Download PDF You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Download PDF You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

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You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

Download PDF You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

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Audible Audiobook

Listening Length: 7 hours and 9 minutes

Program Type: Audiobook

Version: Unabridged

Publisher: Brazos Press

Audible.com Release Date: April 15, 2016

Language: English, English

ASIN: B01E980M6A

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

The ancient essayist astutely quipped, “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4.23). That truism surfaces in story form and didactic instruction throughout Scripture, and is substantiated when raising our children, supervising employees or shepherding parishioners: what has your heart rules your life. This is the central emphasis in the newly published 224 hardback, “You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit” by James K. A. Smith, professor of philosophy at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, accomplished author and editor. This short work appears to be a compression and reworking of his larger “Desiring the Kingdom” to make it more accessible for busy pastors and disciples.The heart of “You Are What You Love” from which flow the springs and chapters is the importance of discipleship. For Smith, discipleship has far less to do with the cognitive, and more with the God-storied, Gospel-shaped affections and perceptions where our loves and longings are aligned with Christ’s. Discipleship is “to want what God wants, to desire what God desires, to hunger and thirst after God and crave a world where he is all in all” (2); it is a “rehabituation of your loves” (19). And this rehabituation comes through the character-inscribing “rhythms and routines and rituals, enacted over and over again” that embed a heart-disposition that leans into God’s reign (Ibid.). These rhythms, routines and rituals come in habit-forming, love-molding liturgies.The greater flow of the book expounds the importance of traditional Christian liturgy, and explores rival liturgies in the marketplace, some youth ministries, vocational environments, wedding arrangements, etc. Smith’s perceptive investigation of these secular liturgies is quite insightful and handy for thinking through the ways our affections and hearts are being molded to love lesser things, alternative views of the good life, and opposing kingdoms. According to Smith, through these everyday rituals and practices “I’m covertly conscripted into a way of life because I have been formed by cultural practices that are nothing less than secular liturgies. My loves have been automated by rituals I didn’t even realize were liturgies” (45).Yet the weight of “You Are What You Love” delves into the importance of Christian liturgy in re-accustoming our loves and longings in the right direction. The church “is the place where God invites us to renew our loves, reorient our desires, and retrain our appetites” because the church is “that household where the Spirit feeds us what we need” and we graciously become a “people who desire him above all else” (65). Therefore, the church’s liturgies are highly essential for discipleship, because “Christian worship is the feast where we acquire new hungers – for God and for what God desires – and are then sent into his creation to act accordingly” (Ibid.). This premise leads the author to make a significant case for well-rehearsed and historical liturgies, rather than the new and novel. In challenging the hankering for the innovative, Smith stresses that we “keep looking for God in the new, as if grace were always bound up with “the next best thing,” but Jesus encouraged us to look for God in a simple, regular meal” (67).But the author recognizes this emphasis on Christian liturgy as a primary practice of heart-shaping, disciple-making, will evoke surprise and skepticism due to many readers’ experiences. Smith spends time divulging how many churches have re-vamped their liturgies into passive entertainment, or an expressivist endeavor. The corrective is to reclaim the gift of worship and the recognition that the main agent in worship is God himself. In classic form, worship “works from the top down….we don’t just come to show God our devotion and give him praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us” (77). In being reclaimed by historic Christian liturgy, we find that worship “that restores us is worship that restories us” 95). It draws us back into God’s story, week after week, re-grounding and re-immersing us into God’s world reclamation project.“You Are What You Love” is a treatise about the heart, to help disciples learn to guard their hearts. It is insightful, instructive, investigative and inducing. This work is ideal for an elder board to read together as they think through – or rethink altogether – the why and way of Christian worship and their task of the care of the souls given to their charge. Pastors and parishioners alike would benefit greatly from probing the leaves of this manuscript. Also, church planters, missionaries, and church revitalizers will find their time spent reading this material well worth it. This is a must-read for anyone serious about church, worship, and disciple-making.Thanks to Brazos Press for providing, upon my request, the free copy of “You Are What You Love” used for this review. The assessments are mine given without restrictions or requirements (as per Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255).

