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Podcast: How (and How Not) to Think About Spiritual Habits in the New Year (Matthew Bingham)

December 29, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How to Pattern Your Life as a Christian in the New Year

In this podcast Matthew Bingham gives some practical advice on spiritual habits to practice in the new year. Matthew talks about how these spiritual disciplines have been a part of church history for a long time and how to make spiritual disciplines more than just rules to live under and, instead, enriching practices in your life.

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A Heart Aflame for God

A Heart Aflame for God

Matthew C. Bingham

A Heart Aflame for God explores spiritual formation practices that are consistent with the 5 solas, presenting the riches of the Reformed tradition for 21st-century evangelicals.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:34 - Rule of Life: Exhortations and Cautions

Matt Tully
Matthew Bingham is vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He’s also the author of A Heart Aflame for God: A Reformed Approach to Spiritual Formation from Crossway. Matt, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Matthew Bingham
Thank you. Great to be here.

Matt Tully
In recent years we’ve seen a noticeable rise in Christians talking about the importance of adopting some kind of rule of life, some kind of pattern for how we’re living as Christians that would conform to Christ’s life or other sources in church history. I want to talk about that and unpack what’s behind that desire, and then ask what a distinctly Reformed vision for spiritual formation might say to that. But before we get into all of that, for those who are less familiar with this idea of a rule of life, can you briefly describe or define what people mean when they talk about that.

Matthew Bingham
It’s a great question and it is something that is really popular right now, and I can understand why. Often people who talk about a rule of life are looking towards monastic movements. We think of someone like Benedict of Nursia, who had a rule—

Matt Tully
He’s got one named after him: Benedict’s Rule.

Matthew Bingham
Exactly. Exactly. And so it’s a rule. We think of a ruler, a measuring stick, something to measure up against, and essentially, I think using the term loosely, it sort of is like what it sounds like. It’s a set of practical guidelines, practices, patterns that one is committing oneself to. Often there’s a communal element to that in terms of doing this with some friends, or your small group, or people at church, whatever it might be. The idea is I want to impose a measure of discipline and rigor and rhythm to my life, and I want to see some benefit from that. And often in these conversations that you’re alluding to, it’s obviously with a view towards spiritual growth, but it’s usually conceived much more holistically. And so there’s a physical dimension and a spiritual dimension, and it’s all kind of interwoven into this concept of a rule of life.

Matt Tully
Speak to that last element, because I picked up on that as well. Maybe beyond what would be a typical evangelical approach to spiritual disciplines or practices, where we all know that it’s important to read the Bible and maybe have a habit for reading the Bible at a certain time, it seems like a lot of the language and the discussion around a rule of life does want to push against maybe an overly intellectualized faith. It wants to bring in more earthly habits and practices that involve our bodies, as an important expression of our faith. Speak a little bit to what’s going on on that front.

Matthew Bingham
I think it’s attractive to people for a lot of the reasons that you mention—that holistic sense. It’s that sense that I’m more than just a mind. I’m more than just a thinker. I’m embodied, and I want to honor that and live in a way that is congruous with that. And so I need an approach to my life that meets the whole of me. And I think that when people are sensing that and wanting that, they’re not wrong to want that. That’s right. We are embodied. We do have minds but also we live in relation with others. We have needs. We need to sleep, we need to eat, we need to do all these things, and they all are interconnected. So I think that people are desiring something that will speak to the whole person, and that’s a good thing and that’s a right thing to want and to do. I think these rules and the whole concept is also attractive to people because it does harken back, however loosely, but it does harken back, or at least reference and gesture back, to ancient practices, medieval practices.

Matt Tully
That seems like a big part of the appeal. And maybe there’s another question of how faithful some of these modern practices actually are to ancient rules, but there’s a rootedness to some of the language and the discussions that seems appealing to people today.

Matthew Bingham
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. I think a lot of commentators, Christian and non-Christians, are commenting on the way in which our world in the twenty-first century West does seem so rootless. There are a lot of people who talk about things like globalization—creating a homogenous, worldwide monoculture based on buying things.

Matt Tully
Capitalism and consumerism.

Matthew Bingham
Yeah, people are noticing that. They’re noticing how we all move around and how we’re very mobile, which is kind of fun, but it also erodes a sense of community and place. And I think people—again, Christian, non-Christian alike—are feeling a loss here and trying to find solutions. And so I think anything that seems rooted in something stable, something ancient, something that unites one not just with others today but people through the centuries, I think that has an intrinsic appeal in our cultural moment.

