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Encountering Jesus in the Scripture, Pt. 3
Published February 2, 2025
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How Can We Be Formed In Christ?
Understand Where You Are
Following Jesus requires us to learn more about who God is, engage deeply in God’s word, learn more about him, what he requires of us, and what he desires for his creation. However, have you ever experienced a gap in what you know and what you do? People can gain new knowledge, yet it doesn’t turn into a life-changing practice. You can have belief without practice, just like you can have practice without belief. It is easy
for Christians to be hungry for biblical ideas and even long to be like Jesus; maybe they even try time and time again to implement new practices to be “better,” yet it doesn’t translate into a new way of life. The answer is not to just try harder but to realize that our current habits or rhythms may not be aiming or reorienting us to the heart of Jesus. 1 John 4:19 says, “we love
because he first loved us.” We are made to love the one who made and loves us. To live according to what we want, we need an awareness that our current habits, which make up patterns in our lives, have to change. We need God’s grace for this. We need a re-orientation of our affections.
Spiritual Formation is a kind of retraining our dispositions by the grace and the power of God. This is belief with practice. As a pianist learns how to play the scales of a piano, he trains his fingers to know which keys to play until his play becomes natural. This is the same when Christians step into reading the Scripture for the first time. We must be aware that our cultural patterns create no space to slow down. There is no magical time where everything stops, and the perfect moment is presented to meet God in the Scriptures. This requires grace to say yes to a new pattern of reading the word and saying no to other things that have filled up our time. Most people feel that their lives are already full, so how do you fill an already full cup? We have to create space. We have to say no to some things in order to say yes to better things. Without this, a new holy habit will never be acquired. Jesus himself declared that we are to seek first the Father’s kingdom and his righteousness, and then everything else we need will be given to us (Matt. 6:33). Rooted in God’s love, the Holy Spirit wants to show us a new way, a new pattern, of encountering Jesus in the text. Author James K.A Smith speaks to this need for our hearts to be recalibrated, “Spirit-led formation of our loves is a recalibration of the heart, a reorientation of our loves by unlearning all the tacit bearings we’ve absorbed from other cultural practices. We need to recognize how such rituals can be love-shaping practices and form and deform our desires–and then be intentional about countermeasures.” Learning to live
in the love of God and to love God with your heart, your soul, your strength, and your mind takes the right kind of practice.
Too often, we have unhealthy rhythms in our lives, many of which we are not even aware of. Every person, to some degree, is a result of their upbringing. Good habits, bad habits–they are the fruit from the soil in which they were planted. Even after we have given our lives to Christ, there are still patterns that need to be changed, and ways of thinking and living must be reformed. Have you ever found it hard to break a bad habit? The habit feels so engrained, and it’s almost like it will never change. Think of it this way. Have you ever driven your car on a familiar road, a road that you’ve taken time and time again? Then, one day, you take off on that road, and you get to thinking about something other than driving, only to realize that you have arrived at your destination. Subconsciously, you fell into a well-worn path that you’ve done time and time again. Through history and repetition, this became a formative practice. This is how unhealthy patterns get formed in our lives–by repeated practice. The danger is, that we are sometimes not even aware of the sub-conscience roads we’ve been driving on. There is good news, however–God has given us the grace to change (Eph. 2:4). Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are able to be transformed from old patterns, old habits, and practices into new love-shaping practices (John 16:13). Now, it may have taken a while to get into some of the unhealthy patterns, so it may take time to build the new Christ-centered patterns. But the good news is, we can change. The Bible declares that “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” When we put our faith in Jesus, we are changed; we are given a new foundation, a new nature, and a new calling.
The reason we’re talking about this is not to over-emphasize the old patterns we had in our lives but to understand that there are still cultural patterns that are so ingrained in us that are shaping our affections–training us to hunger and thirst for substitutes that can never really satisfy. To love
the Lord requires both hunger and habit, the removal of the old and the reorienting of our life towards the new life in Christ. There must be new patterns that we engage in to develop the relationship with Jesus through
the Scriptures, along with other habits like prayer. These new practices turn into new appetites, and what we feast on, we hunger for. The Bible calls this process sanctification; it’s as if we are learning to “put on” or “clothe” ourselves with Christ (Rom. 13:14). Again, James K.A. Smith brings out this idea on discipleship:
Understand Where You Are
Following Jesus requires us to learn more about who God is, engage deeply in God’s word, learn more about him, what he requires of us, and what he desires for his creation. However, have you ever experienced a gap in what you know and what you do? People can gain new knowledge, yet it doesn’t turn into a life-changing practice. You can have belief without practice, just like you can have practice without belief. It is easy
for Christians to be hungry for biblical ideas and even long to be like Jesus; maybe they even try time and time again to implement new practices to be “better,” yet it doesn’t translate into a new way of life. The answer is not to just try harder but to realize that our current habits or rhythms may not be aiming or reorienting us to the heart of Jesus. 1 John 4:19 says, “we love
because he first loved us.” We are made to love the one who made and loves us. To live according to what we want, we need an awareness that our current habits, which make up patterns in our lives, have to change. We need God’s grace for this. We need a re-orientation of our affections.
