Intentionality Of The Heart
In twenty years of training Christian leaders in leadership development rooted in spiritual formation, we at The Leadership Institute have learned that the negative perception of Christians is an unfortunate result of professed but unpracticed faith. Even Christians affirming spiritual formation ideas may be little changed unless they engage in spiritual formation practices.
For example, the regular practice of solitude and silence coupled with prayer has become a place of deep transformation, producing hypocrisy’s opposite—integrity. Hypocrisy is a dissonance between profession and practice. In regular solitude, God uncovers our pretending, our appearance managing, and our malformed images of Him. More genuine communion with God develops a growing likeness to Him in us.
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God’s command, “Be holy as I am holy,” is inspiring. Imagine God looking at you and saying, “You can actually be holy as I am holy.” But it’s also unsettling. Do we really want to have the effect on other people that the vision of God had on Isaiah and even the seraphs?
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings. With two wings, they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” At the sound of their voices, the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”
To follow Jesus implies that we enter into a way of life that is given character and shape and direction by the one who calls us. To follow Jesus means picking up rhythms and ways of doing things that are often unsaid but always derivative from Jesus formed by the influence of Jesus. To follow Jesus means that we cannot separate what Jesus is saying from what Jesus is doing and the Way he is doing it.
I have a recommendation for an enterprising Christian businessperson. Think of how the letters WWJD have been used. Why don’t you also sell bracelets, T-shirts, and bumper stickers with these letters: HWJDI? They stand for “How Would Jesus Do It?” It would be very helpful in reframing what it means to live the Jesus Way.
