If we do not make formation in Christ the priority, then we’re just going to keep on producing Christians that are indistinguishable in their character from many non-Christians.
In one way or another, it is a common mistake to think transformation is all in the will. And it isn’t! It’s in the mind – how we think, what occupies our minds, and so forth. It’s in our feelings. It’s in our body.
God’s aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.
Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.
The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That’s the key to transforming society in the larger arena.
We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.
The different parts of the automobile like the ignition switch, the various buttons, the steering wheel – the interfaces between the driver and the machine – is our spirit or heart.
