You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Worship is the heart of discipleship if and only if worship is a repertoire of Spirit-endued practices that grab hold of your gut, recalibrate your kardia, and capture your imagination. Because we are liturgical animals, we need to recognize the rival liturgies that vie for our hearts and then commit ourselves to the rightly ordered liturgy of Chri

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

He gives us the gifts of good rituals so we can practice loving him with heart, soul, mind, and strength. Thankfully, we pursue God with God. We love because he first loved us.

We ought not to settle for being Christians who happen to be artists, or lawyers who are simply “also” Christians. We should see our vocations as ways to pursue God himself—and, as Plantinga puts it, to do so with “integrity, independence, and Christian boldness.”

Plantinga’s vision is relevant to all vocations and professions: he paints a picture in which God is invested in every square inch of his creation—not just the church and theology, but also philosophy and physics, law and economics, agriculture and the arts.

Humans are made to design. Indeed, if designer Herbert Simon’s axiom is correct, then we could rightly say that the gospel itself is a design project—it is the good news that humanity is now liberated to take up the design work given to us at creation, to assume our (co)mission as creation’s designers.

The US Constitution is the design equivalent of the Jaguar XKE and the Palazzo Te: it liberates human energies and maximizes human options.”

In this sense, good design tells the truth about the world. “A well-designed hoe,” Grudin comments, “speaks the truth to the ground that it breaks and, conversely, tells us the truth about the ground.”

Robert Grudin elucidates this sense of design as intrinsic to the calling of humanity: “Design is the purest exercise of human skill. To add a new instrument or process to the design treasury is to engage in the force of evolving nature.”