Matt Tully
I wonder if you can steelman the perspective of someone who would be advocating for a rule of life today, for looking back over church history and looking through the Bible and pulling out different threads of practices and habits that we could use. What would be the best case for why that would be something that a modern Christian today should pursue?

Matthew Bingham
I would be very enthusiastic about looking to Christian men and women who’ve gone before and trying to see what wisdom they can pass on to us. In the very first instance, I want to cheer on people who say we have this great cloud of witnesses, we have a rich Christian history, we have 2,000 years of believers who have gone through difficulty and suffering, trials and travails, and why wouldn’t we want to look to them and think about what they have to say to us? So I think people are wanting that, and that’s good. I think people are responding to some of the cultural currents that we already alluded to, and that’s right and good. One should consider the question, Where has God placed me? He’s placed me here, in the twenty-first century in the West, and I need to live well and serve him faithfully in this context. So some attention to that context is good and right. And then the third thing I think that people are responding to that’s right and good is what we mentioned—the holistic aspect of my person. And here is where, again, I think some of the interest in a rule of life and some of these habits is downstream from larger cultural trends. Everywhere one looks, on podcasts and in the media, there are all these different programs and approaches to optimizing one’s life. These are the vitamins you should take. Here are sleep habits. I heard some guy pitching a thing that’ll cool your mattress down for you so you can sleep at the optimal temperature. We live in an age where everything is trying to be optimized and fine tuned for maximum performance. Interestingly, in another parallel, a lot of those life hacks or seeking to optimize or whatever also looks to ancient practices. Some of the things about diet and exercise are trying to root themselves in This is what ancestral humans would’ve done, and we want to learn from that. So I think you see this whole movement in the secular culture towards some of these things—not all of it bad—and then I think right now amongst Christians, there’s a kind of Christianized appropriation of some of those impulses.

Matt Tully
It’s helpful to even see this modern trend, we’ll say, (I don’t want to be dismissive) or this interest in having a rule of life is happening in the context of a broader cultural conversation that goes beyond Christianity. We are feeling the shallowness of the different facets of our lives today, and we all want something deeper. We want something more ancient and stable. I wonder if you can just briefly summarize what some of the cautions would be. We talked a lot about the potential benefits and the understandable impulse toward this rule of life mentality that we see around us today. What are some of the dangers or the cautions that you would offer?

Matthew Bingham
A couple different things come to mind. In the first instance, I think one problem I see with trying to take some of the—again, we’ll just call it the life hack podcast world; I’m talking about secular stuff—and apply it to the Christian life. You have fitness influencers who are giving me an elaborate program for how I’m going to maximize every one of my biomarkers for super fitness. I try to build a rule of life in which I’m trying to optimize my life as a Christian. Again, not a bad impulse. I think one danger though is some of the stuff I’ve read in that space seems to suggest that if you just fine tune all the dials, it’s going to be awesome and you’re going to be growing and it’s going to be wonderful. And I do think there’s a risk there, in the first instance, of downplaying our fallen condition. We are laboring under the curse, and there are thorns and thistles. I don’t care how many rules you implement and how dialed in you are with respect to when you go to bed and when you get up and all of these things, you are laboring under the thorns and thistles as well. So my first caution would be I worry some of the rhetoric around the rule of life and different approaches to disciplines and habits can sometimes suggest maybe a too perfect picture, whereas I think Scripture leads us to expect that the people of God are going to walk through difficulty just like everybody else. And the person who is walking with the Lord is going to be sustained and supported through difficulty, not do an end-around and avoid it.

Matt Tully
I think oftentimes, too, the underlying assumption with those kinds of hacked approaches to our lives is that we actually are able to plan for every contingency, we are able to develop some kind of rhythm or routine that’s going to get us where we need to go. There’s kind of a self-powered mindset underneath a lot of that, it seems to me.

Matthew Bingham
Yeah. And I think that then can lead to real disappointment for people when it doesn’t work. And we all have seen that in secular contexts. Whether it’s a new workout program or whatever it is, you try it and, for a lot of us anyway (maybe this is speaking too autobiographically), it eventually breaks down, and then there’s disappointment.

Matt Tully
It’s never quite what you hoped it would be.

