Who Are We? : Formation

We are in the midst of a sermon series all about who we are as a church. What’s at the core of who we are and what we’re about? What’s the DNA of Redeemer Church? In previous weeks we have talked about the gospel and worship, and this week we’re talking about formation. Formation is core to our identity as Redeemer.

We are a church that is partnering with God to welcome, shape, and send out followers of Jesus - and that means formation in the way of Jesus is one of our greatest emphases as a community.

So this morning I want to talk about three guiding principles that we adhere to with regards to formation.

First principle: The cornerstone of formation is grace.

In the first century, the cornerstone of a building was the first stone to be laid, and it was on this stone that the rest of the building was built and stabilized. It was the foundation of the foundation. So if we think of our formation in Jesus as a building, than the grace of Jesus is it’s cornerstone.

Many of us need to hear this because we misunderstand the basis of Christian formation. Some of us have this mentality that says, “In order to be saved, I need grace. I am dead in my sins. I am helpless and lost. I need God’s grace.” This of course is correct! But then, having been forgiven and saved by the grace of Jesus, we come to believe that it’s up to us to grow closer to Jesus. It’s up to us to pull ourselves up by our moral bootstraps in order to grow in our relationship with God, to repent from our sins and to overcome temptations - in all these things it’s up to us!

And it’s no wonder that we’ve come to believe that our formation in Christ is up to us, because if you go to the Christian Living section of Barnes and Noble, every third book will teach you the five steps you can to take to follow Jesus better - and none of them will say a word about what it is that powers our formation in Jesus.

But if you hear one thing this morning, please hear this: How we begin our life in Christ is how we continue our life in Christ is how we end our life in Christ. It’s all dependent upon God’s grace. It’s all grace. It’s all a gift from God.

You were saved by grace, you are formed by grace, and when you’ve finished running this race, it will be the result of grace alone that you experience the gift of resurrection.

We so often forget that the cornerstone of formation is grace. And this is why Paul is so frustrated in Galatians 3. There he writes:

3 O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. 2 Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? 3 Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

Having been saved by grace, are we now to grow and be formed by our own strength and will? No. The cornerstone of formation is God’s grace.

Martin Luther said that if we want to make progress in our faith, we must begin again and again and again. We must never pivot from where our life in Christ began - which is his grace.

Throughout the Old Testament, as God continuously is calling his faithless people to return to him, the constant refrain in his message is the call for his people to remember his grace: when he rescued them from Egypt and made a covenant with them in the wilderness through no merit of their own. God is constantly urging us to return to the place where you started. Return to my grace.

If you are here today, and you are stuck in your sin. This just might be the reason why. Because you are trying to overcome it all by yourself. That road leads only to exhaustion and giving up and accepting that this sin will be apart of your life for the rest of your days. If that is you: What Jesus is saying to you today is this: return to my grace. Strength and willpower are not what power our formation. God’s grace is the power that fuels our formation.

[Addicts?]

This is the first principle that we adhere to: Grace is the cornerstone of formation.

The second principle: Formation happens primarily in the desires of our hearts.

It is a sad state of affairs that for large swathes of the church in America, we’ve come to assume that people are what they think. We assume that the best way to shape a person in the way of Jesus is by engaging their intellect. If we can just teach them the right information, then we can change the trajectory of their lives. Let me put that assumption another way: in many ways, be believe that we can think our way to holiness.

But I wonder…Has anyone here experienced a gap between what you know and what you do? How do you explain that? Have you ever had the experience of hearing an incredibly illuminating and powerful sermon on a Sunday that causes you to wake up Monday with a new resolve to live differently, only to fail by Tuesday night?

What explains that? What explains the fact that we can fill our minds with biblical knowledge and theology and not see those truths translate into a new way of life? Is it because there is some other piece of information that we still need to acquire that will unlock the life transformation that we’re seeking?

Or could it be that formation doesn’t live primarily in the brain? Could it be that formation happens elsewhere?

Listen to this prayer from the Apostle Paul to the church in Philippi, which we find in Philippians 1:9-11.

9 And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10 so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

I want you to take note of the sequence of Paul’s prayer. If you read it quickly, you may assume that Paul is primarily concerned with their knowledge - that Paul is praying that the Christians in Philippi would deepen their knowledge so that they will know what to love, but in reality his prayer is the inverse. Paul is praying that their love may abound more and more, because in some sense, love is the condition for knowledge. Paul says that in order to discern “what is excellent” - what really matters - we must first and foremost attend to our loves.

What moves us as human beings is not primarily what we think, but what we love. We all have desires in our hearts that move us in a particular direction. Sometimes we are moved to meet those desires in places that are, as Paul says, excellent! Places that truly give life and build us up. But we all know that on other occasions, we are moved to meet the desires of our hearts in less-than-ideal places, which ultimately does not satisfy us, and destroys rather than builds our lives.

But the trajectory of our lives is primarily set by what we love. More than anything, what forms us is not what we think, but what we love.

