Saturday, August 20, 2005

The Centrality of Spiritual Formation Maybe it's a bandwagon, but still, I'm jumping on board. Perhaps the most vexing question we Christians have to face is why aren't Christians more like Christ? Why do most of us seem so totally incapable of replicating Jesus' vision, his virtue, his boldness, his wisdom about the human condition, his compassion, his love--his sheer power to live? The New Testament can be both inspiring and frustrating. We long to live lives with the characteristics of Jesus, seeking to love as Paul describes, to have the wisdom James says all we need do is ask for. But we look around and discover a disconnect...such lives can be hard to find. And such a life in me? How in the world...? I find Dallas Willard's Renovation of the Heart enormously helpful. Here's his opening salvo in the Prelude: "When we open ourselves to the writings of the New Testament, when we absorb our minds and hearts in one of the Gospels, for example, or in letters such as Ephesians or I Peter, the overwhelming impression that comes upon us is that we are looking into another world and another life." "It is a divine world and a divine life. It is life in the kingdom of the heavens. Yet it is a world and a life that ordinary people have entered and are entering even now. It is a world that seems open to us and beckons us to enter. We feel its call." Willard goes on to say point blank that many, if not most, Christians avoid the New Testament because they know they cannot truly find the life described there, and so they resign themselves to a kind of desperate clinging to a vague hope of something they feel mostly distant from. Then he goes on to say that such a life can be received, and that the way is orderly and certain if we but follow the path the New Testament describes. His is a bold proclamation: "The perceived distance and difficulty of entering fully into the divine world and its life is due entirely to our failure to understand that 'the way in' is the way of pervasive inner transformation and to our failure to take the small steps that quietly and certainly lead to it. "This is a hopeful, life-saving insight. For the individual it means that all of the hindrances to our putting off the old person and putting on the new one can be removed or mastered. And that will enable us to walk increasingly in the wholeness, holiness, and power of the kingdom of the heavens. No one need live in spiritual and personal defeat. A life of victory over sin and circumstance is accessible to all." ...good news, indeed... 10:21:29 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2005 Jeff Berryman .