Longing for God: Seven Paths of Christian Devotion
By Richard J. Foster and Gayle D. Beebe
IVP

Pastors juggle competing tensions every time we stand under a biblical text and attempt to preach these joyous, terrifying words to our church. We resist whenever we run up against an expectation that we make Scripture's odd narratives and disquieting imperatives easy or uncomplicated; but we do want the text to dig into the grain of people's everyday world, because we know the Bible is gritty and (in any way that matters) relevant. We resist the consumer temptation to come to Scripture and the church only for what strikes the fancy, but we do desire to honor each individual story in our community, knowing that God longs to meet unique people in unique ways.

Richard Foster and Gayle Beebe's Longing for God serves as a helpful friend for any preacher navigating these waters. In the vein of Foster's previous writings and work within the Renovare spiritual formation movement, Longing provides a slow, tempered, and plainspoken engagement with the church's core practice of teaching people to love and obey Jesus. "Although we need God," says Foster, "we at first do not desire him." This book is about the many ways the church has learned to desire God—and if we had to shave the definition of preaching down to a single line, helping people learn how to desire God would probably work as well as any.

Touring the last 2,000 years of church history, Beebe and Foster provide seven paths that they believe summarize the myriad of ways Christian teachers have led others toward God. These seven paths are

1. The right ordering of our love toward God, finding our deepest satisfaction in loving—and being loved by—God,

2. The spiritual life as a journey, understanding Christian maturity as the process of moving "in a Godward direction,"

3. The recovery of knowledge of God lost in the fall, receiving the foundational truths provided in biblical revelation,

4. Intimacy with Jesus Christ, recovering the "central issue of Christian spirituality: learning to become like Jesus,"

5. Action and contemplation, appropriating both the inner and outer work of the gospel,

6. The right ordering of our experiences of God, learning openness to spiritual encounters while always submitting experience to God's authority, and

7. Divine ascent, embodying common stages of spiritual progression.

Accompanying the explanation for each path, the authors profile a handful of Christian voices (Thomas à Kempis, Bunyan, Merton, St. Bonaventure, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Julian of Norwich, to name a few) who were leading examples for each expression of spiritual devotion.

You need only turn a few pages to recognize that these paths are anything but cookie cutter. Some even have core elements at odds (Augustine and Cassian's scrap over the interplay of divine initiation and human response, for example). Teaching our diverse history helps us rebuff the temptation to think there is only one way to read a text or only one theological lens through which to engage Scripture. Exploring the texture of our spiritual mothers and fathers helps us nurture humility as we preach the Bible—and as we teach people how to listen to the Bible.

More striking than how often these paths diverge, however, is how much they share. Though each path carries its own language and nuance, certain themes recur. Christian maturity requires patience over a long stretch of life. The love of God toward us—and our love to God in return—stands center. Obedience must be practiced (they might say "ordered"); character transformation never happens by accident. Scripture guides all our Christian experience. And, particularly noticeable: the Church as a physical, embodied community provides the context for true formation.

Many of the teachers for these spiritual paths were mystics, and some people following the path of en vogue "spirituality" quote these mystics with their ecstatic experiences and erotic language as justification for an individualized "spiritual" experience separated from the witness of Scripture and the Church. Origen spoke to this sentiment. "The mystical quest is always rooted to the life and teachings of the church. The church is not a tether that shackles the believer, but rather the body and bride of Christ living in dynamic relationship with the prevailing culture …. There are no 'community-less' Christians."

Beebe furthers Origen, reminding us that the church is not a pragmatic social arrangement but the continuation of incarnation. "Just as Christ was originally made present through the virgin," says Beebe, "so he is now made present through the visible church." I imagine we could all easily craft a sermon from that launching spot.

Longing for God offers a model for engaging (preaching) the Bible that honors both an experience with God and the authoritative content of Scripture. We often drift between emotive experiences disconnected from the actual words of the Bible and a rigid commitment to the Bible's words disconnected from any soul-touching experience with God. Foster reminds us that Scripture and experience are not at odds. The deep cravings of our heart prompt us toward God ("Our incessant longing for happiness is the indirect beginning of our life with God"), but the solidness of biblical truth keeps us near God ("the lack of knowledge of God eventually [leads] to a lack of love for God").

Preaching in conversation with these ancient voices and ancient paths allows us to connect people with the community of faith in ways that are both personal and communal. We can free people to discover ways that are uniquely suited to help them experience God and learn to love and obey Jesus. However, this freedom, though intimately personal, is never individualistic. These long-practiced paths will keep anyone who walks them immersed within the broad story of God's church. And this story invites us, as it has invited God's people for two millennia, to the long, hopeful, arduous, grace-filled, restorative way of being Jesus' disciple.

Winn Collier is the pastor of All Souls Charlottesville in Charlottesville, Virginia, and author of Holy Curiosity.