But it’s also worth pondering how both can drift askew in the hands of an unsteady driver. Gospel-Centered can veer into passivity. “Believing the gospel more-and-more” becomes thinking about the gospel without doing anything else - Willard’s “sin management.” Meanwhile, Spiritual Formation leads some to reckon that it’s all up to our consistency,

If you try to bend metal without the softening effect of heat, it may simply break. Many people, after years of being crushed under moralistic behaviorism, abandon their faith altogether, complaining that they are exhausted and “can’t keep it up.” But the gospel of God’s grace doesn’t try to bend a heart into a new pattern; it melts it and reforms

It is largely caused and sustained by the basic message that we constantly hear from Christian pulpits. We are flooded with what I have called “gospels of sin management,” in one form or another, while Jesus’ invitation to eternal life now – right in the midst of work, business, and profession – remains for the most part ignored and unspoken.