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Spiritual Formation and Preaching Spiritual Formation Spiritual formation is our growth in Christ, often aided by a spiritual director or discipler. In the postmodern era, spiritual formation and spiritual direction are becoming increasingly important. Protestants, Orthodox and Catholic communities are all studying anew how to listen to the living God. The following essay explores the topic of listening to the Voice of God. Preaching flows out of our own spiritual formation and it is a form of spiritual direction to those to whom we speak. The Voice of God Spiritual formation happens when we hear and obey the Voice of God. But does God truly speak to us today? I once lived next to a lion. He was confined in a zoo not far from my house in Cairo. I was unable to make him roar. That happened in his own time, usually when he was alone early in the morning, when things were still. Then, his roar would bellow over the trees and buildings. It would slice right through my shut windows and awaken me in my bed where I lay, a kilometer away. God is like a lion that cannot be forced to speak, but has he ever? Christians say that God has. We say this because God is love (1 John 4:16) and an attribute of love is a desire to know and to be known. That is why the prophets spoke and the scriptures were written. This is why the Incarnation happened, because God wanted to know and be known in the fullest, human way possible. God told the world a Story, a Story that took generations to tell, a Story about himself. But the Story was not told to everyone at the same time. In the Bible we read how God entered into a special covenantal relationship with a chosen people. Through that covenant, the Hebrews learned what God was like, specifically and personally. They, in turn, were to make God known to the nations. As the Hebrews encountered God, they recorded what they experienced. The Story was not told once and then forgotten. It was recorded so all peoples could experience it. This is why we talk about the inspiration of the Bible: God's Spirit actively caused the Story to be recorded for all times and peoples. God still speaks because God still wishes to be known and because the Story is recorded for us all. We can be reading the pages of the Scripture when, all of a sudden, they just seem to be directed at us. We call this illumination. Always, the illumination we receive will be consistent with the inspired Word and it usually comes in the context of encountering that Word. And this is why we pray the prayer of illumination before we preach. In it, we ask for God to speak to people. For instance, John Calvin would pray: “O Lord, heavenly Father, in whom is the fullness of light and wisdom, enlighten our minds by your Holy Spirit, and give us grace to receive your Word with reverence and humility, without which no one can understand your truth.” Recognizing the Voice of God Through the ages, believers have talked about their encounter with the Voice of God. Several elements always seem to reoccur in their writings. Here is what three widely different people — the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, the neo-orthodox Karl Barth and the popular Southern Baptist author Henry T. Blackaby — have said about the Voice. The Voice of God . . . is unique, it smites your existence, it renews you with God, it announces God to you Karl Barth Church Dogmatics, Vol. 1, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1975), 141-143
it exalts Jesus, it works against Satan, it strengthens you in the Bible, results in truth, results in love Jonathan Edwards The Works of Jonathan Edwards (1834; reprint, Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1974), 2:12-17.
is unique, is truly God, it leaves you with an understood message, it is a real encounter Henry T. Blackaby and Claude V. King, Experiencing God: Knowing and Doing the Will of God (Nashville, Tennesee: Lifeway Press, 1990), 72-107. This can be simplified into the following four observations. The Voice of God: 1. Is consistent with the Story of God 2. Is an encounter with God 3. Provokes a response to or away from God 4. Causes God’s character to grow within us when we respond Discerning the Voice of God from other Voices In addition to hearing the Voice of God, there is also the voice of self and the voice of Satan. Unless we develop spiritual discernment, we will confuse the voices. After the time of Constantine, the church became increasingly worldly. Yet, holy men and women left it all to go into the deserts of Egypt to hear the Voice of God. During one stay I had in the Egyptian desert, the air was perfectly still. There, I experienced total silence for the first time in my life. It was captivating. The silence hung so heavily that I felt like any noise, however slight, would seem like an act of violence. In that environment, the early monks learned to distinguish the Voice of God from the voice of self and Satan. In the quiet, they struggled with their own temptations until they received the gift of discernment. They learned that when we are full of ourselves, we cannot be full of God. They taught that each of us is enslaved by our own besetting sins. Passions such as rage, lust or jealousy can violently dominate our souls and make it do their bidding. Because of this domination, the monastics concluded that any soul controlled by a sin-passion is also affected by demonic influences. They spoke of spiritual growth as a process of becoming free from our sin-passions and the demonic powers associated with them. This process is called theosis. To travel on the path of theosis toward godliness, one needs to actively struggle against temptation with the help of a spiritual father or mother and by growing in prayer. The early monks fasted and prayed in the desert in imitation of Christ, who fasted in the wilderness when he was tempted by Satan. Asceticism is a spiritual discipline which develops prayer by making us more dependent on God's grace. Christian asceticism does not focus on the body as something evil. Instead, its focus is on grace. As we grow into God's grace, a deep stillness and peace begins to permeate our lives. We become free from the reigning passions in our lives. We become calm in the sense of trusting in the presence of God in our souls. We achieve a state of dispassion, not that we become disinterested in life, but that our soul has become fully in love with God. The early monks called this inner stillness, hesychia. It's a form of prayer in which we live our lives in communion with God, free from life's idolatries, listening to and communicating with God. It is when we are in this state of deep trust and inner quiet that we are most able to hear the Voice of God and to distinguish it from the voice of self and the voice of Satan. We grow in spiritual discernment. The Voice of God and Preaching We are left with the question, "How does the Voice of God affect our preaching?" It affects our preaching because we are all in the process of spiritual formation. As we hear and obey the Voice of God, we become changed as people. We preach out of our encounter with the living God. But as preachers, we are also spiritual directors. This is not meant to say that we tell people what to do. Rather, a spiritual director listens to what the Voice of God might be saying for others. This requires an honest knowledge of people and spiritual discernment. A spiritual director is a soul friend, someone who seeks a spiritual word from God for the benefit of others. When we apply this concept to the preaching task, then our job is to preach the plain meaning of a scriptural text and also to discern what God wishes to say out of that text for the benefit of our listeners. The discernment we receive will affect the application of the sermon and the tone by which we preach. Spiritual directors follow a principle that is very important for the preaching task. They recognize that when God gives them a spiritual word for a person, it will be for where a person is really at in his or her spiritual life, not where we might imagine that person to be. A spiritual director knows this and tries to honestly understand the real struggles and issues of a person. Only then can a spiritual director listen for what God might be saying to help that person grow to the next level. This thought from spiritual direction is important to those of us who preach. Often, we imagine our listeners to be at a higher spiritual level than might actually be the case. We may think that our people are on top of everything when, in reality, they might be filled with doubts and struggles which they'll never admit. In order to hear genuine spiritual words for the people we serve, we must honestly know them. In the modern era, not much place was given to the Voice of God. Now, in the postmodern era, this ancient practice is being re-discovered. And lo! — it is good! We are coming to understand that sermon preparation does not just involve studying the Bible. It also includes "studying" people. And it also entails a prayerful listening to God. In the intersection of these three elements we hope to hear a hermeneutical word for those we serve.
For Further Reading
Blackaby's book, Experiencing God first introduced many people to the concept of hearing God's Voice.
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