He Wants You
Why Formation Belongs at the Heart of God's Mission
What are things that, if you do not tend to them, slowly fall apart?
Gardens.
Clothes.
Teeth.
Interestingly, the soul is little different. And yet the soul is often the very thing we neglect most easily.
This happens in part because the soul is difficult to see. Much of what shapes us happens beneath the surface of our lives. A vibrant soul has much to do with awareness—awareness of God, awareness of ourselves, awareness of what is forming us over time.
David describes this kind of attentiveness in Psalm 131:2:
“I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.”
It is a tender image. Attunement, born of pruning.
But many of us have been formed into the opposite kind of life. We live hurried lives in a distracted world. We learn to measure ourselves by productivity, usefulness, accomplishment, visibility. Even our spirituality can become another form of striving. And sometimes, our desire to be useful to God only deepens the estrangement.
Becoming
The Christian tradition has long used the phrase spiritual formation to describe this slow shaping of the soul.
At its simplest, spiritual formation is the process of being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ—in the inmost heart and gradually expressed in every domain of our being. The apostle Paul writes that Christians are being transformed “from one degree of glory to another” (2 Corinthians 3:18). Elsewhere he says that God’s purpose is that every Christian would become “fully mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28). Spiritual formation is not merely about gaining more knowledge or more discipline. It is about becoming—becoming a unique reflection of Jesus himself.
This transformation is not passive, nor is it instant. It involves participation. Over time, even the ordinary practices of the Christian life—prayer, Scripture, worship, confession, silence, obedience, work, recreation, suffering, death—become the means by which God reshapes us from the inside out.
A hint of this is found in a simple prayer that my wife and I pray over our daughters: “God, help these children become all you created them to be.” It reminds us that our goal is not merely happy or successful children, but setting young image-bearers on an ever-emerging pilgrimage.
I think spiritual formation is, in many ways, learning to desire that same thing for ourselves.
Not merely that God would use us. But that, over time, we would become more of who he uniquely created us to be.
Beneath the Surface
If spiritual formation is ultimately about becoming more like Jesus, then we must begin with something foundational: human beings are not disembodied spirits. We are embodied souls. Physical image-bearers.
To follow Jesus is not merely to intellectually adhere to certain truths, but to be living embodiments of those truths in a tactile world—to live in communion with the Father as we eat, drink, sleep, and walk our way to one day sharing his full resurrection life.
And yet we often reduce the Christian life to what can be seen on the surface:
believe the right things,
do the right things.
But human beings are far more complex than cognition and volition. Much of who we are exists under the surface of our lives, hidden like the mass of an iceberg beneath the waterline:
our stories,
our wounds,
our bodies,
our fears,
our desires,
our families,
our personalities,
our learned ways of relating.
As Peter Scazzero writes, “Jesus may be in your heart, but grandpa is in your bones.”1
We can choose to oversimplify the Christian life to only what’s on the surface. But Jesus didn’t die to purchase only our public lives and productivity. He paid the price to obtain even what’s beneath the waterline.
All of us.
He’s not satisfied with extracting usefulness. He aims to redeem every part of us. In other words, he doesn’t just want to get something out of you.
He wants you.
And I think this is where our understanding of mission has become too small. We frequently speak about God’s purposes only in terms of what he wants to do through us:
people converted,
churches planted,
nations reached.
These things matter deeply. But God’s mission is also about what he wants to do in us. The outward movement of mission and the inward movement of formation cannot ultimately be separated. God forms people through participation in his redemptive purposes, and he carries his redemptive purposes forward through formed people.
This is why spiritual formation is not peripheral to God’s mission. It is part of the mission itself.
The Collapse of Usefulness
When spiritual formation is pushed to the periphery, the Christian life can quietly become transactional. Without realizing it, we begin to relate to God through a subtle formula:
Maintain your spiritual life so that you can be useful.
At first glance, that may not sound dangerous. In many Christian contexts, it even sounds responsible. But over time, the spiritual life itself becomes subordinate.
Prayer becomes a means to achievement.
