The Calculus of Spiritual Formation

If this graphic looks familiar, it’s because I wrote about this sign a few weeks ago. My grandson Roman must read these seventeen words each time he visits our house. By now, of course, he has memorized them, and he rattles them off in a rapid staccato. I don’t expect him to comprehend and cherish these words yet – that is the work of a lifetime – but I believe that someday he will see what they mean, and they will take his breath away.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I sat around the dinner table with Roman and his parents to talk about these seventeen words. I asked my impromptu focus group which of the three clauses resonates most with them and which, if any, seems difficult to grasp intuitively.

They agreed that it is the last clause – “I don’t need to prove myself” – that is most difficult to grasp. Same here. I feel that I’ve spent my whole life trying to prove myself, so although I believe that the third statement is true, it doesn’t usually feel true for me. There’s a cognitive dissonance here.

As I’ve pondered our discussion of these three clauses, I realized that they constitute a kind of equation or syllogism. You could picture the relationship between the clauses this way:

Or, to use the language of logic, we can see the three clauses as an if-then statement:

This dependence of the last clause on the first two tells me something: If I’m struggling to believe the last clause, it’s because I’m a little shaky on one or both of the first two. Either I’m not sure this is my Father’s world or I’m not sure that I’m His beloved.

I wrote last week about getting God’s truth from my head to my heart.
 
We’re intuitively aware of this divide between head and heart. Daily life has a way of revealing the gap between our aspirational theology and our actual. We all have an aspirational theology, a set of principles we believe to be true even though we don’t fully understand or appreciate them; things we believe because we know we’re supposed to believe them. These are the truths that we grasp intellectually, but they have not yet sunk down into our soul so that they pervade and inform our unconscious assumptions.

These two vital truths – God’s sovereign rule over all things and His unceasing affection for me – are an example of aspirational theology: they are easy to say but difficult to fully grasp, easy to understand with my head but difficult to comprehend with my heart.

I wrote last week about two ways to move God’s truth from head to heart: rehearsal (reflection and meditation) and suffering. A friend commented that for her, it is her relationship with God that makes His truth a matter of the heart.

I think my friend is onto something.

When I feel that I must prove myself, that’s a clue that I must go back to rehearse those first two clauses: “This is my Father’s world” and especially “I am His beloved.” If I can get that right – if I can get those two precious truths down into the center of my being where I can cherish them – only then can I believe that I have nothing to prove.

We sang about this as children: “Jesus loves me. This I know,” but we surely couldn’t understand it then. Comprehending the vast love of God for His beloved – His unrelenting affection for me – is itself the work of a lifetime, the work of several eternities, in fact. I have often said that the New Jerusalem will be populated by the community of the astonished: we will all wonder what we are doing there. I will wonder how someone like me could come to dwell in a place like that, at home with the Holy One of Israel.

This then is the main task for any believer, to move ever deeper in appreciating God’s great and unsearchable affection for His own. We’re going to spend eternity amazed at the love of our Father, and the Gospel invites us to revel in that wonder right now.

Persevere.