As I continue to read Shaped By the Word, It becomes more and more apparent how misguided I have been in my efforts to make myself into the person that I perceive God would have me to be. Consider these two quotes:
Let me give you something to meditate on. Take it and work through it for the rest of your life! It is possible for us to will the will of God but not surrender our heart. I can will the will of God for my life, but I can will to do it at my convenience, when it suits me, how it suits me, in the context that suits me. I can honestly and sincerely will to do the will of God without surrendering my heart. This is why there is one more level of being beyond the soul, or will. There is the “me” that wills.
Here we come to the central point of spiritual formation. Our acculturation tends to move us into both perceptual and experiential modes of being that operate on the principle that all we need for wholeness is simply to bring something more to where we are, which will move us to where we want to be. If we acquire more information to process, more technique to function with, more “doing” to do, we will move ourselves into a higher level of wholeness. We tend to look for some piece of information, some technique or method of spiritual formation that will take us from where we are to where we want to be with a minimum of inconvenience, pain, or suffering. We have so emphasized the Life dimension of the New Testament that we have avoided coming to grips with its death dimension. We have avoided the fact that in the gospel, Life comes out of death, not out of life. Trying to bring Life out of life attempts to escape the necessity of dying to the old parameters of our existence, the necessity of relinquishing the brokenness of our being, the necessity of letting go of those things that warp and misshape and distort who we are. The emphasis upon informational, functional, “doing” is our attempt to bring Life out of life. But formational, relational “being” enables God to lead us to that death from which Life emerges.