Sublime

I want to supplement Willard’s emphasis on the individual practice of the spiritual disciplines with what might be a counterintuitive thesis in our “millennial” moment: that the most potent, charged, transformative site of the Spirit’s work is found in the most unlikely of places—the church!

And I include myself in the criticism. We as the American church need to take more ownership for our collective sin, our obsession with things that will not make an ounce of difference in heaven, and our failure (past and present) to stand up and speak up for the poor, for the stranger, for the ones who don’t look like us.

In God’s economy, everyone benefits by everyone contributing.

The justified pastor—the man justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to God’s glory alone, who happens to be a pastor—when taken on his good day or bad day, ministry high or ministry low, will be received with gladness and welcome. Clothed in the righteousness of him in whom you trust, how can you be turned away? You will not b

For a wise articulation of this point, see Michael Horton, Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014).

Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.