I love a project. To be more precise, I love starting and finishing a project. The middle is not so inspiring.
Have you ever resolved to clean out your kitchen cupboards? The first step, naturally, is to pull everything out. How else are you going to clean right to the back, declutter, and reorganise? Unfortunately, this inevitably leads to a moment standing in the centre of the kitchen, with the contents of the cupboards strewn around you, when you suddenly realise that you’ve lost your motivation… and you still have to put everything back. The middle of a project is not so inspiring.
When I was a child, my parents decided to renovate our family home. It was a massive undertaking and it did not go to plan. Some unfortunate events combined with a DIY attitude meant that the whole project took a lot longer than we (I) expected. Years longer.
I like the metaphor of renovation for spiritual formation and discipleship. It captures the idea of deconstruction (sometimes you need to pull something apart) but it pairs it with a hopeful future orientation (you’re pulling it apart to build it up again better, stronger, safer, and on firmer foundations). Sometimes you planned to just update the tapware in the bathroom, but then you discover black mould or dry rot behind the bathroom sink and before you know it you’re replacing the floor and half the walls.
A good definition is handy too, and Robert Mulholland’s is my favourite. Spiritual formation is “(1) a process (2) of being conformed (3) to the image of Christ (4) for the sake of others.”[1] Over time, we are being changed and there is a directionality to that change: the image of Christ. What for? For the sake of the world.
This process, though: why is it taking so long?
Why do I so often feel like I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen partway through the great clean-up and sort-out, motivation flagging, but with so far to go. Why am I not better yet? Why am I not more loving, faithful, patient, courageous? Why am I not praying more?
I look at my life, my regular failings, the rough places in my character, the inconsistencies of my devotion to Christ, and I think: “be better.” So I try to work on myself more, swinging between working too hard and not working enough, never finding a happy medium.
On the one hand, we continue to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil 2:12 NIV), and on the other hand, “it is God who works in you to will and to act” (Phil 2:13 NIV). Yes, the Spirit “brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard” (Gal 5:2 The Message Paraphrase), but you still have to tend those fruit trees. God is working and we are working. It’s not an either/or.
It’s not a matter of just trying harder, though. Instead, as John Ortberg often says, it’s about training wisely. In those moments when my patience is being tested, just resolving to be patient has had a poor success rate. What does seem to work are the regular rhythms of reflective prayer and rest. It’s like a kind of cross-training, I guess (what would I know?), where I train at prayer in the morning in order to perform patience in the late afternoon.
Input here, output there.
That’s kind of true, but there’s something about this that feels too transactional. Like I’m employing the spiritual practices as a tool to improve my wellbeing and to make me a better person. God’s involved of course, but in quite a distant way. This is a lot like the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism that sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton first described in Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers.[2] God watches over the world, but he only gets involved to solve serious problems (Deism). God wants people to be nice and fair and Christian morality will help you do that (Moralistic). Finally, this approach to life will generally help things go better and help you to feel good about yourself (Therapeutic).
Christianity, in both its historic beliefs and spirituality, is so much more than that. But I can still see resonances of this in how we talk about our spiritual formation. The focus is to a) be a better person and b) to experience greater wellbeing. God is involved in this process, but sometimes in a transactional way.
Spiritual formation can become a self-improvement project to support my goals. I will employ the spiritual practices/disciplines like tools in this project, where I work on myself. We’re doing this with God’s help, of course, and in the right direction: Christlikeness.
This version of spiritual formation is so under-nourished, so unimaginative, and so much less than the communion with Christ that we are invited into.
In 2 Corinthians 3:12-18, Paul writes,
12 Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. 13 We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. 14 But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. 15 Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. 16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. 18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate[a] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
In this passage Paul is playing with the metaphor of being veiled and unveiled to speak to the sensitivity of our hearts to the truth of the gospel, both as individuals and as a community. He describes how when God’s Spirit is present, we experience freedom, a lifting of the veil, and so we all now, with unveiled faces, can contemplate the Lord’s glory. As a result we are being transformed into His likeness. There is nothing between us and God, and so we reflect somehow God’s glory in increasing measure, but it’s a glory that comes only from God.
By this point in the 2 Corinthians 3, Paul is talking about the veil metaphorically but earlier he draws directly on Exodus 34—Moses and his literal veil. In this passage, Moses has come down from the mountain with the second set of tablets and having seen God’s glory (from behind at least). He has a face that is so radiant and bright, because he’s been in the Lord’s presence, that the people are afraid and they can’t come near him. And so, Moses wears a veil when he’s with them; when he goes back into the God’s presence, he removes the veil to spend time with God. There’s clearly something special happening for Moses in God’s presence that he carries it with him in a luminous visage.
