Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the ...

Transcript - SF507 Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit

© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 07 of 07SF507

Holy Spirit, Prophetic Spirit, and Missional Spiritual Formation Part II: The Practice

Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit

This name of this lecture is Holy Spirit, Prophetic Spirit, and Missional Spiritual Formation. It is part two—the practice of this element of spiritual formation. We have been discussing the theology and practice of spiritual formation according to the three concentric circles that we have seen through these lectures. In terms of practice, we have focused our attention on this as alternating with the theology of spiritual formations. So we have gone back and forth between theology and practice as we have gone. This is the last one on practice on this prophetic side of spiritual formation.

Previously, in focusing on practice, in lecture two we talked about the work of the Holy Spirit in the human spirit through spiritual reading. The practice of that element—lectio divina—this focuses on the individual dimension of spiritual formation. The Holy Spirit’s spiritual formation works in each one of us. We are called to be transformed, and this is a part of that whole thing, the individual transformation. All of us are called to this—every one of us who knows Jesus. If we do not engage in this, basically what happens is we become consumer Christians, and at the most that’s what we become. We consume what is offered to us. We become spectators rather than those who engage in it. In some cases, perhaps people that just consume Christianity are not really Christians at all. They have never really understood Christ, because if you understand Christ, He has an affect on you in a way that is transforming.

So Dallas Willard has written this new book, The Great Omission. In Matthew 28:19, “having gone therefore to make disciples of all the nations.” Sometimes the gospel is presented as if there is nothing beyond just salvation from going to hell so that we go to heaven rather than hell. But the fact of the matter is what Jesus has commissioned us to do is to make disciples, people who are followers who are apprentices of Jesus Christ. That’s the commission. So he talks about how that has been omitted

Richard E. Averbeck, Ph.D.

Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Transcript - SF507 Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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sometimes from the gospel. It’s a great omission. So this is a real concern that we have that are Christianity be the real thing. That’s what spiritual formation is really all about.

Now the work of the Holy Spirit in making us into a redemptive community is the second part of this. He does that in making us into a temple of the Holy Spirit—a people that actually practices the presence of God through worship and prayer. That’s in lecture five when we go into the practice of that element of spiritual formation through worship and prayer especially. This focuses on the relational dimension of spiritual formation. The Holy Spirit spiritual formation work among us as He continues to work in us individually. We are called to be a transformational community. So we are called to transformation but we are called to be a transformational community; not just individuals.

Now I could have talked in that unit about things like spiritual friendship. I did talk in the previous lecture in talking about the basic principles, about how we really need to think in terms of: we know we are disciples of Christ, and the world knows that we are disciples of Christ when we love one another deeply. The world sees that. It’s the badge of the Christian that we love one another. We could have talked about that in terms of spiritual friendship and love. And we could have talked about spiritual direction as part of that as well—how you engage in helping to direct someone in their life so they go deeper with Christ along with you.

What I am going to do however is turn to the foundations of those things—spiritual friendship, spiritual direction—in this lecture, where we are going on to the third, the outer, circle. I’m going to talk about the manner of life and ministry that lends itself to really being a spiritual friend, a spiritual director. As you become more mature, people can follow you through and go where you have gone before. This is the kind of thing that we are talking about here. This is the work of the Holy Spirit in making us prophetic—both in the church and in the world—[and in making us] disciples of Jesus that stand up and step out and speak up as a prophetic voice—individually and together as a community of faith as well. This focuses on the missional dimension of spiritual formation [and] the Holy Spirit’s spiritual formation work through us as He continues to work in us individually and among us relationally. So this is a big part of what spiritual formation is about according to the Holy Spirit’s work among us. We are called to be missional, transformational communities of faith.



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So all three are important to this, and what we are focusing on here is the missional side of spiritual formation. But it brings everything else with it. That’s the nature of how this works. Remember, these are concentric circles, and they reverberate upon each other. You can’t really do one without doing the others as well. Each one impacts the others. So we are building by accretion here as we go along in discussing spiritual formation.