Matthew Bingham
Yeah. And when that’s biohacking with special vitamins, that’s one thing, but when it’s your spiritual life and your walk with the Lord, if you lean too hard on a particular program and an expectation that that’s going to make everything really sing for you, and then it doesn’t, that can cause real issues for people. Another caution that I would bring is at least some of the literature around this space draws too widely and too broadly on a range of practices falling under the rubric of spiritual formation that are not biblical. And I think we want to stay away from things that the Bible doesn’t give to us. So again, it’s this good impulse which says, Hey, you know what? We’ve got issues. Let’s look to saints who’ve gone before and imitate them. And that’s a good impulse. And in fact, I think Scripture tells us to look to others and imitate them. But what does Paul say? He says, Follow me as I follow Christ. We’re to look to others and imitate them insofar as they are following the patterns laid out by God and the means given by God. As a Protestant evangelical, of course I’m committed to the proposition that the only place where God has spoken to us with God-breathed words is in Scripture. And so again, I’m cautious of any approach to spiritual formation that would draw—however well-intentioned the drawing is—that would draw promiscuously on a very wide swath of historical examples. Because many of those are well outside of Scripture.

13:18 - A Theological Foundation for Spiritual Practices

Matt Tully
It seems like oftentimes the mindset coming to some of these spiritual practices is that we can just kind of pull whatever we want, whatever’s working, whatever kind of floats my boat. We kind of separate that from maybe the theological reflections or convictions that we have. Speak a little bit more to the theological underpinnings of a lot of these practices that are popular today.

Matthew Bingham
I think you’re absolutely right. There is a pragmatic streak to a lot of it. In fact, some things I’ve read even say exactly that: with spiritual formation, it’s what works for you, and different things are going to work for different people. Again, I think some of that is downstream from this larger cultural trend towards you need to optimize for you, not everybody’s the same, some are morning people, some are evening people. And for wide swaths of life and reality, there’s truth to that. But I do think that when it comes to spiritual formation, I think God has given us a vision for what that looks like. It’s interesting to me, when we think about Psalm 1 that talks about the godly man, the the blessed man, the blessed woman, is one who finds delight in meditating on the law of the Lord day and night, and that is what leads to fruitfulness. And Psalm 1 is such a key psalm for us as the first psalm. Talking about drawing on Christians who’ve gone before, the folks who wrote what’s called The Geneva Bible, which was a sixteenth century English translation of the Scriptures, they kind of glossed various passages, and it was one of the first Protestant study Bibles. And they actually wrote of Psalm 1 that it’s set first in the manner of a preface. It’s number one for a reason. It’s the first psalm for a reason. They saw it as a preface to the whole psalter. And it exhorts us to study and meditate on heavenly wisdom. Again, I think any scriptural approach to spiritual formation has to begin with and continue with and end with, on this side of glory, a life rooted in God’s word.

Matt Tully
And that’s obviously one of the great rediscoveries of the Reformation, one of the great heritages that we have as Reformed Christians, broadly defined in the Reformed tradition. And obviously, when it comes to Reformation orthodoxy, it’s hard to get away from doctrines like justification, sanctification, union with Christ, sola Scriptura. Those are all foundational principles and doctrines for how we view theology and view God. How might those inform us as Protestants are thinking about spiritual formation? Draw some of the lines of connection between these core theological convictions and our spiritual formation and practices.

