Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become Like Him, Do As He Did > Status Update

JMC: "Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.

Does this sound a bit masochistic to your modern ears? I imagine, yes. But in context, Benedict was essentially saying, “Don’t waste your life on triviality. Remember what matters. Life is fleeting and precious. Don’t squander it. Keep your death before your eyes. Hold eternity in your heart.” Benedict was urging the monks to be joyfully present to the miracle of daily life."

Me: "Memento mori" is a healthy practice for Christians, however you choose to do it. Good advice here. It focuses you on the importance of how you spend your ever-dwindling time, as JMC is saying here.

JMC: "Western culture is arguably built around the denial of death through the coping mechanism of distraction."

Me: Yes and yes, amen.

JMC: "Who we are—the good, bad, and ugly—is all a result of spiritual formation. I occasionally hear people say they are “getting into spiritual formation,” by which they usually mean they are beginning to practice spiritual disciplines, read books, and possibly doing the “work” in therapy. All very good. But to clarify, you’ve been being spiritually formed since before you came out of your mother’s womb. All of us have."

Me: 100% We are always in the process of being spiritually formed. So, intentionally surround yourself with those you wish to form you (for my own family, that meant literally moving to a different city).

JMC: "Put another way, you’re becoming a person."

Me: I was about to get up in arms here, but JMC gave my favorite footnote so far where he, albeit rather obliquely, denounces both abortion and euthanasia by disavowing personhood theory. I'm still not completely comfortable with the sentence, but I will put my torch and pitchfork away (for now).

JMC: *Utilizes C.S. Lewis's trajectory theory of heaven and hell as popularized in his "The Great Divorce."

Me: I'm not a fan of the Trajectory Theory simply because it's not how the Bible presents the reality of heaven and hell. People do not wander into either. The wicked are thrown into the Lake of Fire, and the righteous have the door opened for them to the feast.

JMC: "Formation into the image of Jesus is a long, slow process, not a onetime event. There’s no lightning bolt from heaven. Spiritual growth is similar to bodily growth—very gradual. It takes place over a lifetime at an incremental, at times imperceptible rate. Yes, we experience periods of dramatic change like birth or a teenage growth spurt, but those key inflection points are the exceptions, not the rule."

Me: 100% agreed! This is why good, biblical Lord's Day service liturgies that don't change much from week to week are so key. We are slowly formed by them as we learn them, internalize them, and they become part of us.

JMC: "Formation into the image of Jesus isn’t something we do as much as it’s something that is done to us, by God himself, as we yield to his work of transforming grace. Our job is mostly to make ourselves available."

"This doesn’t mean we’re off the hook—“Let go and let God.” No, we have a responsibility to cooperate with God’s transforming grace."

Me: Good balanced teaching here backed by (Philippians 2:12-13).

JMC: "Formation isn’t a Christianized version of project self; it’s a process of salvation. Of being saved by Jesus."

Me: Exactly. We are saved and are being saved and we will be saved

JMC: "It would be much harder for God to hate us than to love us, because love is who God is inside his deepest self."

Me: "For You are not a God who delights in wickedness; evil may not dwell with You. The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes; You hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies; Yahweh abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man" (Ps 5:4-6).

The opposite of love is not hate. It's indifference. God hates evil and evildoers because He loves righteousness and the just. He will reward the righteous and take vengeance on His adversaries.

I do want to stop to appreciate this section that is too long to quote though. JMC finds wonderful application in the doctrine of the Trinity here (mirroring some of what I wrote in an earlier update). Too many theologians and pastors don't have any idea what to do with the Trinity when/if they teach it except throw up their hands about how mysterious it all is, but we have to believe it anyway. JMC has obviously both read and been shaped by Augustine, and that is encouraging.

JMC: ""For the sake of other." Without this crucial element, formation will inevitably devolve into a private, therapeutic self-help spirituality that is, honestly, just a Christianized version of radical individualism, not a crucible to burn our souls clean and forge us into people of love like Jesus."

