Spiritual formation

He has written more than 20 books exploring faith and the spiritual life, and in 2022 became the first recipient of the Richard J.

Foster Award in Spiritual Formation.

His writing and teaching have helped people around the world discover a deeper relationship with God in everyday life.

But my appreciation for Trevor is also deeply personal.

And I remember waking my wife up in bed and I'm just kneeling by the bed and I'm crying and I'm telling her, babe, I'm so sorry because I've been working 80 hour work weeks and you and Eden have been getting my leftovers and And that's on me.

I need to start saying no to some really good things to say yes to this family and to my own spiritual formation journey and to growing in love of God first and foremost.

Because honestly, being in ministry, I always feel like I was falling out of love with God.

So that's

Oh, man.

Or humble of, man, I've made a lot of mistakes.

And maybe even though I'm 20, 30, 40 years old, you know, older than my kids, maybe God is the primary agent of my kids' spiritual formation, not me.

And so it's my job to ask good questions and listen and be patient along the journey, whatever that journey may be with my kids.

Anonymity has its privileges, doesn't it? Psalm 3, it's exciting to me.

I think that this is the first time that we really get into a psalm where we're pushed into spiritual formation.

And the reason I say that, Psalm 1 is really a thesis.

And actually, I mentioned it's kind of one of the harder ones to pray because of that.

Psalm 2 is actually really helpful in spiritual formation.

And it's got plenty of real meaty prayers to pray.

But I think Psalm 2 is so obvious that you aren't pushed in Psalm 2.

And it's saying, what does it look like to live as if Psalm 2 is true? What does it look like to believe that he has a king on his holy hill? What does it look like to believe that he's the sovereign? And what Psalm 3 shows us is that what it looks like is running to him instead of to a different earthly king.

I've heard of gospel conversations over the last few years and never been so it's great to be here.

So tonight I'll explore some of the contours of Evelyn Underhill's lived experience and her understandings about spiritual formation.

I'll firstly introduce you to a little bit of her narrative and her own spiritual formation, then I'll close with some macro concepts from this new book that I've written and sort of drill into Underhill's concept of becoming.

But firstly, who was Evelyn Underhill? Underhill lived from 1875 to 1941, and as well as being a celebrated writer of 39 books and hundreds of articles, she was a brilliant scholar.

Receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, she was the first woman to lecture in theology at the University of Oxford, and she became an honorary fellow at King's College London.

This photo of Underhill is one of my favourites and I found it in a photo album at the House of Retreat, Plessey, Chelmsford, north of London, where she led retreats.

And you can see she's got her prayer book, one of her original prayer books in her lap there.

I'll share a tiny sketch of Underhill's narrative just to give you a sense of some of the influences on her spiritual formation and her life of prayer.

I'm the ministry team senior coordinator at ACSI.

And I've got the opportunity as a part of my role to facilitate our spiritual formation network, which is really now a global network of school leaders who have been entrusted with spiritual formation and discipleship within the schools God has called them to.

And what's really cool about this network, if you guys have kind of been tracking with some of the things Jerry's been talking about, three years ago, we started the network and with 30 school leaders in the United States alone.

And the Lord has exponentially grown that over the past three years to now having 380 school leaders representing now 29 countries.

I think we're going to be so shocked when we get to heaven and We hear the languages and we see the faces, you know, every tribe, every tongue, all the nations belong to him.

As we're developing in our own spiritual formation, I think it's critical for us to understand what faith looks like grown in the context of other cultures.

How does God come close? How does God befriend people and other cultures who do not have what we have, who do not speak the same language, who do not come from the same place in life? I think there's a lot to be learned.

Tanya, you write, our hearts are molded by the heat of impossibility, and the ultimate result is that we are increasingly formed into the likeness of Christ.

Oh, that's a good question.

I think a lot of times impossibility gets put in the category of spiritual warfare.

You know, the gates of hell will not prevail, right? And I think the understanding that I've come into, especially in this season of my life, is that the same spiritual warfare that brings us to our knees is the same spiritual formation that turns us into the likeness of Christ.

Because God wastes nothing.

I sit down with my wife, Ann Voskamp, and John Ortberg for a kind of conversation that you would have if you were at dinner with us.

We talk about how to trust God when you don't understand, about spiritual formation in an instant culture, what to do when God is silent, what to say and not say when someone is suffering, and I don't think I've ever asked anyone on the podcast this question before, what would you believe if you weren't a Christian? That's really interesting.

It's a fascinating conversation, and one of the things I try to do is I try to bring you into the room so we can have a conversation with the leaders in the same way you would if you got to grab dinner with them.

And this is all in service of a big project that Tony's been working on now for a couple of years.

I was.

Uh, over the years, I, I feel like I've grown into the knowledge of waiting and the, the whole, um, uh, realization that there's value in the waiting through my own experience.

Like, I've joked before that my spiritual formation isn't like I got into a Jaguar and took off.

[laughs]

He pastors taxi drivers.

Nick has his Bachelor of Theology, and he has a Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation, and he's also been a longtime spiritual director.

There's so many things to tell you about Nick, but I'll just, uh, fill you in on one, one minor hobby that he has taken up lately, and that is ultra-trail running.

He's watching people running trail runs.