The Practices that Do What Admiration Can't

For new readers: The Compass is a newsletter on spiritual formation, and "Gone Hiking" is one of its recurring series. Every Tuesday it explores the practices and ideas that help us find and navigate the way to a deeper life with God.

Monday I told you I am amazed by Jesus. This was not strategy; it’s just how I think. Full stop. While I know what this life has done for my salvation, there are plenty of times when I don’t know what to do with a life like his except stare.

But here’s the question that has to be answered after you stare: now what?

Admiration by itself doesn’t change anything. You and I can read a story about Jesus in the Gospels that takes our breath away, and be impatient with people twenty minutes later. Wonder and interior transformation just are not the same thing. Enough of the first doesn’t automatically produce the second. Assuming they are is a mistake almost all of us making without even noticing we’ve made it. Dallas Willard spent a good chunk of his career trying to get pastors and Christians feel the weight of this reality. At one point he just asked the question straight out: “Are we willing to undergo the transformation necessary to embody the character of Jesus?”

Not admire it or affirm it, but positive steps. But something different. Something more. Embody it. That’s a much harder thing to do, and potentially much more important, and it’s what I want to sit with today.

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Here's the thing about Willard: he didn't spend his career worrying about whether people were getting forgiven. He knew there were plenty of people worrying about that. He spent time worrying about what most of us weren’t wondering about, but should have: why too many forgiven people don’t seem to actually change after salvation. He wrote something that I think about a lot. He’d taken a hard look at what passes as discipleship in most churches, and he came back and told us what he had found:

There are numerous programs in local congregations and [denominations] that are frequently spoken of as discipleship programs... However, the emphasis all too often is on some point of behavior modification. This is helpful, but it is not adequate [for transformation]. It does not reach the root of the human problem. That root is the character of the inner life, where Jesus places the emphasis.1

Make sure you see what he isn’t saying. He isn’t knocking Bible studies, preaching, prayer groups, worship, forms of twelve step programs, etc. He flat out says they do good. His observation was much more specific and harder to ignore. He said where we tend to focus our time and resources is on behavior, not character. The branch instead of the root. We put energy into what people do, but we hardly ever get to what people actually are underneath the behavior. And that inner formation, he insisted, was what Jesus thought was discipleship, not an elective for the especially devout.

I want to slow things down here and be very careful, because what I say next may sound to some as if I’m chipping away at grace. I’m not.

Forgiveness is the miracle. It’s worth saying again: forgiveness is the miracle. The amazing claim of the gospel is that our decision to tell God our best life is lived without him is fully forgiven by God because of what Christ’s life, death, and resurrection did, not what we managed to do to turn our life around. That's not up for renegotiation in anything I’m about to say.

But a lot of us inherited a version of the gospel that treats forgiveness as the finish line instead of the starting gate. As if the moment of forgiveness was the whole transaction, and the rest of the Christian life is just behavior management on repeat. This is a theology of salvation that doesn’t reach far enough or do enough work. It celebrates forgiveness of sin. Rightly! But it never forces us to wonder about the question that salvation was intended to make possible: What happens to the forgiven person now?

The great apostle, Paul, says something that needs to be set here right next to Willard. He’s writing to a church full of forgiven, but still very unfinished people, and this is how he describes what’s happening to them.

We all... are being changed into his very image, from one degree of glory to the next, by Adonai the Spirit. (Complete Jewish Bible)

If you want it plainer, here it is:

The Lord’s Spirit makes us more and more like our glorious Lord. (Contemporary English Bible)

Don’t skip past how Paul pictures this. He is not saying our transformation was completed at the moment of conversion. He is saying conversion opened the door so that we could walk into deeper and deeper transformation.

Here is what is crazy: the church has always believed this. Until recently. We have known what we were told in Genesis: godliness was built into humans in the very beginning of everything. But sin bent and twisted our energy for God into energy for ourselves and our own agenda. But God was not put off by this. Relentlessly, through forgiveness and deep interior transformation he gave godliness back to us.

C. S. Lewis used Mere Christianity to nudge the church to remember what it had forgotten. The whole point of the church, he says, is to to make people “little Christs” He acknowledged this took both forgiveness of sin and deep interior transforamation. And if the church was not doing that, the whole thing was a waste of time.

So when Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth about being changed “into the Lord’s image,” he wasn’t describing something unnatural being forced onto them. Instead, it was a restoration. Which changes everything. God isn’t trying to put something alien onto us, or into us. He’s giving back to us what was in us from the very beginning.

Okay. So if deep interior transformation, the changing of our character into Christlikeness, here’s the practical question: what does the changing? This is where spiritual practices stop being extra-credit for the extra devout and start looking like something closer to necessary for all of us.

Here’s what I really like about Willard’s insight. It’s precise. It doesn’t confuse what we do with what God does. He says a spiritual disciple, such as prayer, silence, scripture reading, etc., is “an activity within our power that enables us to accomplish what we cannot do by direct effort." This is so important that I want to paraphrase it: A spiriutal practice is not a righteous deed. We don’t ern credit with God for going on a silent retreat. We’re not more forgiven because we kept a fast. What a practice does is more indirect. It doesn’t give you the virtue and it doesn’t transform you. What it does do is put you in a place where God can transform you. It creates a fertile spiritual environment where the virtue can take root.

Don’t overlook the power of indirection in this interior transformation. You can’t decide to become more patient in the same way you decide to change your socks. The decision made on Sunday to work hard at becoming more patient has a well-documented history of collapsing by Tuesday. But here is what you can do: you can decide to build a regular period of silence into your week. And over time, that practice of silence places the wounds that are driving your impatience somewhere where the grace of God can go to work. And the promise of God given us through Paul is that if you will do this, then God will do what only God can do: little by little the patience that marked the life of Jesus will begin to grow in us.

I’ll end with what I’ve been saying all along: this is not an innovation. This is not a new idea. This is not a foreign idea imported into Christianity. It is what has always been there but has gone missing in too many places that meet under the name of Jesus. It’s past time to recover and restore the thing God has given to renovate our souls so that, in the words of Paul, we are made “more and more like our glorious Lord.”