The other is a caution that I want to raise here at this point in this final lecture in this series. The caution is that one does not just teach spiritual formation. As you teach spiritual formation, if you really teach it, if you really are engaged in this, you are actually engaging in doing spiritual formation with people; not just teaching it to them. You cannot just “can” this as information and have the affect of what you’re teaching actually be caught and captured in the life of people. You work it into your life as you work together on it mutually. So spiritual formation is something that you don’t just teach; you actually do it with people.

Another part of that is, and in connection with that, is that we need to avoid doing spiritual formation in a way that actually undoes it. Just giving the information is not good enough. Even if it is biblical information, it is not good enough. You can know a lot about the Bible, and you can learn even more without actually being touched and transformed by that knowledge. Transformation happens as the Holy Spirit wind of God drives and guides people forward who have their sails up to catch that wind—the image that we introduced earlier in these lectures.

One of the main things I am going to focus on now in this lecture, as part of seeking to do it with you, is I’m going to dwell on the importance of story and journey as a big element of spiritual formation. We all have a story. I have one. You have one. By walking through this with you, I hope to be doing spiritual formation with you, even during this lecture, and engaging you in the very nature of what it means to have a story that ties into God’s story. So what we are talking about here then to begin with is history, but history as His—God’s—story. This applies to all of history. All of history is really God’s story, and it also applies to each of our own personal histories, or our own personal stories.

First, the Bible is an authoritative canon that tells a story. So it is authoritative, but it is an authoritative story. It tells a story, and not just any old story. It’s a true story, and, most important of all, it’s a story that we are all part of whether we know it or not



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and whether we like it or not—all people. This is true whether a person knows the Lord or not.

This is what providence and sovereignty is all about. Nobody is outside of God’s sovereignty [second]. Some people enjoy the fact God has His hands over them; other ones would rebel against it. The fact of the matter is, though, nobody escapes this, so we are all part of this story whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not. We have all joined the story in progress, along the way, so to speak. The biblical story extends from creation to Christ and from there all the way through church history up to us now. The Bible looks forward, beyond itself, to all the effects of the mission that was engaged through Jesus. We have just joined it in His generation, so we too are part of the ongoing story that is His story. And so we need to understand that there’s this link, this fusion, between God’s story and our story. We fit into it whether we know it or not and whether we like it or not.

Third, it is the script for the lives of people who know the Lord, both in terms of what we face in life and how we would best face it. It is a script. There is a scriptive way of understanding this for both the individual and the community of faith. History is about individuals, but it’s also about communities. It’s about whole nations. It’s about all that’s happening in all of humanity, but it’s a scriptive story. It’s what we follow as those who know the Lord, and the better we follow it, in terms of understanding what we face in life and how we would best face what we face in life, that is how well we actually follow the script that God has given us.

Now we can play on this word “script,” because when we talk about Scripture, it is both descriptive of what happened in the past and also prescriptive for how we should live now. As a script, Scripture both locates us descriptively and directs us prescriptively. This is a way of understanding what this is as a written text. It tells the story about how things really are and always have been since the foundation of the world and where this whole thing is going as well—where it’s going, what the direction is.

The narrative framework of the Bible consists of a story, and our lives follow a trajectory from that story. Our lives are an extension of that in one way and in various ways or others. This story therefore instructs us about our lives as we are living our lives. As we engage in Scripture we get instructed about our lives as we live them. Stories instruct in their own peculiar way. They draw us in. And this is a big story. It’s a story that’s a metanarrative—



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we’ll talk about that in a bit here. But stories draw us in. It’s like a movie that we might be watching today. We can get pulled into it as if we were actually there. Often when I am watching a movie with my wife, she will poke me in the side, because if it’s real tense, I’ll be real tense and she will recognize this as I’m sitting with her. The point is that you can get drawn in and caught up in it, and that’s actually what God intends to do in our lives as we engage with Scripture through His Holy Spirit, bringing to bear what is said there and working it into your own heart and life by just affecting us along the way.

There are also, of course, other genres of literature embedded in the Bible; not just story and narrative, and each of them is part of the way the Bible instructs or guides or directs us or meets us. So, for example, laws are commands: they teach us, they instruct us by commanding us. Rituals enact things, they act out things. Poems elaborate, they expand, they’re very impressive, and very figureofspeech formulated. Proverbs actually train, they’re intended to train, and they have that kind of way of instructing us. Apocalyptic gives us hope, it helps us to hope. All of these are different ways of instructing us so that we become more like Christ.