Yes, there is a journey inward and even a self-discovery that are key to Christian spirituality, but it’s followed by a journey outward into love—into action in the world. The goal is to be formed by Jesus, at every level of our beings, into those who are pervaded by love."

Me: JMC giveth with the one hand and JMC taketh away with the other. I could not agree more with the first paragraph (could have written it myself, honestly), and I cringed hard at the first sentence of the second. The only journey inward we attempt should convince us how desperately rebellious and hopelessly sinful we are, and how help must come from outside ourselves. We must be shaped from the outward in.

JMC: "This is the gospel: God has drawn near to us in Jesus—us, we who are sinful, broken, wounded, mortal, dying, and incapable of selfsaving, with many of us completely uninterested in God or even enemies of God—to draw us into his inner life, to heal us by immersing us within the fold of his Trinitarian love, and then to send us out into the world as agents of his love."

Me: This is so close to receiving my full endorsement, but comes up a bit short in the end. It's not wrong per se, but the "This is the gospel" part necessitates explicit mention of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Paul's shorthand of the Gospel needs to be our starting point (1 Cor 15). God doesn't "immerse us in the fold of His Trinitarian love" until we are both washed (purified from our sins) and declared righteous by being united to Christ sharing in His justification.

JMC: "“Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it,” as Jesus said. Put another way, there are no accidental saints."

Me: This verse is talking about salvation from the coming judgment on Jerusalem in AD 70. Few Jews would find the Way to life (allegiance to their promised Messiah) and escape (from Jerusalem to Pella). By contrast, "many" would come from the east and the west to recline at the Lord's Table, while most of the Jews of Jesus's day would be thrown out. Ultimately, there are myriads upon myriads of saints depicted from every tribe, tongue, and nation, so the "few" can't be the number of all the redeemed from all history.

That being said, I do agree that there are no accidental saints. I just want the verse used to match the teaching is all.

JMC: "Tragically, many people genuinely want to apprentice under Jesus, but they don’t know how. Spiritual formation in the North American church is often truncated to this three-part formula:
1. Go to church.
2. Read your Bible and pray.
3. Give.
I’m all for these three practices (all three are in my Rule of Life). But in my experience, many Christians get thirty years down the road with this as their template for discipleship and don’t feel all that different; they just feel older."

Me: I don't know how else to say this: If you are in a church that is not actively challenging you to grow, where the whole counsel of God is not being preached (be honest here, are there things in Scripture that your pastor will not preach on? Modesty? Submission? Slavery? Homosexuality? Sins especially unique to women like bitterness and gossip? Children's discipline and education? Eschatology? Hell? The murder of the unborn? etc.), where church discipline is not being practiced, where parishioners are not tithing and not being held to account for it, etc. Then it may be time to find yourself a faithful church that practices all of these things, all things the Church has historically done, so that you may grow.

JMC: Three Losing Strategies for Spiritual Growth:
1.) Willpower
2.) More Bible Study
3.) The ZAP From Heaven

Me: JMC defines Bible Study as intellectually gathering more spiritual information, and as that is what he means, I agree with him. We should read our Bibles asking the question, "How does the Lord want me to obey Him today?" and not, "What can I learn?" All theology should be practical in the end.

JMC: "But at its worst, [waiting around to be spiritually zapped] is laziness, pure and simple, because it’s far easier to go to church once a week chasing a spiritual high and angle for a download from heaven than to do the daily, unglamorous work of discipleship."

Me: Sometimes he sounds like I do. Many large evangelical churches are focused on giving their attendees this "spiritual high." It's the modern sacrament to replace the Sacraments.

JMC: "This approach can be just another search for a quick fix, a shortcut, what the psychologist John Welwood called “spiritual bypassing”—trying to skip over our pain and just have Jesus “fix” us. Cue the rise of conference junkies chasing the next spiritual high or people who show up at church every time the doors are open but refuse to go to therapy."