Matthew Bingham
That’s really at the heart of it, because the tension in the Christian life that a lot of people feel is they read all of these passages about God’s grace to us, and his forgiveness, and our sins are separated as far as the east is from the West, and there’s nothing more that I can do to add to that. And that’s a wonderful thing. And so they read that, and then they also read all of these exhortations throughout the Scriptures—and not just the Old Testament but the New Testament as well. You can’t read very far, in any of Paul’s letters, without finding many, many moral imperatives and exhortations, and a lot of folks struggle with that. So they’re thinking, Well, which is it? And I think the greatness of the Reformation was to rediscover the reality that in salvation, God justifies us and he sanctifies us. For the person united to Christ by faith alone, both of these things are present and both of these things are happening. Through justification, Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us. It is done. It is finished. It is perfect. There’s nothing more that we can add to it. Every justified person is justified equally, because it’s not based on anything in them. It’s based entirely on Christ and his life and his perfect righteousness and his atoning death. But then the one who’s justified through union with Christ is also being sanctified, is being transformed, is being changed by the Holy Spirit more and more into the image of Christ. And that is the work that is ongoing. It’s progressive. It is imperfect in this life. It varies from Christian to Christian. The thief on the cross, at the end of his life, and the apostle Paul, at the end of his life, were both justified exactly the same, but their sanctification had progressed differently. So once we kind of see those two in relationship to each other and see them in their biblical alignment, all of a sudden all of this opens up. And that that’s the beauty of the Reformation. So when we’re talking about spiritual formation, this is how we can embrace and lean on Christ—holy, perfectly, it’s finished, it’s done. My life is hidden in Christ with God, and that’s perfect. And yet I also now am called to work out my salvation with fear and trembling, as Paul calls us to do in Philippians. Once we kind of get that relationship and think on that and meditate on that and dwell on that, now all of a sudden I can say, Hey, you know what? I do want to work hard. I do want to grow in godliness. I want to put my energies into that. And then connecting back to some of the good things in some of the rule of life concept, Yeah, I want to wake up a little earlier so I can read the Scriptures and pray and meditate on God’s word, and I trust that he’s going to use that and use those means to bear fruit in my life, so I can be like that Psalm 1 tree, bearing its fruit in season.

Matt Tully
We’ve already talked briefly about the way that some of the modern discussion around rule of life can flatten theological distinctives and underplay the significance of the different theological traditions that have informed these different practices or ways of thinking. I wonder if you can just think of a few examples of what that might look like. Are there some practices or ways of describing our spiritual formation that you would say are rooted in traditions that aren’t consistent or don’t fit with a Protestant worldview and theological system?

Matthew Bingham
Sure. I think there are some more obvious examples, and then there are some more subtle ones. And I think some of the more obvious ones are we think of things like, for example, icons for our Eastern Orthodox friends. Iconography is very important, and the use of these images in their devotional life is very explicitly commended and it’s a really crucial piece of the puzzle.

Matt Tully
There’s a theological significance for that for them.

Matthew Bingham
Exactly. It’s not just decoration. You might have a picture in your house of a loved one or something, but they kind of go beyond that, and the icons actually have a spiritual weight to them and a theological significance. Those are the more clear examples.

Matt Tully
And the Reformers, to be clear, explicitly rejected that for theological reasons as well.

Matthew Bingham
Correct. Rooted in their understanding of the second commandment and other things, the saw that this was not to be a part of a Christian’s spiritual life. And in addition to those obvious ones that I think most evangelicals are going to see as a little outside of my tradition, there are more subtle things as well. A big one would be approaches to prayer. There is a strand within mystical, medieval theology that continues to be popularized today that suggests that praying with words is fine and that’s good and you should do it. But if you really are going deep with God and you’re really getting to an advanced spiritual place, you will move beyond words. Again, mysticism is a vexed word, and there are all sorts of different ways to define and approach it. But the most common way to think about it is mysticism being this idea of an immediate communion with God, unmediated by things like words. And so the true spiritual masters would get to this place where it’s just silence and stillness in the presence of God. Again, there are ways to use some of those words that are okay. Solitude. Jesus goes away to a quiet place. But I don’t see anything in Scripture that would suggest that we ever get beyond words. God has given us a book and revealed himself through words. We communicate. We’re communicating right now through words. For all the emphasis placed on body language and all that, that’s all fine as far as it goes, this is actually the way that God has built us to communicate, through language. And Jesus is the Word. And so I don’t see anything that would suggest that we get to a place where it’s desirable to move "beyond words."

22:34 - A Holistic View of Sanctification

Matt Tully
It’s so subtle and nuanced because, again, few people would probably say words aren’t valuable and they’re not important in prayer. But there can be a subtle emphasis on how there is something a little higher, that there’s the next plane up, that you’re sometimes going to get to is to just be silent in God’s presence. Speaking about words, one of the things that you emphasize in your book is the profoundly word-centered shape of Reformed spirituality. It’s thoroughly rooted in the Bible itself, in the words that God has given to us. But I think one critique or one concern people might have about a Reformed emphasis on the Bible being central to our spiritual lives is that it can run the risk of over-intellectualizing our faith, of making our faith all about what we think and even believe in our minds. How would you respond to someone who’s concerned about that trend? And maybe they would say, I know people who it feels like they’re just obsessed with having right doctrine, but the rest of their lives don’t seem like they’re being transformed by Jesus.