The one that we’re focusing on here is the narrative framework that gives the movement through history for all of those other genres as well, and especially for the story of our own personal life. It pulls us in by attaching itself to our life, and our life attaches itself to what we have in this story. Our whole life, in its many seasons and dimensions, belongs to this script.

Now, as ancient as it is, the Bible tells the story that focuses its primary attention on the main issues of the lives of all people of all time, ancient and modern. There are a lot of things in the Bible that are ancient, and we have some difficulty understanding them because they’re culturally vested in the ancient world. But by and large, what the Bible is really about, even when it’s talking culturally like that, is about things that are basic and central to the lives of all people of all times. In our reading of it, the more we read it well the more we see that.

The Bible connects directly and dynamically to each of our personal stories. And one of the features of postmodern culture today is wellknown, and that is this incredulity toward metanarrative. Now a metanarrative is a big story that explains all the other stories. It’s kind of the framework story, and the stories of our lives get



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understood through a meta-story. We understand it because it explains the dynamics of what’s going on in our real world in such a way therefore it becomes a metanarrative—a narrative that explains our narratives, our stories.

Now in postmodern culture there is what is called an incredulity toward metanarrative. The idea that there is any kind of story that explains all the different stories of people is considered to be ludicrous in this common, familiar, postmodern culture that we engage with today. So, for example, pluralism rules the day, and the only thing that pluralists are not happy with is people who aren’t pluralists. So the very nature of it is that it’s kind of a rule of the day, and pluralism rules.

A second thing about this is that, by the nature of it, personal, local stories overrule everything else, so that, for example, what is true for you might not be true for me. And so you have your own story and that works for you, so that’s fine—this is part of the pluralism—but my story is a different story and yours does not connect and does not tell me what I should be thinking or anything like that. And so they have this aversion to the notion of a story, like the story in the Bible, really explaining their story. So this is the very nature of this kind of pluralism.

Now the point that I want to make here is that the biblical story can actually explain local stories of persons and communities so well that their incredulity toward metanarrative can actually become overcome by the sheer force of the metanarrative itself. It is a powerful script. And this is one of the ways the Holy Spirit actually works powerfully in people’s lives.

One of the main ways is, for example, the Navigators [worldwide para-church organization] right now is doing evangelism. They’ve made some very major shifts. It’s just getting people to read the Bible with them—not Christians—and they actually have the nonChristians leading the Bible studies. And the reason is because if they lead it and read it, they’re trying to explain it and then you can just ask questions: “Well what does that really mean?” And pretty soon they’re so captured by this script, the immediate, the story of Scripture and how it explains their own life, pretty soon the natural thing for them is to trust Jesus and to just engage their life and apply the Scriptures in such a way that their story fits right in, and they begin to understand their life in that way. So the gospel makes perfectly good sense. It’s so powerful in that way. The Holy Spirit works in that particular way.



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So it’s the way that the Bible explains the experience of individuals, families, and communities that carries so much force. And this is missional. It actually can engage people in such a way that, even if they have this incredulity toward the metanarrative, they are overcome by the power of God’s story itself. It provides a profoundly meaningful way forward for them in the midst of their experience as well. They are in a particular set of circumstances in life, and so are we—each one of us. And so right in the middle of it we have this text telling us what the most meaningful way forward is in our experience.

Telling the biblical story well is really missional, and the more we live and tell our story well the more we ourselves, and our lives, become missional. We become disciples (Matthew 28) who actually make more disciples. It’s the nature of the connection that happens between people.

Once again, one of the most effective ways today to do evangelism is by story. It gets into people’s worlds with them and helps them to see how the Bible explains their story—the good, the bad, and the ugly of their story—and invites them to a new life, a kingdom of God, living life, and they get a chance to actually switch lives. And the point is that there is a redemption, a kind of new life effect, that comes out of this kind of engagement.