Rest is valued only as fuel for more work.
Relationships are measured by outcomes.
The problem is not fruitfulness itself. Scripture speaks often about fruit:
The fruit in keeping with repentance (Matthew)
The fruit of abiding in Christ the true vine (John)
The fruit of sanctification and eternal life (Romans)
The fruit of the Spirit (Galatians)
The fruit of light found in all that is good and right and true (Ephesians)
The fruit of righteousness (Philippians)
The fruit of good works (Colossians)
The fruit of lips that acknowledge his name (Hebrews)
The fruit of wisdom (James)
This panorama is much bigger than fruit measured only as missional results: the number of shares, conversions, baptisms, disciples, churches, or movements. And yet many of us have been formed inside cultures that subtly teach us to define ourselves by visible impact. Over time, it becomes possible to build an entire spiritual life around usefulness while neglecting the soul itself.
Jesus warned about this kind of distortion. He spoke of religious leaders who traveled “over land and sea to win a single convert,” yet reproduced in others the same spiritual sickness living within themselves (Matthew 23:15).
It is possible to do work in the name of God while remaining deeply disconnected from the heart of God. Perhaps we discover this only when something interrupts our usefulness. When the neglected teeth won’t chew.
For some, it was the COVID-19 pandemic. During this crisis many missionaries returned home indefinitely or remained isolated for extended periods. While no doubt disorienting, I noticed that it was common among them to experience a disproportionate sense of worthlessness.
For me, it happened after returning to the U.S. from missionary service and working at a mall food court. Beneath the surface, I was confronting a painful question:
If I could no longer do the things that once made me feel valuable to God, then who was I?
What I slowly began to realize was how much of my identity had become entangled with functionality. If mission was only about what God did through me, then losing productivity felt like losing my reason to live.
Similarly, the prophet Elijah once collapsed beneath a broom tree and asked God to let him die. His expectations had shattered. The outcomes he imagined were not unfolding the way he thought they would.
I do not think Elijah’s despair came merely from exhaustion. I think it came from the confounding realization that God would not submit himself to Elijah’s formula. When his self-prescribed usefulness collapsed—like the betrayal of any idol—his soul collapsed with it.
Anyone who follows Jesus long enough may eventually arrive beneath the same tree.
Joy Like Swords
So, what happens when spiritual formation is valued as part of the mission itself?
At first, perhaps not what we expect. Because to desire deeper conformity to Jesus—which requires missional outwardness—is also to surrender ourselves to the painful work of pruning.
In Philippians 3, after recounting his “loss of all things,” Paul describes his deepest longing this way: to know Christ, to share in his sufferings, to become like him, and to rise with him. Not merely to accomplish things for Jesus, but to belong to him so fully that even suffering and death become places of communion.
This is a lived example of applying Jesus’ words in John 15:2: “every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” Pruning disorients us precisely because it involves the cutting away of things we have wrapped ourselves around for meaning:
ambition,
control,
self-sufficiency,
good things distorted,
good things redeemed,
even desires God himself stirred within us.
If more of Jesus is to come alive in us, then much within us must slowly surrender. Death by a thousand paper cuts.
And yet this pruning is not punishment. It is love.
This is how God forms us into people who are capable not only of doing mighty works in the name of Jesus, but of abiding in Jesus himself. This is how he frees us from using mission to justify our existence. This is how he attunes our deepest identity not to productivity, but to belovedness.
And strangely, this is where joy begins to emerge. Right in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about pruning and abiding, he says: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”
Not after the pruning. In the midst of it.
It is his way of producing in us, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “joy like swords…where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”2
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A few Easters back, my wife and I took our daughters to an Andrew Peterson concert. During one of the songs about the suffering of Christ, our oldest daughter leaned over and quietly said:
“I feel like Jesus is calling my name.”
My wife simply whispered back:
“Well…say yes.”
I think that may be the invitation at the center of God’s purposes.
To say yes to the inward and outward movements of formation.
To say yes to becoming all God created us to be.
To say yes to Jesus.
Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2015)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (New York: HarperCollins, 2005)