You Are What You Love by James K. A. Smith is a small book with large ambitions. It aims to reshape the way evangelical Christians understand discipleship, replacing their emphasis on thought with an emphasis on desire. Rather than saying, “You are what you think,” Smith urges Christians to say, “You are what you love.”For Smith, this reshaping of discipleship is not something new, but something old. Both the Bible and the pre-Enlightenment Christian tradition taught that “the center of the human person is located not in the intellect but in the heart.” For example, consider Jesus’ words in Matthew 15:19: “out of the heart come evil thoughts—murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” Or consider Augustine: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”Jesus’ words reveal that the heart orients us toward evil thoughts and evil deeds. Change the heart, and the thoughts and actions will follow. Augustine’s words remind us that our heart is oriented toward a telos, an end or goal, a vision of human flourishing. Because God made the heart, only the heart that seeks His telos—the kingdom—finds rest. Every other kingdom leaves our hearts weary and restless.The problem is, how do you disciple the heart? How do you properly form human desire? Through practice, which develops habits. A cousin of mine likes to say that practice makes permanent. That’s as true for playing the piano as for developing moral character. What we do repeatedly shapes who we are.According to Smith, the practices that shape our hearts can be called “liturgies,” a churchy term for the order of worship. Martin Luther said, “Whatever your heart clings to and confides in, that is really your god.” There is a liturgy, then, that develops a good heart for the true God. There are also liturgies that develop bad hearts for false gods such as consumerism. Smith urges us to take a “liturgical audit” of our lives to make sure our practice is oriented toward the proper telos, God and His kingdom, not some lesser goal.Smith uses the term liturgies expansively. In the final three chapters of the book, he uses it to describe Christian practices in the home, at school, and in one’s vocation. The heart of his book concerns the worship practices of the gathered church, however. It is here that the Christian heart is most formed. Smith states that his book “articulates a spirituality for culture-makers, showing…why discipleship needs to be centered in and fueled by our immersion in the body of Christ. Worship is the ‘imagination station’ that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom.”For him, worship is about “formation” more than “expression.” It is God himself meeting us to shape us into the kind of people who do His will, not just an outpouring of our sincere feelings about Him. (Pentecostals might be tagged as “expressivists” because of their exuberant services, but it seems to me that their theology of spiritual gifts aligns with the notion that God is the agent of worship, not just its audience.) Seen this way, and mindful that practice is repetitious, Smith urges Christians to hew closely to the traditional “narrative arc” of worship—which consists of gathering, listening, communing, and sending—and to eschew “novelty.” (He’s not talking about the “worship wars,” by the way. This has to do with the structure of the worship service, not the style of its music.) That liturgy “character-izes” us, meaning, it shows us that we are “characters” in God’s story and then forms the appropriate “character” in us.Interestingly, Smith argues that Christian cultural innovators need to be rooted in Christian liturgical tradition: “the innovative, restorative work of culture-making needs to be primed by those liturgical traditions that orient our imagination to kingdom come. In order to foster a Christian imagination, we don’t need to invent; we need to remember. We cannot hope to re-create the world if we are constantly reinventing “church,” because we will reinvent ourselves right out of the Story. Liturgical tradition is the platform for imaginative innovation.”I hope I have accurately and adequately communicated the gist of You Are What You Love. It is a thoughtful, thought-provoking book that I would encourage pastors, church leaders, and interested laypeople to read. Having said that, though, I want to make two “yes, but” points.First, yes desire, but also thought. In other words, I agree with Smith that the heart is the heart of discipleship. This is a point on which evangelicals should unite, whether they are heirs to Jonathan (“religious affections”) Edwards or John (“heart strangely warmed”) Wesley. I am concerned, however, that Smith has swung the pendulum too far toward a discipleship of desire in order to compensate for the tendency in evangelicalism to swing the pendulum too far toward a discipleship of thought. This is, admittedly, an impressionistic critique. Smith is a philosopher and theologian in the Reformed tradition, after all, and the Reformed are known to be punctilious about doctrine. Still, I would’ve liked to see more on the discipleship of the mind in the book.Second, yes process, but also crisis. A process-orientation in discipleship focuses, as Smith does, on the development of spiritual habits. A crisis-orientation focuses on the necessity of decision. The characteristic forms of process-oriented discipleship are stable liturgies, the sacraments, and spiritual disciplines. The characteristic form of crisis-oriented discipleship, at least among evangelicals, is the altar call. As a Pentecostal, I would also add the call to come forward for Spirit-baptism or healing. There is little place for crisis in Smith’s book. Perhaps this is an overreaction to the crisis-orientation of evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, which often leave little room for process. Still, it seems to me that both are necessary to discipleship. Wesley was no slouch when it came to process. His followers weren’t called “Methodists” for nothing, after all. But he still stood outside the mines and called miners to repentance and faith. I didn’t see that in Smith’s book.These two “yes, buts” notwithstanding, I intend to re-read and meditate further on Smith’s book. As a Pentecostal, I disagree with certain aspects of Smith’s Reformed liturgical heritage (infant baptism, for example), even as I am challenged by the overall thrust of the book. The heart is the heart of the matter. Any discipleship that fails to take that truth into account fails to achieve its aim.

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