Matthew Bingham
I think the first thing we’d want to say is that certainly we do see people who know a lot of things about God, and maybe even know a lot of theology, and maybe even know a lot of the Reformed theology that I would be wanting to champion whose lives do not bear fruit. They do not bear fruit and keep him with repentance. They do not live lives marked by joyful, abundant life in Christ, love of neighbor, or the fruit of the Spirit. So then the question is, What’s going on? And that’s where I think we don’t have reason to think that the reason that they’re like that is because they’ve just been spending so much time meditating on Scripture and thinking about the person and work of Christ that they’ve somehow hardened and shriveled. I don’t have any reason in Scripture to think that that’s the cause of it. While I’d want to acknowledge that there are people in churches that I would approve of and say doctrinally they’re good, but they’re not living abundant lives in the way we just described. I would quarrel with the idea that that correlation equals causation. I would quarrel with the idea that those people are overly represented in those kinds of churches. I don’t think that’s been established to any degree of satisfaction. Again, we would also want to think about when we talk about a word-based piety, which is what I would commend and I think the Bible commends and the Reformers certainly commended, when we talk about a word-based piety and we talk about the need to think on God and the things of God, we’re not suggesting that godliness is the result of learning—if you learn 100 facts about God, you’re 100 points more godly. I learned a new fact about supralapsarianism today, and so I’m a little bit godlier than yesterday. No, no. That’s not how it works. That’s not what anyone’s saying.

Matt Tully
In sanctification, godliness does not equate with knowledge.

Matthew Bingham
Exactly. There are people in research university New Testament departments who have devoted their life to studying the New Testament. And many of them are not believers at all and wouldn’t claim to be believers. So clearly the bare accumulation of facts about God, even true facts, does not get you where you want to be. James says "even the demons believe and shudder." So that’s not what we’re saying. But we are saying that for those who have been born again (John 3), who have experienced regeneration, who have been made new creatures, who have been given eyes to see and ears to hear, the way that they’re going to stir up godly affections is through meditating upon who God has revealed himself to be, meditating on the Christian life, meditating upon their own sin and shortcomings, meditating on the perfections of Christ in contrast, and meditating on the heavenly joys that await Christians. We think on these things, and it stirs up our hearts. I do think that’s the pattern we see in Scripture. So it’s not that the bare acquisition of knowledge is what’s sort of getting us there. But rather, yes, it is that we use the minds God gave us to meditate, to dwell on, to savor God’s great realities. And that stirs us up. Yes, that’s going to be something for Christians, for those who have been converted. A lot of the spiritual formation literature today I think really neglects a strong doctrine of conversion, of regeneration. It does not touch on the the biblical reality that for those who have not been born again, they’re going to hear more about God and it’s going to just turn them off even more. Paul says that the same gospel message is to one group life and salvation, and to the other group it’s the stench of death. So for those who were born again, yes, thinking on the things of God is the means that the Bible gives us to stir up the heart. So to the point that this is all very intellectual, I would say, yes, there’s an intellectual component because God made us as intellectual creatures. When we talk about intellectual, we’re not talking about having high IQ or playing chess or reading philosophy.

Matt Tully
It is not just a seminary level discussion of some of these doctrines.

Matthew Bingham
Exactly. We’re just saying everybody made in God’s image and living in God’s world is called to think God’s thoughts after him. And in so doing, we stir up Godly affection. So ultimately, we’re thinking about emotions and we’re thinking about wanting to feel rightly and desire rightly. But the road that the Bible gives us is, yes, it’s through dwelling on God’s promises and how he’s revealed himself in Scripture.

Matt Tully
And obviously the Reformed tradition would place a strong emphasis on the means of grace that God has given to us in Scripture, whether that’s Bible reading, prayer, the sacraments. But how would you respond to someone listening right now who would say, I have been reading my Bible, I try to pray, and I’m a part of my local church, and I don’t feel like the Lord is using those things in a powerful way. Maybe there have been seasons of that, but it doesn’t feel as meaningful as some of these new practices I’ve been experimenting with and that I’ve been trying.

