounts to buttress others is to be a teacher that validates other teachers.

With this warning in James we find teaching about the tongue and how it is like a rudder, steering the whole of a life even though it is only a small part of the body.

I’ve been reflecting on this lately because of a trend I’ve seen for many years in Christian publishing and platforms: The folks who give vent to the boldness of their tongues are often seen as the most insightful and prophetic.

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Rather, I think we need to see this impulse as a kind of spiritual adolescence - an immaturity that seeks to advance oneself by reacting against the ways they have been failed in the faith.

It is this latter claim that is important to sit with. We have all, in one way or another, been failed in the faith. We have had people teach us false things, even if the “falseness” merely names how reductive the assertions are (I hear a lot of claims about how the “Protestant tradition believes x,” or “the Reformed believe y” that are false because of how incredibly reductive they are, for instance).

Most Christians I meet today can name at least one, if not several, Christian leaders who have impacted them deeply and whose sin has made them unfit for ministry. That is a disorienting reality.

My worry, in particular, is how often we hear new voices who make a name for themselves by convincing people that everyone has been wrong about everything before they showed up. Or, as is often the case, everyone has been wrong about everything until this present moment (in this case, they are not the only one who is right, but are linking themselves with whatever the “new” movement is).

This does not mean that we can’t criticize the tradition, but it does mean that before we make claims that are “new,” we had better do the work of being faithful to the tradition we are criticizing. Unfortunately, that rarely happens. Instead, we become enamored by what is new, ever-more impressed by how right we are and how wrong everyone else has always been (just notice how juvenile that sounds).

Instead of suggesting to folks that the gospel has been lost for centuries (for goodness sake, if I hear this again I’m going to lose it), which is nothing more than railing against your old youth pastor, what if we actually do the work of going back and listening intently to the tradition to read Scripture along with others who do not share the same presuppositions as we do.

Let’s just not accept them any longer. We can do that you know. We can just decided that overly reductive grandiose posturing is infantile and call it so. We can recognize that folks who constantly cause people to question their own church tradition are, to use the older language, rabble-rousers, creating stumbling blocks for people and are divisive in the church.

But as long as we continue to hold them up as prophets we baptize the very sort of speech that Scripture names as evil. The tongue is a fire indeed. Let us remember that as we bear witness to the crucified Lord of glory in our words.

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It is the season of the World Cup and it is not unusual to see packed bars and restaurants full of people screaming, jumping up and down, or, just as often, looking entirely dejected. Exuberance and despair appear in equal measure these days.

When we think about Christian faithfulness one of the important historic distinctions is between passion and affection. This is something we talk about in When God Seems Distant that people have found helpful [here is a podcast I did with Preston Sprinkle on this theme]:

I realize, however, that distinctions like this might seem nit-picky. Some, no doubt, just roll their eyes at these sorts of distinctions. But I want to show you why this really, really matters.

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Remember 1 Corinthians 3:1:

There are a handful of key things I want you to notice about this passage. First, Paul assumes what we call a developmental spirituality in When God Seems Distant. In other words, just as we physically mature from infancy to adolescence to adulthood, so too do we mature spiritually in like manner.

Second, in our infancy we were met with milk because that is where we were developmentally. God meets us where we are. If we are infants, he meets us in our infancy. But here, Paul notes that while the Corinthians are still on milk, they shouldn’t be any longer. To use language that was often preferred by many Puritans, it is time for the Corinthian church to be spiritually-weaned.

Third, and most importantly for our purposes here, the season of infancy is a fleshly sort of season. We all know this of course. Infants are total narcissists. They are utterly self-centered. But they are supposed to be. A good infant is a self-centered infant, whose needs, demands, and troubles are met in love, abundance, and kindness.

But infancy is not the goal.

While we develop this much more in the book, here is a quick cheat-sheet:

• Passions begin in your body and often work against the integration of your person, causing you to be carried away by your bodily desires (think of rage, lust, etc., and how they can almost take you over).

• Affections, rather, begin in your heart and bring order and integration to your person.