Along the way, what happens is the way you’re engaging with such a person in the world—and this can be happening also with Christians in the church who have not grown and all these kinds of things—what happens is you end up carrying on a mission just by being authentic—just telling the truth about your life, about your history, about your troubles, about all sorts of things, and not holding anything back. You don’t have to pretend about anything. That enables them then to be invited to not pretend either. They can just walk into this thing and they can see what this Word of God really does and how it really is the one story that explains their story.

So those with ears to hear and eyes to see are invited to a new personal life that is continually renewed—a new community. So [it’s] a personal life that’s new and continually renewed, [it’s] a new community life and fellowship with God’s kingdom people right here and right now, and [it’s] a new mission in life in which we stand out as light in the midst of a world that lives in deeply profound darkness. The light that shines forth from God’s story comes into the world through our personal stories then as well,



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and we become that light that we’re called to be. We don’t put it under a bushel; we let it shine just by engaging authentically in real life ways with real people right in the middle of the world.

When we read the Bible from this place, the Holy Spirit uses it to enlighten our human spirit individually and in community in transforming ways. And this ties into the whole issue of illumination in the Christian life—how the Holy Spirit works to illumine us through the Word of God. And I have an article there, cited in the notes, that I’ve written on that subject.

Now what I want to move on from here then is to actually talk a bit about the very nature of this story that we’re talking about. We’ve talked about how it works and the kind of nature of it as a metanarrative and so on, but what actually is the story? Part of my story, in my life (and I’d like you to think about your own life story along the way; we want to actually do some spiritual formation here), part of my life story is that I came to know of the Lord in college. I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and went to the University of WisconsinRiver Falls, which is commonly called “Moo U.” I studied agronomy—soil and plant relationships.

I came to know the Lord there, and, quite frankly, when that happened I just lost interest in everything else. I heard in that context along the way too that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and the New Testament was written in Greek. And my mentality—the way I was—was that, “Well I guess then Christians must learn Greek and Hebrew.” That’s just the way I thought as this young college student who didn’t know any better. And so I was in the midst of the Hippie movement in those days, the Vietnam War, part of the Jesus movement. And so what happened was that I just went off, and this took over my life. And so what I did is I found a Bible college, one that taught both Greek and Hebrew. And that was my criteria: did they teach Greek and Hebrew?

So I found only one that I could find that did that, and I went there. And there I met my wife, and my wife and I went off to seminary and then from seminary onto a PhD program at a school in Philadelphia called Dropsie College. It’s a Jewish school for PhD studies. It’s not a disease; it’s actually the name of a school. And I came back to teach at the seminary that I had studied at. They hired me right back, and I met there a man by the name of Larry Crabb. He’s a counselor, and he took me on as kind of a project: here’s this comparative Semitic scholar, and he was curious about how someone does that. And I ended up becoming a good friend



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with Larry and doing an MA in counseling after I finished my PhD in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near Eastern languages.

The reason for telling this story is that at one point it occurred to me that I needed to just kind of stop and start over and rethink everything from the ground up and bring these two worlds together—going deep in the study of the Bible and going deep in the lives of people. And then bring these two together and do biblical theology from there; do it for life. And this is the kind of theology I want to do. As that developed, I kind of came to a certain understanding that has helped me to do this kind of theology. It’s about God and it’s about people and it’s about the Bible, coming together. And so there’s this certain flow of biblical theology that I want to walk through with you here that I think ties into the very nature of what we’ve been talking about earlier, about the nature of the Bible as a story—really His story—that our story ties into.

First, although the world was created to be a place of rest, peace, and purpose for us, God created it perfectly, and a perfect place for us to find rest, but what I mean by that is peace and purpose in the midst of it. Even though He created it that way, it is now a mess and so are we. We have lost our rest, and this loss manifests itself in the way we handle life. Basically this is what Genesis 1–11 is about. It kind of levels the ground of our human experience so that we can see what’s going on, and we can understand life and our life specifically in relationship to it. And that’s why those chapters, Genesis 1–11, are really in the Bible.

