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Last week, our media team interviewed one of our school families who had recently been through a particularly harrowing ordeal with their daughter, a student at Grace. She had suffered a prolonged illness, requiring extended care and treatment. Part of the interview captured the family’s story and testimony, and part of it documented their experience with our school. At the end of the interview, the father said that many schools can teach our children English, history, math, and science, but few can shape them into having a deeper relationship with Jesus. Here we see Jesus.
In this one quote, this school daddy encapsulated what’s most important about Christian schooling generally, and about Grace specifically. Grace exists to train our students’ hearts and minds toward Jesus. At our school, we call this process “spiritual formation,” but that’s just another term for discipleship, the intentional process of coming alongside students, sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with them, inviting them into a saving relationship with Him, teaching them what it means to live as His disciples and to access the abundant life He promised those who love and serve Him, and equipping them to be His hands and feet in the world around Him. This is our families’ deepest desires for their children, and we serve as helpful partners to our families in fulfilling those desires.
But what is that process? How do we “teach Jesus” through spiritual formation in our children’s lives? That’s a really important question in today’s world. The Barna Group has studied modern American Christians and found that only 10 percent of those claiming to be followers of Christ are what they call “resilient disciples,” which most active churchgoers would simply define as basic followers of Jesus. A major part of the problem behind this paucity of active discipleship is that, as Dallas Willard famously said in The Great Omission, very few churches have an active plan for discipling their members. The basic plan seems to be “attend church, read your Bible, and pray.” If it were that simple, the percentages would be higher, and America would look very different, much more like the Kingdom of God, than it does currently.
As image-bearers of God, we are whole beings. We’re not just “brains on sticks,” not merely thinking beings, as much of our heritage from our Enlightenment past would make us believe. Nor are we simply emotional beings who can be assuaged and healed by the right therapist. Neither are we solely physical beings, as those who would argue against our divine origins contend, merely evolved, naturalistic beings. To be an image-bearer of God means to be all of these things, and so much more: an incredibly complex being who thinks, feels, and does, all hopefully empowered and equipped by the Spirit of God through a relationship with Jesus Christ.
A spiritual formation plan, a discipleship plan that equips complex image-bearers to think, feel, and do, has to appeal to the heart, the head, and the hands. And that’s the focus of our spiritual formation plan at Grace. I want to talk here primarily about training the heart, or our desires.
We are fundamentally a people of the heart, a people of desire. We are created by a God who desires, desiring His name to be glorified, goodness in the world around us, and intimacy with His people. Curt Thompson has said in The Soul of Desire that “God’s utter, joyful desire is for us to be with him and he with us such that we might together create beauty in the world… He is calling out our desire to redeem it and make it the leading edge of the renewal of all things.”
As fallen beings, our desires are often toward self-gratification. Our desires drift from things noble to trivial, from love for country and children to the Cowboys and Blue Bell ice cream. Sadly, our hearts seek darker desires, as well, those things that we use to self-medicate our pain or as substitutes for our Savior, as impotent and invalid sources of our sufficiency, value, and worth. John Calvin famously said that the human heart is an idol factory, manufacturing things that stand between God and us. Our hearts seek to indulge these desires, like the stirring lines of “Come Thou Fount” remind us: “prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.”
St. Augustine called these “disordered loves,” created things we put in the place of our Creator and love in His place, to our own emptiness, desolation, and dread. Nothing was created to bear the weight of our ultimate affections, not our work, not our wives, not Washington DC, not the White Sox, or anyone else, but God, and when we put that weight on them, we, and they, collapse under it.
The first step in shaping the heart is to get a new one, and that comes with coming to a relationship with Jesus Christ. When Jesus met with Nicodemus in the dead of night, He said that “Unless one is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God” (John 3). When I come to the place in my life when I realize my desolation without Jesus and my need for Him, He meets that need that only He can fill. What’s more, He fills me with His Holy Spirit, gives me new life, and transforms my desires. Once, I didn’t want to chase after the Lord. I didn’t care about Him, and it didn’t convict me when I strayed from Him. When my heart desires these things, even when I’m haltingly and imperfectly chasing after them, I know that’s the Spirit living within me.
