Sermon Tone Analysis

| !!! *Spiritual Formation: What it is, and How it is Done*

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A few scripture passages point us to the place in human personality that is the focus of spiritual formation:

!!! Proverbs 4:20-24 reminds us to keep the words of God's wisdom "in the midst of your heart," and that from there "they are life to those who find them, and health to all their whole body."

(vss.

21-22 NAS) Then comes the exhortation, "Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life."

(vs.

23).

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In Mark 7:15, 20-23, Jesus teaches about the true source of evil in human life: "The things which proceed out of the man are what defile the man....

For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, acts of sexual immorality, thefts, murders, adulteries, deeds of coveting and wickedness, as well as deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride and foolishness."

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In Luke 6, he points out that "there is no good tree which produces bad fruit.... Men do not gather figs from thorns bushes...." (vss.

43-44) It is the inner nature of the tree that determines its outward product.

Likewise, "The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart."

(vs.

45)

!!! Spiritual formation in the tradition of Jesus Christ is the process of transformation of the inmost dimension of the human being, the heart, which is the same as the spirit or will.

It is being formed (really, transformed) in such a way that its natural expression comes to be the deeds of Christ done in the power of Christ.

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The progression of spiritual formation is outlined in various passages of the New Testament.

It is most fully spelled out in II Peter 1: "Now since you have become partakers of the divine nature, the writer says, "applying all diligence, in your faith supply moral excellence, and in your moral excellence, knowledge; and in your knowledge, self-control, and in your self-control, perseverance, and in your perseverance, godliness; and in your godliness, brotherly kindness, and in your brotherly kindness, love."

(vss.

4-7)

!!!

These New Testament progressions always conclude with agape.

Agape is the center, the linchpin, of it all.

Col. 3 has a wonderful progression which concludes, "And beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity."

(vs.

14) Romans 5 concludes its progression with the words, "because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." (vs.

5)

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If you examine these and related passages you will see that they include a passive element and an active element.

And making the distinction between passive and active, and seeing how they come together, poses--especially for the evangelical understanding--the greatest difficulty in the area of spiritual formation.

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We know, as Jesus says, "Without me you can do nothing."

(John 15:5) And I think everyone here will agree with that.

It is the initiative of God and the presence of God without which all of our efforts are in vain--whether it is in justification or sanctification or in the realm of the exercise of power, all our efforts it will be in vain if God does not act.

But we had better believe that the back side of that verse reads: "If you do nothing it will be without me."

And this is the part we have the hardest time hearing.

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So I have read the above passages to you.

"Keep your heart."

Well, that's something for me to do.

I have the keeping of my heart.

I am responsible for it.

Do I do it alone?

No.

If I do it alone, I'll just make bad matters worse.

But I have to do it nonetheless.

I am the one who has to "give all diligence to add to my faith moral excellence, add to my moral excellence knowledge"--I'm the one.

Again.

Do I do it alone?

No.

But if I do nothing, it will not be done.

!!!

We have a problem today in Evangelical circles.

We're not only saved by grace, we're paralyzed by it.

I'm Southern Baptist, and we often preach to you for an hour, telling you you can do nothing to be saved, and then sing to you for forty-five minutes trying to get you to do something to be saved.

That's confusing!

And, as we look at these verses (many similar ones could be chosen), I hope we can see within them the union of passivity and activity.

Because spiritual formation is something that requires that we take wise steps in accomplishing it.

The "old man" will not be put off, and the "new man" put on, unless I do something--and, indeed, unless I do the right things.

And so the need as we approach the topic of spiritual formation, is to understand as well as we can what is our part and what is God's part, and take care of our part that God may be able to work with us in bringing us to be the kinds of people that we need to be and he wants us to be.

(If the idea that we must do something to "enable" God to do something bothers you, you have just hit a major barrier on the pathway of spiritual formation.)

!!! Now, spiritual formation talk has emerged within evangelical circles because of a pervasive felt need--felt on the part of many people within the laity as well as within he clergy--for "something more" than the group and individual activities that have been recognized and encouraged in conservative religious circles in recent decades.

Especially, as Fundamentalism fell away and our contemporary (post-WW II) version of Evangelicalism emerged, we had a period of great success, and still enjoy that in many, many quarters; but because of the particular dynamics of that period, we came to think that, in the language of some Protestants, "the Word of God is the only sacrament."

And what that meant practically was that the sole means of spiritual growth was being taught and "preached at"--that we're saved and transformed by hearing the truths of the scriptures, we're redeemed by the truths which the conservative and evangelical segments of the church rightly stood for.