Importantly, passions are not bad. Passions were meant to be awoken by your affections to help animate your life (particularly through difficulty). But, nonetheless, passions make good servants but bad masters.

Infants need to realize that they (and their desires) are not the center of the universe. So Paul notes that while the Corinthian Christians were infants in Christ, even in their physical adulthood, Paul could not treat them like spiritual people (that is, like Christians), but he had to treat them like fleshly people.

As an aside, this is an interesting use of fleshly. Paul is writing this to a church he claims are saints who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus. But they haven’t grown up. They are stuck in infancy.

It is my contention that much of American Christianity is still on milk and need to be weaned so that they could be on solid food, but instead of being weaned, we simply pumping passion into people’s wills.

But weaning is not solely rebuke, although rebuke must happen. We have to offer paths of maturation. Paul doesn’t hesitate to rebuke, but he still offers them milk while telling them that they must be weaned. Central to our rebuke, therefore, and the developmental path of maturation that follows it, is that we have to stop serving our passions and must lead others into the deeper waters of affection.

Those Christians who are tossed by the waves of their passion in worship and faith are trying to fuel their Christian life from the same fountain fueling their lust, greed, and envy.

Passions are movements that begin in your body and often move against the integration of your person. Passions burn hot and they burn quick - they feel really, really powerful - but they do not end up lighting a life on fire. The deep and abiding movements of a life are ultimately oriented by affections and not passions.

Consider a handful of texts about how passions work:

Romans 6:12: “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions.”

Romans 7:5: “For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death.”

Colossians 3:5: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.”

2 Timothy 2:22: “So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart.”

James 4:1: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?”

Now, admittedly, we later developed more clear distinctions about these things using language that helped us to explain the difference between passions and affections. Many use the term “passion” in such a way that it could be either. But these texts help us see how the distinction we made between passions and affections can help us understand our lives. It also helps us see why we long to be faithful and to stop sinning, while still being tossed by the waves of our longings.

But as we saw in 1 Corinthians 3:1, there is a tendency to try to stay in infancy as a Christian. The things that used to wake us up in our youth - passions - felt stronger to us than affections, and so we seek to use resources that cannot carry us into maturity.

Because of this, when we find ourselves in the desert, when the Lord is showing us what is in our hearts (Deut. 8:2), instead of abiding in him, we imagine he is calling us to become passionate. Instead of turning to the Lord, we can easily imagine we are supposed to awaken passions in us. But serving passions is a very young approach to life. It does not provide what it promises, but leaves you tossed by the waves of your emotional life.

This is why so many give themselves passionate to worship who are also passionately captivated by their lusts. “Flee youthful passions,” Paul warns.

Affections are deeper and more abiding dispositions of the soul that are not always felt sensibly like emotions, but that govern and guide a life. This is why our tradition focused so much on religious affection.

Watch your passions. As you watch the World Cup pay attention to how you can go from never caring about a team to being devastated at their losing or ecstatic in victory. Be watchful of what passions seek to take you over to make you obey them (greed, lust, ambition, etc.).

For my paid subscribers, I want have a video below with some pastoral reflections on the role of passion in spiritual disciplines in particular. I want to consider the nature of spiritual practices and the passions of our life. I hope this will help provide a bit more practical guidance to what we are talking about here.

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I worked at Century Electronics when I was in college. It was owned and run by an absolute legend of a man named Ladi. If you grew up in the Northwest suburbs of Chicago in the 80s and 90s you knew his commercials. In one he was skiing, and he slalomed down a slope and stopped right in front of the camera and said, in his thick accent, “People ask me, ‘Ladi, how are you so cool?’ and I tell them, ‘Because I am Ladi, and you are not.’”

Amazing.

Anyway, Century Electronics was a store in the between times. It was started in 1976 and still rocked that vibe. There were two technicians working in the back full time (also legends) who could fix anything you brought them, from toasters to microwaves to high-end stereo equipment.

