![Preview of You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/419XqjcSt2L._SL200_.jpg)
added by Jonathan Simcoe · updated 5mo ago
added by Jonathan Simcoe · updated 5mo ago
If our loves are absorbed with material things, then our love is a weight that drags us downward to inferior things. But when our loves are animated by the renewing fire of the Spirit, then our weight tends upward.
Jonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago
“My weight is my love,” he says. “Wherever I am carried, my love is carrying me.”
Jonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago
The body of Christ is that unique community of practice whose members own up to the fact that we don’t always love what we say we do—that the “devices and desires” of our hearts outstrip our best intentions. The practices of Christian worship are a tangible, practiced, re-formative way to address this tension and gap.
Jonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago
Now here’s the crucial insight for Christian formation and discipleship: not only is this learning-by-practice the way our hearts are correctly calibrated, but it is also the way our loves and longings are misdirected and miscalibrated—not because our intellect has been hijacked by bad ideas but because our desires have been captivated by rival vis
... See moreJonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago
But if we are first and foremost lovers, and if our action is overwhelmingly governed by our unconscious habits, then intellectual threats might not be the most important. Indeed, we could be so fixated on intellectual temptations that we don’t realize our hearts are being liturgically co-opted by rival empires all the while. The point of looking a
... See moreJonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago
Has all of your new knowledge and information and thinking liberated you from those habits? As anyone who has ever attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous well knows, “Your best thinking got you here.”2
Jonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago
You are what you love because you live toward what you want.
Jonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago
In short, if you are what you love, and love is a habit, then discipleship is a rehabituation of your loves.
Jonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago
The practices of Christian worship train our love—they are practice for the coming kingdom, habituating us as citizens of the kingdom of God.
Jonathan Simcoe added 5mo ago