Spiritual Formation is a kind of retraining our dispositions by the grace and the power of God. This is belief with practice. As a pianist learns how to play the scales of a piano, he trains his fingers to know which keys to play until his play becomes natural. This is the same when Christians step into reading the Scripture for the first time. We must be aware that our cultural patterns create no space to slow down. There is no magical time where everything stops, and the perfect moment is presented to meet God in the Scriptures. This requires grace to say yes to a new pattern of reading the word and saying no to other things that have filled up our time. Most people feel that their lives are already full, so how do you fill an already full cup? We have to create space. We have to say no to some things in order to say yes to better things. Without this, a new holy habit will never be acquired. Jesus himself declared that we are to seek first the Father’s kingdom and his righteousness, and then everything else we need will be given to us (Matt. 6:33). Rooted in God’s love, the Holy Spirit wants to show us a new way, a new pattern, of encountering Jesus in the text. Author James K.A Smith speaks to this need for our hearts to be recalibrated, “Spirit-led formation of our loves is a recalibration of the heart, a reorientation of our loves by unlearning all the tacit bearings we’ve absorbed from other cultural practices. We need to recognize how such rituals can be love-shaping practices and form and deform our desires–and then be intentional about countermeasures.” Learning to live
in the love of God and to love God with your heart, your soul, your strength, and your mind takes the right kind of practice.
Too often, we have unhealthy rhythms in our lives, many of which we are not even aware of. Every person, to some degree, is a result of their upbringing. Good habits, bad habits–they are the fruit from the soil in which they were planted. Even after we have given our lives to Christ, there are still patterns that need to be changed, and ways of thinking and living must be reformed. Have you ever found it hard to break a bad habit? The habit feels so engrained, and it’s almost like it will never change. Think of it this way. Have you ever driven your car on a familiar road, a road that you’ve taken time and time again? Then, one day, you take off on that road, and you get to thinking about something other than driving, only to realize that you have arrived at your destination. Subconsciously, you fell into a well-worn path that you’ve done time and time again. Through history and repetition, this became a formative practice. This is how unhealthy patterns get formed in our lives–by repeated practice. The danger is, that we are sometimes not even aware of the sub-conscience roads we’ve been driving on. There is good news, however–God has given us the grace to change (Eph. 2:4). Through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are able to be transformed from old patterns, old habits, and practices into new love-shaping practices (John 16:13). Now, it may have taken a while to get into some of the unhealthy patterns, so it may take time to build the new Christ-centered patterns. But the good news is, we can change. The Bible declares that “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” When we put our faith in Jesus, we are changed; we are given a new foundation, a new nature, and a new calling.
The reason we’re talking about this is not to over-emphasize the old patterns we had in our lives but to understand that there are still cultural patterns that are so ingrained in us that are shaping our affections–training us to hunger and thirst for substitutes that can never really satisfy. To love
the Lord requires both hunger and habit, the removal of the old and the reorienting of our life towards the new life in Christ. There must be new patterns that we engage in to develop the relationship with Jesus through
the Scriptures, along with other habits like prayer. These new practices turn into new appetites, and what we feast on, we hunger for. The Bible calls this process sanctification; it’s as if we are learning to “put on” or “clothe” ourselves with Christ (Rom. 13:14). Again, James K.A. Smith brings out this idea on discipleship:
Discipleship is a kind of immigration from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Col. 1:13). In Christ, we are given a heavenly passport; in his body we learn how to live like ‘locals’ of his kingdom. Such an immigration to a new kingdom isn’t just a matter of being teleported to a different realm; we need to be acclimated to a new way of life, learn a new language, acquire new habits–and unlearn the habits of that rival dominion.Living in the love of God and re-orienting our lives in the way of Jesus is a work of grace. These habit-forming practices, such as the reading the Scripture, are the ways we learn to “put on Christ” (Col. 3:14), where we are changed more and more into his image.
“Discipleship is a kind of immigration from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son” James K.A. Smith