We're saved by believing them, we're sanctified by believing them, and all issues of spiritual growth are dealt with simply by taking the word in through reading it, through hearing it, through exhortation and ministry from the scriptures.

Or so we thought.

But I think that what we found, beginning some years ago, was that this "method" really does not do everything that is needed or that we thought it would do.

And during the period since WW II, especially, we came to accept the marginalization of discipleship to Jesus.

We came to see it as something of an option that we might choose to exercise should we wish; but if we would just like to believe the truth and receive the ministry of the word, and get on with our life without discipleship, that's okay too.

And as a result we have now come to the place where we can be a Christian forever without becoming a disciple.

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So discipleship was marginalized to something that was a special function.

In my circles it always had to do with soul-winning.

In the more liberal wing of the church (you know, Sojourners and The Other Side, if you are acquainted with those magazines and the segments of the church they appeal to), discipleship came to mean some type of "social action."

Discipleship in the sense spelled out clearly, through word and deed, in the New Testament was moved out of the center of the Christian life.

The subsequent rise of talk about spiritual formation occurred because of the felt (though often unarticulated) need to find something deeper: something that actually lead to the transformation of life, that actually moved people in the direction of "the good tree", that looked into the tangled depths of the heart and said, "There must be a way of doing something about that."

!!!

In the path of serious spiritual formation there is indeed (as there always has been) a real possibility of meeting this need for transformation.

There is a real possibility of looking at I Cor.

13, for example, and being able to see that the love that is portrayed there can actually come to occupy the human heart.

People can really be like that--"Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things."

People can be like that, not because they do such things, but because agape love has occupied them effectively as a result of their having learned how to receive it into the deepest part of their being.

!!! Now I think we are at a crucial point in time, and that the very great promise which currently steps forward in the "buzz" about spiritual formation has three possible outcomes, two of them disappointing ones.

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One is that spiritual formation will be lost in the sea of humanistic or "new age" spirituality--in what I am tempted sometimes to call the "Ophracization" of Western culture.

I think that Ophra means well, and there is much good in what she does--certainly much more than with many others in her type of public position.

But she is severely misguided on some fundamental points.

She now has on her television program a segment called "attending to your spirit," and we should pay attention to what shows up in that segment, asking ourselves how we could deal with the real needs she addresses.

*/The hunger of the human heart that is unfed by what is authentic will go for what is inauthentic./*

If human beings need something vital badly enough, they may even destroy themselves trying to get it.

!!!

I was raised in southern Missouri where the land is mineral poor.

Cows and sheep there will find piles of junk or refuse out in the fields or woods and eat old dry-cell batteries and rusty wire and nails to get the minerals that they need; and they die of it.

The hunger for spiritual depth that we see manifested across our culture becomes a threat to a meaningful and practically effective understanding of spiritual formation as it should be presented by followers of Christ.

And this threat has several forms.

!!!

Most are familiar with the Vedic or New Age form, but now */secularism itself has a 'spirituality/*.

Even a mere "culture" has a spirituality to it now.

There is a book titled Spirituality and the Secular Quest, edited by Peter Van Ness, in the very well known "World Spirituality" series.

And what you have there is simply the */claim that secular people have a 'spirituality' too.

Spirituality is taken to be simply one dimension of the human being./*

That's the great divide, because, from the scriptural teachings and the teachings of our traditions in the Christian communities, we know that that is supposed to be right--human beings are, as such, supposed to have a spirituality.

And in a sense they do.

They remain spiritual beings, with all that implies.

*/But on their own they're dead spiritually./*

They're cut off from the source of spiritual life.

Yet */what we are seeing and what we will continue to see is an attempt to take the merely human, dead in trespasses and sins, and make that into 'spirituality,' framing it culturally, artistically, and in other ways.

Usually 'spirituality' as a purely human dimension has to do with commitment, creativity and meaning./*

!!!

And so we have not only the Old Age, viz. the Vedic, which is now called the New Age, but we also have secularism as a direction in which the drive to "spirituality" may develop.

We could almost speak of "culturalism," because culture is now generally assigned to the area of the spiritual.

And I think that in many of our Christian congregations there already exists in the minds of many people a hopeless mish-mash of these two tendencies, the Vedic and the secular.

It has already almost totally captured some mainline churches--and some not so mainline, as you find when you begin to talk with people about what they actually think about spirituality and spiritual formation.

!!! Now all of the spiritualities address, of course, the deep human needs of identity, righteousness and power.

They must do so to have any appeal, and recent failure to show how the Christian way deals with those needs is largely responsible for their widespread appeal today.