Me: But then JMC quotes psychologists and recommends therapy, and I sigh deeply in my soul. Both were created to be secular encroachments on responsibilities that have been given to the Church, especially the pastors (those placed over you by God who will have to give an account for your soul someday, something your psychologist and therapist won't have to do). These are just attempts to offload the responsibility that comes with the spiritual hierarchical authority granted to them, but there is going to be for a very rude awakening for them come judgment day.

JMC: Problem #1: Sin

"I recognize that a growing number of people have an emotional allergy to the word sin, but it is just the word we use to name the felt experience of the human condition that pretty much all luminary thinkers agree on. Whether ancient, modern, Eastern, Western, religious, or secular, they all harmonize on this specific point: Something is deeply off in the human heart. It’s not just that we do terrible things; it’s worse—we often want to do terrible things. And even when we don’t want to do terrible things, we still get pulled into doing them, like a drug addict caught in a self-defeating loop."

Me: Good start. I appreciate that he has correctly identified the main issue. Many popular theologians share in the emotional allergy to naming the condition of the human heart. Until we correctly identify the disease, all the supposed cures we implement will only make the sickness worse. One bit of nuance, sin is always first and foremost against God. It is open rebellion.

JMC: "The New Testament writers speak of sin as not just an action, but also a condition—of being in sin."

Me: Covenant theology time! This rebellious nature is a result of humanity being "in Adam," who as the covenant head of mankind sided with the Serpent against his Maker and plunged all of mankind into his curse. The cure then, is to be "in Christ" (the Second and Last Adam), who came and lived a life of perfect obedience and then "bore our sins in His body on the tree," dying the death we deserved, so that we may "in Him" die to sin and live to righteousness. His justification is our justification, His life is our life through this union.

JMC: Three Dimensions of Sin "Sin is done by us, sin is done to us, sin is done around us."

Me: Yes. 100% This is a very important point to keep in mind when practicing biblical counseling. "Hurt people hurt people," as the saying goes.

JMC: "The doctrine of original sin means…that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrongdoing and wrong thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf grows wider and wider."

Me: That is not the historic doctrine of original sin. The "original sin" was Adam's rebellion in the garden, and as head of mankind his covenant guilt/curse for the trangressive act is imputed to all of his children such that we are all naturally born already declared guilty "in Adam" with a death sentence hanging over our heads.

Augustine, who first developed the doctrine, took it in a more hereditary direction. Adam was created with "original righteousness" (a natural inclination to law-keeping), but lost it at the fall so that all of his posterity is born with "original sin" (a defiled inclination to lawlessness). Either way, it's not something we either do or add to, it's something irreversibly done by our first father.

JMC: "Many people don’t realize there are all sorts of other paradigms (called “atonement theories”) to understand sin in the library of Scripture:
Guilt/Innocence
Honor/Shame
Power/Fear
Clean/Defiled
Belong/Lost
Shalom/Chaos
Hope/Despair

All of these are true, and none of them contradict or compete for primacy. The problem is not that Westerners view sin through the lens of guilt/innocence, but that they often view it solely from this one angle and, in doing so, miss the full picture. Until we come to see sin as far more than the breaking of judicial laws, we will likely remain stuck in whole-life dysfunction."

Me: Good teaching here on properly balancing views.

JMC: "Few people realize that the Greek word translated “saved” in the New Testament is sōzō—a word that is often translated “healed.” So, in the Gospels, when you read that Jesus “saved” someone and then read that he “healed” someone, you’re often reading the exact same word. Jesus intentionally blurred the line between salvation and healing. Once, after healing a woman of a twelve-year chronic disease, Jesus said, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.” Some translations say “healed you,” and others say “saved you.” Why? Because salvation is a kind of healing."

Me: Exactly. Jesus came to bring in the New Heavens and the New Earth (the Regeneration), save the whole cosmos, and free it from the curse. His healings were a foretaste of the renewing power He would unleash on the world through His resurrection, the very reversal of death which will one day be completely undone.

