Spiritual Formation: Three Ingredients
Have you ever tried to learn something? For example, have you ever tried to learn how to play a musical instrument, succeed in business, excel at a sport, master another language, or complete a college degree? For you to become excellent or just proficient at any of these types of things, you must have at least three ingredients: (1) time, (2) effort, and (3) discipline. You must consistently put in the time, exert the effort, and exhibit the discipline to remain focused and not give up until you achieve the ability, attitude, skill, or level of success that becomes synonymous with who you are.
Most things in life are learned this way. Learning requires time, effort, and discipline. Then why, when it comes to spiritual things, do people often want a different way or new set of requirements for learning? What if God designed you to learn spiritually in the same way you learn other things? Then, spiritual learning would require the same three ingredients, time, effort, and discipline, as everything else you try to learn.
Spiritual Formation: Five Steps
Learning is rarely achieved with inconsistent time, haphazard effort, and lack of discipline. Therefore, these three ingredients—time, effort, and discipline—if supported properly with a strategy or steps could ensure that you are focused appropriately to achieve learning.
A five-step strategy that supports the time, effort, and discipline that you put forth to learn are (1) know, (2) feel, (3) understand, (4) apply, and (5) practice. Let’s use these five steps of learning for your spiritual formation. Spiritual formation is a process of becoming more like Jesus both inwardly (your desires, motivations, attitudes) and outwardly (your behaviors, actions, and skills).
Step 1: Know
To become more like Jesus, you need to know who Jesus is, how He thinks, what He does, etc. Therefore, you must know the facts of the Bible, specifically about Jesus. What information do you know? To know, you must do some research, which can be a cross-cultural experience because reading the Bible introduces you to different cultures, time periods, places, and languages. A proper study of the Bible must be completed to know the intended meaning of what you read. This step in learning is supported by reading the Bible for yourself, hearing others teach the Bible, and studying the Bible both individually using Bible study resources and collectively with others.
Step 2: Feel
To experience spiritual formation, you need to connect emotionally with the people in the Bible and God. To feel or connect emotionally, you must identify with what the biblical people felt when they encountered God, the Son (Jesus). You must engage your heart and mind in your reading of the Bible. Make a deliberate effort to think about the reality of their life situations and engage your emotions with how they must have felt when facing those specific circumstances or when they came face to face with Jesus.
Step 3: Understand
Once you know the information from the Bible (what it says) and you feel the reality of the life circumstances of the people in the Bible, the next step in your spiritual formation is to integrate what you know and how you feel to understand the personal implications that would lead you to become more like Jesus. This step is a mental and emotional process. Mentally, you know what the Bible says. Then, you allow this new biblical knowledge to trigger an emotional response that hopefully leads to application. What would this biblical truth require of you? How would it change your life? To become more like Jesus, will you obey what you know and feel is true about Him?
Step 4: Apply
Most people stop in the learning process of their own spiritual formation at step 3 because they are unwilling to make a direct and specific application of what the Bible says. To apply means you are not only willing to allow God to empower your spiritual formation, but also you are an active participant by determining an obedience response for you to take (i.e., what action, attitude, behavior, desire, motivation, skill needs to be more like Jesus to progress in your spiritual formation?). You know, feel, and understand, but will you apply it to your life?
Step 5: Practice
Practice is directly linked to Step 4: Apply because practice means you regularly and repeatedly perform the action, demonstrate the attitude, exercise the skill – whatever is an obedience response to what you know, feel, and understand from reading the Bible, learning the Bible with others, and studying the Bible for yourself. You practice what you know, feel, and understand the Bible says by applying your knowledge, feelings, and understanding to real-life situations. To practice means you embrace wholeheartedly that spiritual formation is a process of you becoming more like Jesus both inwardly (your desires, motivations, attitudes) and outwardly (your behaviors, actions, skills).
Over time, with consistent effort and discipline, you can implement this five-step strategy of learning: to know, feel, understand, apply, and practice, and discover learning is achievable.
Spiritual Formation: One Person’s Power
Even if you have the three ingredients (time, effort, and discipline) supported by an effective strategy (know, feel, understand, apply, and practice), you still need one person’s power for spiritual formation. God, the Spirit is promised to indwell all believers in Jesus to serve as a permanent helper who leads you to know all truth (John 14:16-17). In fact, Jesus tells His disciples that apart from God, the Spirit, present and working in them and through them, they can do nothing toward their own spiritual formation or help others grow spiritually (John 15:5).
After Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and ascension, the apostle Paul testifies to the work of God, the Spirit in his life to the believers in Jesus at Corinth.
But it was to us [Paul and Sosthenes] that God revealed these things by His Spirit. For His Spirit searches out everything and shows us God’s deep secrets. No one can know a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit, and no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. And we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely given us. When we tell you these things, we do not use words that come from human wisdom. Instead, we speak words given to us by the Spirit, using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths. But people who aren’t spiritual can’t receive these truths from God’s Spirit. It all sounds foolish to them and they can’t understand it, for only those who are spiritual can understand what the Spirit means. 1 Corinthians 2:10-14
Notice the three ingredients (time, effort, and discipline) along with the five-step strategy (know, feel, understand, apply, and practice) can be used with any learning in life. Still, there is one difference when it comes to spiritual formation. You cannot manufacture your own spiritual formation! God, the Spirit’s power makes your spiritual formation possible, not you (Romans 8:1-17). You implement the three ingredients supported by the five steps as your willful submission to God and your invitation to God, the Spirit to do His work of spiritual formation in and through you. God, the Spirit’s power comes in response to your submission and invitation but is evidenced by you consistently putting in the time, exerting the effort, and exhibiting the discipline to remain focused, not to give up until you are more like Jesus – living accordingly to God, the Spirit (Romans 8:12-14) and Jesus is formed in you (Galatians 4:19). Eventually, as God, the Spirit empowers your spiritual formation so that people may encounter you and get a sense of what it might be like to meet Jesus. To God be the glory!
