Grace Takes Practice

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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Everything is Spiritual

This is Part 1 in a multi-part blog series laying out a philosophy for spiritual formation.

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The subject of discipleship, or “spiritual formation,” is once again a hot topic – and it is foundational to the vision of our new faith community – so this week I’ll embark on a new series outlining our philosophy for spiritual training.

One of the difficulties inherent in spiritual formation is that spirit is invisible. How do we know if we are becoming spiritually strong or good? How do we know who requires more or less spiritual training? In the church we often talk about “spirit,” but don’t typically talk about what exactly it is, much less how to reliably train it for ourselves or others.

When Christians do talk about “spirit,” it’s typically in dualistic terms that betray the Greek/Hellenist roots of Western culture. That’s why we sometimes hear descriptions of our “spirit man” or our “spiritual body” which depict the human spirit as an ethereal facsimile of our physical bodies – floating around somewhere inside of us, ready to be liberated at death.

This is entirely foreign to the ancient Jewish tradition, which was a highly concrete and embodied worldview. Moreover, locating our spirit in some ethereal plane conceptually places it entirely out of reach, like some invisible organ we have no ability to affect. Fortunately, the bible is full of insight into what spirit is exactly.

Both the Hebrew word for spirit (ruah) and the Greek word (pneuma) essentially mean the same thing: invisible power. Throughout the bible these terms are used to describe the vital essence of a person, the power which animates (Gen 6:3, Jb 27:3, Ps 104:29). Surprisingly, the biblical concept for the “heart” of man (Heb, leb or lebab, and Gk kardia) is used in essentially the same way – only with more descriptive specificity. Consider Psalm 16:7-9:

I will praise the LORD, who counsels me;
even at night my heart instructs me.

⁸ I keep my eyes always on the LORD.
With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

⁹ Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,

Here – as with “spirit” – the “heart” of man is used to describe the vital power of a man, yet that power is now fleshed out in a variety of ways: namely, through the mind, the will, and the emotions of the psalmist (see bold). Sometimes we think of all these components as distinctive elements of the human soul, but this Psalm illustrates the holistic nature of mankind. Notice how the mind receives counsel from God (v7) and is depicted in parallel with the heart – indicating that the author is referring to one concept using two different terms. Notice too how the Psalmist’s act of will to “keep my eyes always on the Lord” has an emotional consequence, “I will not be shaken” (v8); these invisible dynamics also manifest physically, for the Psalmist sings, “my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices; my body also will rest secure” (v9). This is just one scriptural example of how the invisible essence of a person has a powerfully affect on the physical existence of a person.

That invisible essence is what we call our “spirit” or our “heart” – they are essentially the same thing – and according to passages like Psalm 16 they refer to our mind, our will, and our emotions. In fact, this is exactly what the ancient Jews traditionally regarded as the “heart” of man.

Our own everyday use of these terms supports this. What do we mean when we say someone has “a strong spirit?” Usually that they are a highly determined person, able to persevere through conflict. This is a function of the will. What do we mean when we say someone has “a good heart?” Generally, that they have good intentions toward people, especially the less fortunate. This is a function of their core beliefs and values. When we say someone has a “broken spirit” or a “wounded heart” we usually mean that some emotional trauma has debilitated their will to act in certain situations.

All of these are functions of what today we call the mind, which is the power-center of the human being - that central place of personal control which is the starting point for all our dreams, desires, and decisions. Thus, Dallas Willard defines spirit as “unbodily, personal power” (Willard 2002:34), meaning that although our spirit cannot be directly observed (unbodily), it can cause tremendous change (power). In this way our spirits can be indirectly observed by the external affects of our choices, namely, the specific ways in which we act, influence, or cause change in and around us.

Therefore, everything we do is spiritual. There is absolutely nothing in human life that does not in some way originate with our mind, our will, or our emotions. Our relationships, our moral choices, our creative expressions…everything. Even psychological pathologies – like phobias and social fears – are rooted deeply in the emotional traumas of our past, which influence our beliefs about what is good and right and true, which in turn governs our behavior in ways that generally seem automatic or unconscious. These are all spiritual realities because because we are indivisibly spiritual beings.

This is a critical bit of understanding for the task of spiritual formation because it places real life as it is actually lived squarely back into the realm of spiritual training and devotion. If everything is spiritual then nothing is outside the realm of our religious devotion. There is no more false-dichotomy between the sacred and the secular; all of life becomes a potential point of contact with God. This helps us reintegrate human life, pulling the fragments of modern compartmentalized living back into a comprehensive, holistic existence.

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