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Spiritual Formation
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This past week, my wife and I bought a thousand-piece puzzle and started putting it together. When you get a puzzle, the first thing you do is find those flat pieces—the easy ones—and construct a border. You need boundaries in which to put together your puzzle.
This particular puzzle was a painting of some old homes in Newport, Rhode Island. Little by little, piece by piece, we started putting it together. As we got toward the end, we started counting: did we have enough pieces? We found all the pieces except one. One missing piece.
Life is like a giant jigsaw puzzle, isn't it? In life you have all these events, people, challenges, disappointments, fears, and pain, and you're wondering how each piece fits into the big picture of your life. And sometimes you're wondering: what is that missing piece?
God's Word gives us a big clue to what the missing piece is in a lot of our lives. We're going to explore this over the next several Sundays.
Look at Galatians 4:18 and following. If you remember our study of Galatians, that letter is about a church who had forgotten what brought them hope, what brought them strength, what had brought them into a loved relationship with God. That was grace.
Paul was angry. He said, essentially, "You foolish Galatians—you started your relationship with God by grace, and now you're going to finish it by your own effort." Then he writes in verse 19:
"My little children, I am going through labor pains again until Christ is formed in you."
I give Paul a hearty amen on this one. As a fellow pastor, I labor—we labor—until Christ is formed in you: until He grows in you, in your marriage, in your family, in your friendships, in your work relationships. That is what we labor for: Christ continually transforming and changing your life.
The missing piece for many of us—it certainly was for me for a while—is spiritual formation.
For the first 14 years of my Christian life, I didn't know anything about spiritual formation. Then someone gave me a book called Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster, who writes from a Quaker background about certain disciplines and practices needed to grow deeper in Christ.
A disciple of Foster's, Dallas Willard, wrote The Spirit of the Disciplines, expanding on those ideas. Later, Robert Mulholland wrote Invitation to a Journey, exploring spiritual formation further.
So what is it? Spiritual formation describes the process of how we become more like Christ. It's a process—something or someone is forming and shaping you. Maybe that sounds a little strange to you, but understand: you are being formed by something—by the music you listen to, the media you consume, who you follow. You're being shaped by something.
If you've decided to follow Christ, He calls you to a life of continual spiritual formation. But to walk in that, we have to develop certain habits, practices, and rhythms that become a means by which God's grace can flow into us and change us into the likeness of Christ.
Our culture is fascinated with habits—Atomic Habits, The Power of Habit, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We know instinctively that consistent practice produces real results. For thousands of years, Christ-followers have developed practices and disciplines that position them to grow deeper and experience more life change in their relationship with God.
As we talk about spiritual formation over these next weeks, I'll mention authors from different Christian traditions. That doesn't mean I endorse everything they say—when you're reading, it's like eating fish: spit out the bones, eat the meat.
Here are some non-negotiable truths about spiritual formation:
The Bible—Genesis to Revelation, Old and New Testament—is a hymn book about Him. Genesis is about Christ. Psalms is about Christ. Matthew is about Christ. Revelation is about Christ. The whole Bible leads us into a relationship with Christ. So all spiritual formation is Christ formation.
This isn't a ladder we climb to earn God's favor. These practices are a means of grace—a conduit through which God's grace in Christ works in your life. As Dallas Willard said:
"Grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning."
Just because we're saved by grace, sanctified by grace, and made more like Christ by grace doesn't mean we don't strive—but we're not striving to earn it.
This is not an individualistic, self-help program. Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. In Philippians 2, Christ emptied Himself to serve others, becoming obedient even to death on a cross. Spiritual formation gets us outside our selfishness and pride, helping us stop looking down and start looking up and out.
Spiritual formation teaches us to become more intentional in our relationship with God. Growth doesn't happen passively—you can't just "let go and let God" and put your spiritual life on cruise control. It's never worked that way. God gives us many tools, many means, by which His grace can work in our lives to transform us.
1 Timothy 4:8 says:
"For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for this present life and the life to come."
Paul wrote this in the shadow of the great Greco-Roman philosophers—Aristotle, Plato, Zeno the Stoic—who had gymnasiums where people exercised and discussed philosophy. Paul is essentially saying: working out is great, but it has only temporary value. Spiritual workouts—spiritual disciplines, spiritual formation—are good for this life and the life to come. The return on investment is far greater.
We can't remain in the shallow end of the pool our entire lives. God calls us into the deep end, and through spiritual formation, He does a deep work in your heart.
Don't let misconceptions keep you out of this space. We often reason, "I have so much going on, I'm too busy," or "I've got too many problems—I need to get things together first." Don't do that. God will use whatever you're going through as a classroom of transformation.
The first book of the Bible is Genesis, the last is Revelation, and right in the middle is Psalms—all about connecting with God in the messy middle of life. God meets us in that complicated middle, where we're trying to piece together a puzzle we can't figure out. Take your fear, your anger, your need for approval, your desire for control, your pride, your wounds, your grief into His presence and say, "God, may this messiness be a classroom, a gymnasium, where You do a deeper work in my life."
We live in such a fragmented, distracted time. If we're going to love God and love others well, we have to be fully present—and spiritual formation helps us do that.
We often live split lives—mind and body, head and heart disconnected. Spiritual formation helps us live with a greater sense of unity within ourselves and in how we view the world.
Spiritual formation is not about acquiring more information but experiencing more transformation. Someone once told me, "One step of obedience is worth a lifetime of knowledge." One moment of transformation in the presence of God is worth a lifetime of knowledge.
Jesus urges us in John 15 to abide in Him—He is the vine, we are the branches, and apart from Him we can do nothing. Paul invites us to be transformed in Romans 12:2 by the renewing of our minds.
The past several weeks I've enjoyed watching the World Cup—not really a soccer guy, but I watched more soccer in two weeks than in my entire life. What I've enjoyed most isn't what happened on the field, but off it.
Europeans who traveled to the U.S. for the tournament had grown up hearing only negative news about America—that Americans hate each other, that the country is divided and dangerous. But experiencing it firsthand blew their minds: the portion sizes at restaurants, the friendliness of strangers, people from every background getting along. Their preconceptions crumbled once they experienced it themselves.<br><br>If I had to defend them, I'd say: like a lot of us, they had opinions about America but had never actually been there.<br><br>I believe the same is true about God and spiritual formation. Until you've experienced God—until you've experienced His transforming grace and power firsthand—you don't really understand it. God is inviting us, over the next several weeks, to experience more of Him.
Did we find that final puzzle piece? Yes. No one stole it, no one was the hero—my wife Chrissy found it hiding on the surface of the rest of the puzzle. We put it in, and there it was: the finished picture—the sky, the puffy white clouds, the beautiful homes, the grass, the trees, the flowers, and the ocean all flowing together, complete.
Throughout our lives, we're trying to put together strange, confusing pieces of the puzzle. But in that process, we can turn over our lives to the One who sees the whole picture. God sees your life and mine as a beautiful, finished product—even while we're still in the messy middle—and He is putting all things together for His good and His glory.
He sees the big picture. As the old song says, He's got the whole world in His hands—and He's got you and me in His hands too.
