This is Part 3 in a multi-part blog series laying out a philosophy for spiritual formation. You can read the earlier installments by clicking these links – Part 1: Everything is Spiritual, and Part 2: Everything is Worship.
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So far I’ve said that everything we do is spiritual, therefore everything we do is worship. When it comes to discipleship, or “spiritual formation,” that means every realm of existence is open to spirituality – and that spiritual training should involve a high expectation that we would become genuinely good people.
But many will object that doing so will lead to religious legalism.
Yet this is already the case! According to the data, the Western Church by-and-large already produces a kind of insincere religious legalism - it just happens to be a shallow form. But shallow religiosity is still religiosity. Setting a low bar of expectations has not saved us from the error of the Judaizers, it has only created a modern, secularized form of it. We’ve pressed the lessons of Luther and Calvin to the point of complete absurdity, making salvation nothing more than a matter of pure motives and approved doctrines. Now, instead of suffering under the blight of a works-based righteousness, we suffer under the blight of an information-based unrighteousness.
But genuine grace does not eliminate the expectation for righteousness – as the book of Galatians pointedly illustrates – it empowers a different kind of righteousness that is deeper – a righteousness that is from God, and surpasses that of the scribes and pharisees – a genuine Godly righteousness at the deep level of the heart which produces people who are conspicuously kind, merciful, and loving. This is the kind of righteousness that Jesus and Paul teach.
In fact, we’ve forgotten that “salvation” was never an answer to the question, “How do we escape hell after we die?” but rather to the question, “How can we escape the hell we currently live in?” From its earliest usage the word we translate as “salvation” was used to describe freedom from sickness (Is 38:20), troubles (Je 30:7), and enemies (Ps 44:7). By the time Jesus was born salvation was understood to mean freedom from the enemies of God who occupied Israel. But no single story in the bible captures the essence of “salvation” more than the Hebrews’ “exodus” from Egypt. Salvation literally means “deliverance,” and just as the ancient Hebrews were delivered from slavery, so the salvation that Jesus Christ inaugurated is deliverance, here and now, for those who are enslaved to sin, sickness, exploitation, and despair.
But apprehending that deliverance requires obedience to Christ’s teachings, and that obedience requires significant effort. The opportunity to do so and the ability to do so certainly are a freely given gift of grace – that is, completely unmerited – but the obligation, the responsibility, and the choice to to obey lie squarely with us. Consequently, failure to learn obedience makes us worthless, foolish, and wicked (in that order…Matt 5:13; Matt 7:26; Matt 25:26-30).
Therefore, we must not be afraid to take Jesus and his teachings about how to live life seriously (Matt 5-7). We must strive to, “[teach] them to obey everything I have commanded” (Matt 28:20). This requires the willingness to expect genuine character change in God’s people through the open availability of a grace-enabled intimacy with God. After all, that is exactly what Jesus did with his own disciples; he immersed them in his ongoing presence, taught them a different way to live, and set them loose to practice it.
Practicing is the key we often miss.
I believe that as a wisdom tradition the Christian life is best understood as an exercise we practice – that is, learning by trial and error. One metaphor in scripture for helping us with this – while also avoiding the market-driven church model – is Paul’s frequent use of athletic training to illustrate the Christian life. Paul wrote,
“Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.” (1 Cor. 9:24-27).
Paul utilizes this kind of metaphor several times to illustrate the importance of training, or self-control (1 Tim 4:7-8; 2 Tim 2:4-5). Even the phrase “strict training” is translated from the greek word gumnazo, which is the root for our modern word “gymnasium.” Reflecting on this metaphor is an excellent way to resolve the tension between grace and work.
Consider the way we use these words in reference to physical training: Even though athletes or dancers practice constantly and work very hard in order to become excellent in their filed, we frequently describe them as having “grace” or possessing a “gift.” Yet we never accuse these terms of being in contradiction with one another. We seem to inherently understand that even though an athlete might be “gifted” through no merit of their own, they still must work diligently to cultivate and refine their gift.
Because this metaphor is prominently used in the New Testament, and because spiritual devotion is an inherently bodily exercise (as we have already seen), I’m convinced that the principles of spiritual training are best explored alongside the principles of physical training so that in an age prejudiced by dualism we might recover an effective, incarnational approach to Christian life and discipleship.
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