Now these things keep coming up throughout the rest of the Bible, but here’s where the foundation for that is laid, the leveling of the ground, so that we can build something on that through the rest of Scripture. We were created in the image of God to function as His regent here, His ruling and managing image in the world. He provided a perfect world for us, and we were the crown of His creation as those created in His image and likeness to rule, as He would, in the world. Well corruption came along and disrupted the whole thing. Genesis 3 talks about the dynamics of the fall and how God cursed the situation in such a way that this is now a whole disrupted, created order. Even Romans 8 talks about “the whole creation groans,” and we groan right in the middle of it because of this corruption.

Now it’s interesting that, in the genealogy there, in Genesis 5, when you come to the time where Lamech has a son named Noah,



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we read this, Genesis 5:28-29:

“Lamech lived 182 years, and became the father of a son. Now he called his name Noah, saying, ‘This one will give us rest from our work and from the toil of our hands arising from the ground which the Lord has cursed.’”

So we have this name, Noah. Now Noah comes from the Hebrew word noach, which means “to rest.” And then it says, “This one will give us rest,” or give us comfort. Nacham is the word for giving comfort there. So we have a play on words—”noach, nacham”—in this passage. And the point is one of the best ways to state the problem that we have—the situation, the circumstances that we’re in—is that we’ve lost our rest.

Now rest becomes a main theme throughout the rest of the Bible: through the Sabbath concept, and all the way through Him bringing them out of Egypt to give them rest in the promised land, to Jesus’ statements about,

“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavyladen, and I will give you rest for your soul” [Matthew 11:28].

We’ll talk about that a little bit more here in a moment.

One of the things we need to recognize though before we go onto that is that there’s a certain envelope around the Bible where we have the beginning chapters of Genesis echoed back to us in the last chapters of Revelation—Revelation 21 and 22. We have this creation in Genesis 1 and 2, and then we have the creation of the new heaven and Earth in Revelation 21 and 22. And in that new heaven and Earth there’s going to be no more curse, no more weeping, no more pain. In fact, in the middle of that, God is going to be right there, and we’re going to walk with Him right in that, just as back in the garden. Here again, back in Revelation 21 and 22, we have the tree of life coming into the story again. So there’s an echo. It’s really like an envelope into which the rest of the Bible fits in between Genesis 1 and 2—the early chapters of Genesis—and the end of the book of Revelation where God makes it all right.

So first, we need to understand that the world was created to be a place of rest for us. It is now a mess and so are we. We have lost that rest, and this comes out in the way we handle life, right in the middle of the mess. Now you’ll notice I’m using big theological terms here like “rest” and “mess” and so on. This is



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not a complicated deal. God has kept it simple. We’re the ones that have complicated it. His story is a simple story, and it’s meant to be understood by anybody who can understand any story. So the point is that the very nature of this telling of it must come down and reflect the very nature of the way God has told the story, and it doesn’t need big theological words.

Number two: the second point in this theological thing that happens—this story that happens—in the Bible is that even though we are in this disastrous situation and continue to make it worse because of the many ways we reject God in His design for us and our world, still He has stayed involved, and there is a redemptive rest to be found right in the middle of the mess. And that’s really what the rest of the Bible is about—Genesis 12 all the way through Revelation 22.

Jesus puts it this way in this passage in Matthew 11—a wellknown passage, and one that really ties into this rest theme that we can build from Genesis 1 all the way through. When you come to the end of Matthew 11 Jesus has come to a point in His ministry where He is recognizing the rejection that He has, but He also recognizes that God is going to give Him all authority. And so He uses His authority to say this to us in Matthew 11:28-30:

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavyladen, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me.”

Now that’s very strange. A yoke is something that you use to put around the neck of an animal so that they can pull a load and do work. And right here we have rest connected directly with a yoke.

There’s a certain kind of paradox to the whole thing. But it’s a yoke that is easy and light, as we go on in here. So He says,

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavyladen, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart.”

Now that’s something too; the Lord of the universe is gentle and humble toward us. He is “gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” This is actually a quote from Jeremiah,

“You will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

There is a yoke—there is a burden to pull—but it’s easy and light



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because we have rest in our soul while we’re doing it. And that’s the very nature of this invitation that Jesus has offered here.