Now the way that Paul uses this passage in Exodus here in 2 Corinthians is probably not how we would handle Scripture; there’s a Midrashic kind of vibe. Paul is interacting with Scripture like a Jewish interpreter of his time would, because he is a Jewish interpreter of his time. It can be a bit difficult to make sense of, though, because he seems to be reading something in the Exodus text that isn’t there in the plain sense. He says that Moses was putting a veil over his face to conceal himself in a kind of deception, perhaps to conceal the fact that the radiance of God’s reflected presence in his leadership is diminishing over time.
In the context of Paul’s letter he’s talking about unveiledness as honest disclosure—before both God and people. In writing to the church in Corinth, Paul is trying to present himself as he really is. He’s not coming with performance. He’s not coming with letters of recommendation. He’s not hustling. You see this even more in 2 Corinthians 4 and 5 as he defends his leadership to his opponents. He’s saying, “My ministry is unveiled. It is free from hidden motives or agendas, free from deception and distortion. What you see is what you get. Who I am before God is who I am before you.”[3]
Paul is “unveiled” before God and before the people, because of the freedom the Spirit brings. He writes, “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18). Just as in Mulholland’s definition of spiritual formation, we are being changed into the image of Christ and the process is ever-increasing.
Note, however, the context for this transformation: contemplation.
Contemplation here doesn’t refer to thinking something over, meditating, sitting with it cognitively (though certainly we don’t leave brains at the door). Contemplation is about beholding—and it’s not unidirectional.
We are not just beholding God, we are being beheld by him. Seeing God and being seen by God.
Growing in God is not just about knowing God more. There’s a flip side to it in which we also grow in being known by God. Obviously God knows us already so it’s not as if there’s a process that God needs to go on to get more information about who we are. Knowing, in this sense, is not about information, it’s about relationship. The dynamic here is not that God would need to learn more about us but that we would be more awake to his knowing of us. That we would be aware of that process and that relationship and in so doing we would also know ourselves better
Our knowing of God and our being known by God are inseparable, Paul hints at that in Galatians 4:9. Both come from God’s initiative and his revelation, and that helps to steer us away from imagining both God and ourselves in terms of our own wishes.
I think this is an important protection also against getting trapped in a kind of introspection and over self-analysis that just has self at the centre, because all of that inner work is contained within and held within our relationship with God. It also speaks to our reliance on God for the process of self-knowledge. Personally I am so in need of the Holy Spirit to just reveal myself to me. I need God’s help to figure out what’s going on in me. Some of y’all are super in touch with your emotions and you’re doing a great job with this, but some of us need an extra dose of divine intervention.
This is so different from my natural bent towards formation, which is based on the assumption that I need to make myself better for Jesus. Obviously, this self-improvement project that I might embark on is not entirely self-motivated. I’m doing it under the direction of Christ and the end goal has changed: I desire to be formed in the image of Christ, that I might love God and the world, and serve God with my life. This is a revolutionary shift on a Copernican scale. This is formation as the process of transformation into the image of Christ for the sake of others, as Mulholland describes. But there can still a distance in this approach, where I think of reading the Bible, silence, Sabbath, even prayer, as something that I do, with God held at arm’s length.
I am the project and I’m working on myself, even if I am doing it according to God’s criteria and out of a heart of genuine love for him.
This isn’t bad. Please, train wisely in God’s ways that you might be a) be a better person and b) experience greater wellbeing. This is necessary, but it isn’t sufficient.
Moses’s relationship with God was something almost other-worldly. It’s written that God “would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Ex 33:11). Wow. Even this, however, is under the Old Covenant, and we live under the New. By the work of the Spirit we are drawn into a depth of relationship with God, even greater than Moses; into communion with Christ.
Paul describes this union in mystical terms. In Colossians he writes, “this is the secret: Christ lives in you” (Col 1:27 NLT). And on this flip side, “For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3, NLT). Your real life, who you really are is hidden, with Christ, in God.
In Psalm 27, David sings of his longing for God, to see Him and to dwell with him.
For in the day of trouble
he will keep me safe in his dwelling;
he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent
and set me high upon a rock.
(Psalm 27:5)
David longs to be hidden, concealed and treasured, in God’s dwelling place. David can speak of being found only in God’s dwelling, wonderful as that is.
We can speak of being found in God’s self.
Not only does the Lord forgive us and receive us; He also takes us into himself. There we find all that we are carried. However weighty that might be, however much we might feel both too much and somehow also not enough. Whatever that weight is, whatever pain we carry, our disappointments, our joys, and our strength, God’s loving nature is spacious enough to hold it all.
The God that we follow isn’t one who wants to hold you at arm’s length until you’re better. He doesn’t want to tinker away on your life like a project car in the garage. He’s not giving you a training plan of exercises and sending you away to work on them until your monthly check in. Instead, our God invites us into deep intimacy, drawing us into himself.
[1] Mulholland, M. Robert. Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation. InterVarsity Press, 1993.
[2] Smith, Christian, and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York, 2005; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Oct. 2005),
[3] See, for example, 2 Corinthians 5:11, “What we are is (made plain /disclosed) to God, and I hope it is also made plain to you(r conscience).”
