Intellectual smuggery is deflective and shallow. Echoing in the chamber of an ivory tower does not make a person anymore pious than leading a COD server makes a person anymore effective as a foot soldier. There is a reason why some of the best NRL commentators are former players: their input is not mere muse and speculation but gritty reflection from the pride and pain of wins and losses borne out of lived experience.
If you fancy yourself a thinker – get out of your chair, go for a walk, and put your ideas into practice.
The most effective educators and influencers I know are those who have a life beyond the armchair (or keyboard or Facebook). No one in human history has come close to the wisdom embodied in the life and teachings of Jesus from Nazareth, and He was a salt of the earth tradie who took His message to the streets. At the same time, He had the remarkable ability to not only hold His own but tear down the religious piety of the greatest teachers in the land.
Jesus is our model exemplar, and spiritual formation in His tradition is totalising in the life of His followers – and that formation is a transforming process of the inmost dimension of the human being, the heart (spirit or will). True spiritual formation takes place in the life of a believer when the embodied and reflective will takes on the character of Christ (“until Christ is formed in you!” Gal. 4:19).
To speak of spiritual formation in this sense is to frame a progression of life in which people actually do the things Jesus taught, rather than abdicating any such responsibility in navel gazeing wonder if He was even who He claimed to be: truly God and truly man.
Think about these remarkable words of Paul:
“The life which I live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.”
(Gal. 2:20)
Not faith in, but the faith of.
We will not become perfect until we meet our Maker; but being spiritually formed into the likeness of Jesus we can, as Paul urged the Philippians,
“become blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine like stars in the world.”
(Phil. 2:15)
