First Baptist Church, San Luis Obispo

What does ‘Spiritual Formation’ mean?

This term might be unfamiliar to you. And, to people who haven’t heard it, it evokes images of white-robed monks sitting in a drafty cell doing strange and probably uncomfortable amounts of prayer. Or fasting. And pretty smug about it, too.

Well, spiritual formation does include prayer and fasting—and sometimes it involves sitting alone. And there does happen to be a monastery in Big Sur which I highly recommend spending some time praying at, if nothing else because it’s beautiful there. And the monks are nice. And they’re not smug.

But the essence of spiritual formation isn’t the practices, the fasting, the sitting, the praying. Those are tools which one might employ to reach a goal. The goal of spiritual formation is the same that we have as a church: to love God, to love His church, and to love His world. Essentially, in spiritual formation we are aiming to change our heart—to learn to love the right things, and to love them well.

Another way we can describe spiritual formation is this: learning to act as Jesus would if He were in my place. (This is Dallas Willard’s definition.) But to act as Jesus would requires more than changing external behaviors. Jesus taught that our actions flow out of our heart: “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil.” (Luke 6:45) If we are to act rightly, we must treasure rightly: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Matthew 6:21)

Jesus knows what happens when we begin to treasure things (or power, status, approval, pleasure) more than we treasure Him. It’s not just that we’re wrong—and we are, for He is more valuable than anything else, and we have an obligation to delight in Him (Psalm 37:4)—it is that our wrong treasuring produces wrong action.

So, spiritual formation is, in the end, about learning to act how Jesus would by changing our heart to love Him most of all. And, in the process, we learn to love our neighbor as ourselves. The two go together, hand-in-glove (or, ring-in-ring, to use our church purpose).

Changing the heart comes from beholding Christ

That sounds very nice on paper, doesn’t it? But of course, it helps us not at all if we don’t know how to go about changing our hearts. And that, it turns out, is more than we can do alone.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? “I the Lord search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”
Jeremiah 17:9-10

Anyone who has tried to change their heart will understand why our three-ring purpose statement begins, “God is growing in us a love for Him, a love for His church and a love for His world.” Because changing our heart, ourselves, is an impossible task. It is using a broken tool to fix itself! We need help. Fortunately, this is just what God intends to do:

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
Ezekiel 36:26-27

The plan from the beginning was that, in Jesus Christ, God would forgive us from our sins—and change our hearts so that we could obey Him joyfully. (See Ephesians 2:1-10—and don’t leave out verse 10!) So how does this happen, practically?

The most important verse in the Bible about spiritual formation, I believe, is 2 Corinthians 3:18. Here Paul lays it out:

And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

Paul tells us precisely what it is that causes our hearts to change—”beholding the glory of the Lord.” This makes sense, if you think about it. If the point is to change what we treasure, then we need to learn to see God as worthwhile, amazing, desirable. Looking at the glory of God shows our other attachments and treasures to be thin, paltry substitutes for the Real Thing. 

OK—but where do we look? Fortunately, Paul tells us that too, a few verses later. In 2 Corinthians 4:6, he tells us that we see “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” By fixing our attention on Jesus—His character, His actions, His compassion, love, and willingness to take our punishment to save us—we see who God is more clearly than anywhere else. In Jesus alone do we discover that God is truly the one who “works for those who wait for Him.” (Isaiah 64:4) In Jesus we find that our God has compassion, mercy and forgiveness for sinners; in Christ alone we know that God is Love.

So, spiritual formation is all about knowing God through Jesus. It’s about seeing Him, and loving what we see. And all of this “comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit,” says Paul; it’s more than we can do alone, but it is what the Spirit rejoices to do in us.

Practicing paying attention to Jesus

That’s all well and good, but if you’re like me, fixing attention on Jesus is like pulling teeth. There are so many things that can distract us! And not just bad things—there are plenty of perfectly good things that fill the mind and push out any thought of Jesus. And, many times, when I try to “behold the glory of God,” I am not moved. The words of the Bible seem dry and void of meaning; my prayers feel stale and empty, unheard and hardly meant; worship is an outward show and far from my heart. So what to do?

Paul uses a different metaphor to help us here: training for a sport.

Train yourself for godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.
1 Timothy 4:7-8

If you were to decide to run a marathon, what would you do? Your first step would certainly not be to enter a race tomorrow and try to run the course. You would surely fail, and quite possibly die. Everyone knows that if you are going to undertake, with any seriousness, a physical task of such proportions, you must train. So you will find a coach, who will give you exercises. Training will begin modestly—perhaps one mile, rather than twenty-six—but your practice will shape you into the kind of person who is able to run a marathon.

This is no less true of our life with Christ. To behold Christ is difficult. We are not used to paying attention to anything seriously for any length of time, usually; and we easily distracted. So we practice, taking humble steps at first, but always remembering that the goal is to know Christ personally in such a way that we treasure Him.

This, then, is the purpose behind every Christian practice. Whether we read our Bibles, kneel for prayer, gather in community or confess our sins, our goal is the same as Paul’s: “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection.” (Philippians 3:10). No practice is holiness in and of itself. Reading your Bible is not impressive to God, any more than running one mile is going to satisfy the requirements of running a marathon. But in reading the Bible we turn our attention to God, and learn to love Him, just as the single mile lays the foundation for the whole race. It is love for God that counts, and it is in practicing that we attain it.

New vision renews the mind

When we see God for who He is, our view of everything else changes. Every experience, every possession, every love, shifts into place when we know Christ. He is like the sun at the center, whose gravity pulls the planets into their proper orbit. A proper view of God sheds a light that, slowly but surely, allows us to understand and respond rightly to any situation.

This is what Paul is talking about when he writes, “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2) Beholding God allows us to renew our mind—to rethink everything in light of Him—and then we are able to know and do His will in all the many circumstances we find ourselves in.

Putting it together

These three aspects of spiritual formation—training, beholding, renewing—work together to change our hearts and thus our actions. I like to use an analogy to describe this process:

Imagine that you own a cliff-edge property which looks east, and you wish you sit and watch the sunrise on the edge of the bluff. There is a bench there, but through years of neglect, brambles have overgrown it and made it useless. Your first task will be to clear the brambles, cut things away, prune back. Then you will be able to sit. Of course by sitting you don’t make the sun rise; but when it does, you’re in a position to see it. And when it does rise, and you behold its glory, the light the sun sheds illuminates everything, allowing you to see the whole world around you as it truly is.

The sun, of course, is the glory of God in the face of Christ. In order to behold him we have to prune, cut back, we must train. And then we have to sit and look, and wait for the Spirit to show us who He is. But when we do, we see everything else in light of His glory and are able to live in this world as it truly is, doing His will joyfully.

Practice makes possible—because God makes it possible

In the end, our course to practice this way comes from God’s strength, not ours. Paul assures us: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:12-13)

Do we “work?” Yes. But while we may prune the brambles and sit facing east, it is beyond us to cause the sun to shine. The glory goes to God, who Himself gives us the desire to change, the ability to practice seeking His face, and the joy of knowing Him.