This is the case that Augustine made all the way back in the 4th century. All the way back in the 300s, Augustine argued that our loves shape us and mold us. They are the weight that pushes our lives in one direction or the other. The illustration he gave was that of a person at the top of a hill pushing a large rock over the side. The stone rolls down the hill because of its weight. Its weight is what keeps it rolling. Which is why Augustine says, “My weight is my love, wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”

Proverbs 4:23 - Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.

We are carried along by our loves. What we love, what we want, what we desire is the most important indicator for the trajectory of our lives. And when our loves are disordered, the desires of our hearts go unmet, which is why Augustine famously said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Jesus.”

So for us at Redeemer, the place of formation is the heart. It’s our loves. It’s our desires. Formation is more than a matter of knowing the right things. Formation is aligning our loves and longings with Christ’s - to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave for the world that he his bringing into reality - what Jesus calls “the Kingdom of God.”

The second principle is this: Formation happens primarily in the desires of our hearts.

Third principle: Formation happens through rhythms of life.

So much of our paradigm for formation at Redeemer is informed by Augustine on the ancient level, and Jamie Smith on the more contemporary level. Jamie Smith wrote a well known book called “You Are What You Love,” and in that book he argues quite convincingly that the rhythms of our lives shape our desires, even as our desires fuel the rhythms of our lives.

Let me explain using a rhythm near and dear to my heart and many of yours. One of my unmistakeable loves is coffee. There is a strong desire in my heart and your heart for coffee. So what is the first thing you think about every morning? Coffee! So what do you do? You go and make a cup of coffee. That is a rhythm in your life and mine. It’s a pattern, a habit, and a regular practice. We make coffee.

But here’s the crazy thing about how our brain works. The more that we make coffee in the morning, the more we desire coffee. The rhythm of making coffee grows our desire for coffee, even as our desire for coffee fuels our daily rhythm of making coffee.

Now you may say, wait a minute, coffee is an addictive substance - so that doesn’t count. But this principle is true across the board. Last summer bought some new running shoes, because I wanted to take up the practice of running on a regular basis. I can honestly tell you that my first outing was awful. It was miserable. It was hot. I was tired. And I couldn’t breathe. But at the end of the run, I had that amazing feeling you get when you accomplish something hard. So two days later, I hit the pavement again. And two days later, I was at it again. And what happened was the more I ran, the more I wanted to run. The rhythm was shaping my desire, even as my desire was fueling this rhythm.

So when it comes to formation - which is primarily focused on our loves and desires - it is the rhythms of our lives that shape and grow those desires. How are we formed in Christ? Through regular practices, and rhythms, and habits that place us in his presence and under his authority.

With this in mind, the rhythm of our corporate worship on Sundays has been intentionally designed over the course of thousands of years to foster particular rhythms in your personal lives. In fact, our next sermon series is going to focus on that particular topic - so I’m not going to go into too much detail, but the reason we read Scripture every week, the reason we confess our sins every week, the reason we pray for our neighbors every week, the reason we say the Nicene creed every week, and sing praises every week - the reason we do these things again and again is to foster a rhythm of life for you and your family that incorporates these very things. So that your home becomes a place where sins are confessed and lifted up to the Lord for forgiveness. So that your home becomes a place where the Scriptures are read and discussed. So that your home becomes a place where the needs of your neighbors are known and prayed for. It’s all about fostering these rhythms that will form us in the way of Jesus as they grow our desire for him and for his kingdom.

Do you want to be formed in the way of Jesus? Well, the basis of that formation is grace. And the place where it happens is in the desires of your heart. And it happens through the rhythms of your life. These are the guiding principles that we follow in this community.

Now, let me end with this. The greatest obstacle to formation in Christ is our love of the status quo. What so often gets in the way is our desire to avoid difficulty and live a comfortable life.

In the opening pages of the Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard tells a story from his childhood, growing up in rural Missouri in the 40s and 50s. He recounts how his neighbors responded to the introduction of electricity to their small town. Up to that point, they had ice boxes and kerosene lamps, but no electricity. Until one day it became available in their area. And to his surprise: some of his neighbors refused it! Here was this better life being made available to them that could completely change their life, and they said, “No!” to it.

Why did these farmers say “No” to this new kind of life? Because they were comfortable with their old lives. They were comfortable with the status quo. This is the same reason why so often we are unwilling to pursue formation in Christ, because we are comfortable with status quo of our lives. To use Paul’s language from Romans 12, we are quite comfortable conforming our lives to this world; and even if there is this other way of life that is being offered to us by the gospel of Jesus…we’d rather stick with the our old lives.

Formation is hard. It is messy. It’s a life-long journey filled with stops and starts, hills and valleys. Eugene Petersen called it the long obedience in the same direction. It’s a life-long process. But the new life that Jesus offers us by his grace is so much better than anything else.

The call is to not conform our lives to the world, but to be transformed by the grace of God, as our loves are aligned with his by drawing near to him in the rhythms of life.