JMC: "And the beginning of our healing salvation is what Christians call “confession.” Confession is a core practice of the Way, and contrary to what many think, it’s not at all about beating yourself up in public. It’s about courageously naming your woundedness and wickedness in the presence of loving community as you journey together toward wholeness. It’s about not only the confession of sin but also the confession of what is true—who you are, who Christ is, and who you truly are in Christ. It’s about coming out of hiding into acceptance, leaving behind all shame."

Me: Every week during the portion of Lord's Day service called "Purification," our whole congregation confesses our sins corporately on our knees in a posture of humility, and every week Christ, through the mouth of our pastor, declares over us, "Brothers and sisters in covenant with the Lord Jesus Christ: God Himself promises you the forgiveness of the Father, the victory of the Son, and the glory and empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Your sins are absolved. Believe this and rejoice!" This repeated liturgy teaches us by rote (in the best sense of the word!) how we are to deal with our sins both individually and corporately.

JMC: "We are formed by three basic things:
1.) The stories we believe
2.) Our habits
3.) Our relationships"

Me: Yes and amen to all of this. I have spent the last 10 years adamently teaching the first point, I moved my family to Washington when I began to understand the third, and I have just begun to understand the importance of the second. This is why intentional historic liturgy in the church service is so important, and why we must carefully consider our own habits day-to-day, purposefully implementing good ones (like family worship each night). We are shaped by what we consistently do.

JMC: "Each moment of each day is like a liturgy, a sacred ritual designed to shape our hearts."

Me: I have never heard a better argument for NEVER SENDING YOUR KIDS TO PUBLIC SCHOOL!

Yeah, if you send 100 kids onto the interstate to play, some of them are going to make it out alive. Perhaps you are a survivor yourself (I know I am!), but that doesn't make it a good idea. You can do nothing in the time you have with them to erase the thousands upon thousands of hours of intentional, secular indoctrination they will receive from the godless paideia/liturgy they will endure there.

JMC: As Tish Harrison Warren wrote in her book 'Liturgy of the Ordinary'..."

Me: Warren, a woman, is a (so-called) Anglican priest. Why would I readily place myself under the teaching of someone in direct disobedience to clear Scriptural commands? Paul - "I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man."

JMC: "In the biographer Matthew’s telling of the Jesus story, we find the single most important collection of Jesus’ teachings all grouped into one place. We call it “the Sermon on the Mount,” and it is a treasure beyond value. Tragically, there is a long standing tradition in the church of finding creative ways to explain it away. Many theologians have argued that it’s unrealistic to live this way, that it simply cannot be done."

Me: Amen again! This is especially true when we realize that Matthew is presenting Jesus as the new and better Israel. The Sermon on the Mount (coming as it does after Jesus's baptism and a 40 day wilderness journey) corresponds to the giving of the Law to Israel in Exodus (coming as it did on a mountain after the Red Sea baptism and a 40 day wilderness journey). Jesus is intentionally building on that same Law (Mat 5:17-20).

JMC: "Theory about how people change:
1.) Teaching
2.) Practices
3.) Community
4.) The Holy Spirit
5.) Over time
6.) Through suffering"

"Serious Christians often argue about the best form of community: Is it a megachurch or a house church? Or we debate the finer points of church tradition: liturgical versus Pentecostal versus sermon-centric, etc. But the older I get, the less concerned I am with form and tradition; they each have pros and cons. The key is to be aware of them, and do the best you can."

Me: A very good section overall. I highlighted the one paragraph above as the only part I really disagreed with. It absolutely matters how you approach the Lord on the Lord's Day. The church in America is casually low-churching itself to spiritual death and cultural irrelevance.

Concluding thoughts so far: A far more agreeable chapter this time around. I would still focus more on the primacy of the Church for becoming like Jesus (Eph 4:1-16). Just as we "Be with Jesus" primarily by being with His Body, so too we "Become like Him" predominantly as we grow up together as members of His Body.

For more on how calamitous Personhood Theory has been for Western culture in general and the church in particular, see "You Who?: Why You Matter and How to Deal With It" by Rachel Jankovic.