One of the greatest misunderstandings of the Christian life is it’s just a lot of work, and one of the tragedies is that the lives of so many Christians are anything but restful. We have a yoke, but it’s easy and light. Now we’re not talking about sleep here when we’re talking about rest. We’re talking about a rest along the way as you live out life—a rest in the soul. So the important thing is to understand what this is about. There’s this rest that comes into life, and Jesus has invited us to it. It’s interesting, in the following chapter, in Matthew 12, it begins right away with the Sabbath controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees. So this whole rest concept comes right to a core peak in the middle of this—the pivot point of the gospel of Matthew.

Now basically what we have here is that in Genesis 1–11 we have creation and corruption theology. We have a good creation, but a corruption of that creation. So we have creation and corruption theology in Genesis 1–11. It levels the ground of our human experience. Then in Genesis 12 through Revelation 22 we have redemption theology. Here we begin with Abraham, and we build a program of redemption right from that point. Now this is already anticipated back in Genesis 1–11, but I can’t go into all of that. Nevertheless, Genesis 12 is where Abraham comes into the story, and even you and I, if we know Jesus, are children of Abraham by faith, because he was the father of faith. And there’s a lot that can be done with that in biblical theology.

Now one of the best ways to understand this redemptive program, where we’re called to rest right in the middle of the mess, is to think of a coil in a car where you have 2 positive and negative poles. You have the negative pole—the creation that’s become corrupted—and then you have the redemption theology as the positive pole. And as this cycle goes around these two dynamics of negative and positive, you create the energy of biblical theology. The more one gets engaged with the other the more energy is created, and biblical theology is built out of that energy of the dynamic of bringing redemption theology to bear on corruption theology. And so it’s this engagement that is so important in understanding how the Bible actually works. It creates the very energy of theology itself.

Now the third point then—in this understanding of how the Bible really works and what it’s really about and how it connects directly



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to everything about us—is that in spiritual formation, the goal is to work that rest that God offers right now—this redemptive rest—down into the hearts and lives of people so that they love God and love people well in spite of the mess that we are and in which we live. So yeah, we’re in the middle of a mess, and we are a mess. But the fact of the matter is that spiritual formation is about working the rest that Jesus has offered to us right down into our lives, to the very depths, so that, in spite of the mess that we are, we just go love God and people.

There’s nothing left to do. Nothing else makes sense anymore except to go love God and people, because we have felt the full love and impact and the power of God’s redemptive program. We’re talking here about the dynamic of salvation and sanctification that comes as we engage with this rest, and the more we work this rest down into our lives the more deeply we are transformed.

In this way, the gospel is always good news to everyone, because none of us has worked this gospel into every element and every part of our life. There’s an ongoing good news, an ongoing dynamic, of working this rest into all sorts of nooks and crannies of our lives and of our hearts and just in the way we think and how we handle other people and how we handle ourselves overall.

So there are all those levels of that going on. Now there are two dynamic processes that are important here in order to really work this rest down into the hearts and lives of people, and we can engage in these. This is part of how we become transformed, but not only become transformed but become people who the Lord uses to help transform others. First, we need to meet people where they are with the Bible. In other words, we need to meet them in their created state and corrupted [state], and we need to meet them right there. We can understand them with what God tells us about what’s going on in people. Now I don’t need to have someone understand and believe even, or even think there’s any truth to the Bible, to know that the Bible tells me the truth about people. And so I can engage with people. I can meet them right where they are, if I understand the Bible well, because it tells us where people are.

So the first part of the dynamic process is meeting people where they are. The second is we need to be able to take people where they need to go from where they are. Now this is the redemption theology. We meet people where they are so we can take them where they need to go from there. And the redemption theology



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works in this way.

So again, we have this coil effect as we meet people where they are and we take them where they need to go, then we meet them where they are again and take them where they need to go. And when this goes in a cycle and it creates the energy of engagement with people and the energy of the Christian life, as we keep on meeting ourselves and others in this creation corruption with the redemption power, it creates the energy of the Christian life, just like this same dynamic creates the energy of biblical theology in the first place.

So this is basically, I think, what the Bible is about. It’s telling about how to deal with the fact that we’re in this corrupted condition—even though we were created perfect—and the mess. It tells us about that. It tells us about what God has created as a redemptive program, where to go from there, and how to bring these two together. And spiritual formation is about that very thing—bringing these two together.