This is why we see Jesus in kids. Other schools may see objects to be controlled, or receptacles to be poured into, or begin by seeing students as broken and depraved beings. At Grace, we begin with students as image-bearers of God, broken in sin, yes, but with the capacity of ultimate destiny as children of God and heirs to the New Jerusalem. This affords them and us the dignity, value, and worth that allow us to see, know, and love them in a truly unique way, not only for what we see now, but for the potential of what we pray they will become. This changes everything in how we handle our curriculum, our pedagogy (classroom instruction), our discipline, and everything we do in ways I don’t have time to talk about here, but that make us radically different and more aligned with who God made them to be than others who don’t operate from this perspective. Therefore, our first step is to share with them the story of God who is active in the world, who loves them and who sent His Son to save the world and them, and to invite them into a relationship with Jesus.
The Holy Spirit is the active agent in transforming my heart, but because love is the intentional decision to be all for another, and because God wants my love rather than involuntary servitude, He calls me to participate in my transformation. While I can’t earn my sanctification, I must participate in it. There are very definitely things I can and must do to train and incline my heart toward the Lord, so that my tendency is to press into Him rather than turn away.
Because we are embodied beings, our bodies work together with our hearts to shape and mold our spirits. We need practices and approaches to teach our bodies and spirits to work with the Holy Spirit to shape and mold our hearts toward God. These are called spiritual disciplines. I prefer the term “means of grace,” because they are the way the Holy Spirit interacts with our agency to shape our hearts toward His. One of our major spiritual formation, heart-shaping strategies at Grace is to introduce our students to the means of grace, and give them opportunities to experience and practice them.
Introducing many ways of interacting with Scripture allows God’s Word to work in multiple ways upon our hearts. These include inductive Bible study, or studying the Bible for the meaning of a particular passage and its application on one’s life, meditation on Scripture, praying through it, an ancient process of listening to the Holy Spirit speak through small passages of Scripture and speaking back to God, reading through the entire Bible to capture the metanarrative, or great story and how it all points forward to the work and ministry of Jesus, and memorization, implanting God’s Word on one’s heart for reference and mediation.
Most of us are so familiar with petitionary prayer, asking God for things. This is certainly a critical part of communicating with the Lord, commanded by Scripture, but it is only one way to talk to God. Teaching kids thanksgiving prayer, intercessory prayer, prayer for healing, prayer of lament, and others, is also critical to communing with God, so we can enjoy Him and He can make us new. We want our students not to see prayer as a duty, but a joy.
In our media-saturated culture, we are pummeled daily with distractions and messages, most of which are contrary to the gospel. One of the most healing and restorative practices for followers of Jesus is to sit in God’s presence, releasing to Him the worries and concerns of the day, and receiving God’s peace and love. Our best model for this is Jesus, who often withdrew from the disciples and the press of the crowd to be alone with His Father, to listen to His voice, and to be reminded of who He was and whose He was. Being alone and still with God isn’t a practice that comes naturally to us; in fact, it can feel uncomfortable, even impossible. But it’s not, and that’s why it requires vision and practice that we want to provide for our students.
We try to not only protect Sundays at Grace from school activities and communication, but also encourage worship and restorative practices for our families, so that they can practice Sabbath. God commanded the Sabbath for His people, not as a ritualistic measure but because He made them with limits and knew what they needed. Our broken tendency is to try to live without limits, to push ourselves to the breaking point, to add “one more thing”, and to deem everything, and mostly ourselves, as critically important. Sabbath is a great reminder that we are not in control of our lives. It’s an opportunity to reorder our loves every week, restoring the Lord to the center of our hearts. It’s also an act of faith and trust, believing that the Lord will give us the other six days to accomplish everything He has planned for us, and the perspective to realize what isn’t important.
Everything God gives is a great gift, meant to be enjoyed. Fasting is so important because the natural tendency of our hearts is to indulge every whim to overuse. Fasting trains us to focus our attention and prayer, but also to release the stranglehold that certain things, like food and technology, have on our lives. Regular fasting is a command of the Lord, again not as a ritualistic deed to earn heavenly points, but as a way to not allow any one good thing to become ultimate in our lives. We teach our students how to fast and, at times, encourage it in healthy and appropriate ways.
We can’t teach what we don’t know, and no one can disciple others to a place they haven’t already been. So, the primary way we prepare for spiritual formation at Grace is by engaging in all of these practices as disciples of Jesus ourselves. Loving students and families as Jesus loves is a supernatural act that requires hearts shaped and transformed by the Holy Spirit, acting through human agency. We desire God so that we can love your kids.
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