You went to Century Electronics because you wanted higher quality stereo equipment than you could get in larger stores, or because you wanted someone who could do something unique to your car stereo, or simply because you wanted to get something fixed.

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By the time I started working there the problem was that Best Buy had taken over the territory, and Bose audio had convinced the populous that you don’t want big stereo equipment, what you really want is something tiny (and that you don’t lose anything by making it tiny). This was also the era of Napster, where people were downloading garbage sounding MP3s off the internet for free and so quality was not the primary concern.

I’ll never forget how our lead salesmen, who was the kind of guy that brought home stereo manuals at the end of the day to memorize the specs, would come unglued when someone asked for a Bose product. Admittedly he had a great line: “Bose gets an A in marketing but a D in electronics. Let me show you something better.” Inevitably they walked out with a Bose product…or just walked out.

This is the same problem in publishing.

I don’t know the entire history here, but the publishing industry has been confronted with a populous that also decided that books are basically throw-away commodities. Books are published, often, with little to no expectation that they will exist in a year, and certainly no real hope that they will be read in a decade.

What I am confronted with is how do we write, especially something like spiritual formation, in an age of throw-away books?

I’m not suggesting that people are literally throwing-away their books, although I don’t doubt that is sometimes true. I am thinking about books that are, by design, more consumed than actually read; perhaps swallowed but never chewed.

There is movement against this, I am happy to say, from within the publishing industry itself. There is noticeable movement of creating books that last, and of making books not only affordable but beautiful. This is encouraging. But this is not my main point.

There are counter examples, certainly. Willard, for one, is hardly a 101 read. And yet, for all of the people I talk to who own Divine Conspiracy, I rarely meet anyone who has read past chapter 3.

This is on my mind lately because of the writing I feel called to and the writing I’ve been doing. As you know, John Coe and I set out to write a “101 book” on spiritual formation that we published as Where Prayer Becomes Real. Our view of formation is an integrated view, and it has everything to do with drawing near to God to abide in Jesus, and so we didn’t want to merely talk about spiritual formation, we wanted to shepherd people to their Lord.

But the sequel, When God Seems Distant was probably the hardest book I have ever written. We wanted to build on the first book to walk alongside folks who have lived long enough as Christians to really begin to struggle. We want to bring scripture and the Christian tradition to the question of why God seems distant, but also answer questions about why certain seasons are filled with joy while others feel like God has abandoned us.

But this requires slow, patient attention to the truth of your life. This is hard work. This is not quick.

More than anything else I’ve written, I poured over the edits. I deleted two chapters and rewrote one of them after our editor sent back the first round of edits. Editing is where my mind turns most fully to loving my neighbor as myself, especially for a project aimed not only to inform but to shepherd.

This is also on my mind these days because of an old letter I found from Eugene Peterson. Eugene and I used to write back and forth about these sorts of things and he was lamenting along these lines in a letter that I had misplaced. When my wife found it recently I decided to just sit with it and once again began to consider my own worries about what a throwaway culture does when it merges with Christian consumerism.

In these times I am reminded that my calling is not to write books that sell but to write to an audience I believe the Lord has called me to write to. It is not my job to convince masses of anything, but to find a coalition of the willing who long for something more and are willing to wrestle deeply with their Lord.

But I am also reminded that there is not one spiritual classic I can think of that is an easy read. In fact, most books that the church tells us to read require much of us. We seem to intuit the fact that meaning will be tied to wrestling.

While I don’t expect our book will be considered a spiritual classic, I do hope that we find folks willing to wrestle honestly with their Lord. We hope we can partake in a new movement beyond throw away books, creating books we pour over, meditate our way through, and struggle with.

All of this has led me to wonder, how might this change how we think of books or “rate” what we read? Instead of rating a book based on how we feel after we read it, what if our system of judgment was based on whether or not a book called us to something harder and something more?

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For my paid subscribers, I want to reflect on this post a bit and what I’ve been wrestling with in my own reading habits. My invitation to you is to reflect on your own calling with me, consider what the Lord might have for you in this particular season.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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