Now I wanted to mention certain things also in the notes. There is this other unit here about noticing about spiritual formation in the ministry. I’ve learned this from various church ministry leaders and other leaders in ministries around the country and the world. If you’re going to do a real spiritual formation ministry within your ministry—and this is really what ministry is about anyway—there are certain principles that need to be paid attention to first. First, your life is your ministry. Living and sharing your personal story well, your journey, and bringing people into it with you, engaging in their story—your life actually becomes your ministry, and it’s very organic to that. This is essential to the nature of spiritual formation in ministry context. You can’t do it unless your life is already engaged fully in it, and your life actually then becomes, in essence, your ministry.

Second, spiritual formation becomes what the ministry is all about from the topdown. In other words, you can’t do spiritual formation in a ministry context without it coming from the topdown because it will get sabotaged along the way. The ministry leadership team must do spiritual formation together first before even attempting to take the ministry—the church or the school or whatever—in that direction. You do not just teach it; you do it with people. And this is essential to the nature of how it works as well.

There’s a third point: spiritual formation ministry must be



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Lesson 07 of 07

missional, or it will lose its vitality and direction, and that ties in to the topic we’re in here, right at the end of this set of lectures. We have this navelgazing problem. It happens in the personal life if you kind of turn in on yourself, and it happens in the community as well if it turns in on itself and it loses its missional focus. It becomes no good to anyone, and it actually sabotages yourself as well. And so it’s important to avoid this. You’ve got to have this missional nature to spiritual formation, or it loses the very dynamic of what God is really about in the first place in transforming us into the image of Christ. Jesus was truly missional. He went to the cross because He was missional in what He came to do in the first place.

This is about becoming a community that invites people to another life—a switching of kingdoms. There’s this Colossians 1:13-14 passage:

“For He has rescued us from the domain of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son He loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

So we’ve been brought into the kingdom of the Son out of this domain of darkness. Now that’s essential to the whole thing.

There’s a fourth thing that seems to be really important to ongoing ministry in a way that Jesus would want it done, and I have titled that here “Poorology: Mission and Meeting People and Focusing on the Least, the Last, and the Lost in the Society That We’re In. He did a lot of this, and you can’t really become Jesuslike in your life unless you move in this direction. The theology of the poor just permeates the Bible. It shows up in the Old Testament and New Testament all over the place. Anybody who reads it will see it if they’re paying attention at all, all the way from the beginning to the end. This is a very important part of it. And one of the things about the least is that they will become the greatest; and the last, they will become the first; and the lost, they will become the found. The idea is: this is what God is about. This is why He sent Jesus in the first place, and this is how Jesus lived. This is what He was concerned about. And He engaged in this way in very important ways.

I was involved in a visit to a neighborhood ministries down in Phoenix a couple years ago, one of the poorest areas that we have in our country. And young people were being trained there, and they were being trained how to meet the least, the last, and the

Transcript - SF507 Foundations of Spiritual Formation I: The Work of the Spirit

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Holy Spirit, Prophetic Spirit, and Missional Spiritual Formation Part II: The PracticeLesson 07 of 07

lost right where they are and seek to help them. There was a deep need, in that context, for the indepth study of the Bible, because lives are so disastrous and there’s so much weeping going on, they need hope. And one of the things that did not work in that context was “putting the cookies on the bottom shelf” in teaching the Bible.

Cookies aren’t a good diet anyway, but the point that I’m trying to make is that if you’re right in the middle of heavy ministry, where you have tragedy in lives, and work into this, somehow it drives you into seeing the need for the depths of God’s kingdom in your own life and working at that in the lives of the people you’re with, because there is so much desperation.

One of the things that helps in spiritual formation, and one of the things that spiritual formation is about, is doing the real thing. It’s getting at the real things of life. And when you’re working with the poor you’re down to the bottom line: they need everything every day. They’re always in need. And we begin to realize how much we are so desperately in need too. Spiritual formation is a way of life that engages right in the real things of life, from the top, to the bottom, and all the way through.

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