Matthew Bingham
It’s a great concern and I sympathize with that. I think every Christian is going to feel at times like, Wow, okay. I’m doing the things. I’m going to church and I’m reading my Bible, but I’m not feeling this magical, mystical transformation. And so I guess there are two ways we could respond to that reality. One could be to say, Well, I must be doing it wrong and there must be some other thing out there that I haven’t yet discovered. I need to discover it, and then that will cause all the pieces to click into place. I suppose that’s possible, but if that’s what you’re thinking, I would say, again, if you’re finding that thing outside of Scripture, I think you are at that point heading into a dangerous place. There are powerful things out there, and not all of them are things that Christians ought to be looking into or giving our minds and our hearts to. So I think if we’re stepping outside of Scripture to do that, I would question that. So what’s the alternative? Well, the alternative would be to look at the example again of saints in the Scriptures, whether that’s David in the Psalms or Paul in the New Testament, or the Lord Jesus himself in the garden. What we find again and again is that, yeah, the Christian life is difficult and it is hard and it is marked by some really difficult stretches. God leads his people through the desert places, where there’s no water. But he promises to be with them and to be faithful. So I guess first thing I would say is we need to check our expectations. What am I imagining is going to happen, and do I have an expectation that isn’t actually grounded in the picture Scripture paints of the Christian life?

Matt Tully
That takes us back to the very beginning of our conversation about the prevailing cultural attitudes around progress, convenience, the speed at which things are going to advance, our ability to hack different facets of our lives and to optimize them. It seems like it maybe runs counter to a profoundly Christian worldview.

Matthew Bingham
I think so. If God wanted to, the minute you’re converted, boom, you’re perfectly sanctified. It’s going to be all fruit of the Spirit all the time.

Matt Tully
Which one of us hasn’t wondered why he doesn’t do that?

Matthew Bingham
Yeah. That’s what we all want. On some level we think, Oh, why couldn’t it just be that way? Why do I have to deal with this illness or this inconvenience or this tragedy? Everything from deep tragedies, like losing a loved one suddenly, to just really mundane things, like I locked my keys inside my car. Why did that happen? Why did the Lord allow this to happen to me? And yet it does seem to be a scriptural reality and confirmed by the experience of every believer that God has ordained, in his wisdom, to make the road slow and marked by difficulty. And we trust that he’s wiser than us and that he has a good purpose in that. The classic passage is 2 Corinthians with Paul’s thorn in the flesh. He prays three times that the Lord would remove it. Why? Wouldn’t Paul have been a much more effective gospel worker if he didn’t have to deal with this thorn? And yet God said, "My grace is sufficient for you." So there’s a purpose there, and I think we need to check our expectations. The other thing I’d say on that whole point of, I see some goodness in some of this rule of life and some of these other habits. I’m feeling helped by it. To that I would also say I’m sure you are being helped by it. There are all sorts of good thoughts out there. For example, incorporating exercise into your life, having a morning routine, an evening routine, taking your phone and not having that be the last thing you check before you go to bed and the first thing you check when you wake up. Those are all good, it seems to me, thoughtful practices to adopt or at least think about. So to me, one of the complications in this conversation is that a lot of good, thoughtful pieces of advice and wisdom and observations about the texture of the life that we all lead, those observations, which may be good and helpful, are often conflated and sort of stirred up with the spiritual formation conversation in ways that I don’t think are necessary and I don’t think they’re always helpful. I think it’s helpful to have a concept called spiritual formation, which hues closely to Scripture and to God-ordained means for growth in grace. Peter says "grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." I want that concept and I want it to be fully and exclusively informed by Scripture, because I see that that’s where God has revealed himself. Then I think we do have all sorts of space to think about how do I live my life well? How do I eat well? How do I exercise well and take care of my body? What are thoughtful ways to interact with others? Should I write a thank you card after having a nice dinner at somebody’s house? Those might all be good practices. I don’t think that it’s necessarily helping us to kind of dump all those good practices into the spiritual formation box and stir it all up.

Matt Tully
The tricky thing for us, though, is that it’s hard sometimes, in our day-to-day lives, to disentangle those things. For example, my ability to get up in the morning and spend meaningful quality time reading God’s word and praying to him is probably pretty dependent on how early I’m going to bed. Sometimes the lines do seem to affect each other, even as you want to maintain a clear distinction. How do you think about that?

Matthew Bingham
They certainly affect one another because our lives are integrated and we are holistically bound up in our bodies and in our contexts. And that’s all good. I think the issue, though, is in Scripture we get a God-ordained vision for spiritual formation that is mandatory for all believers. Then, we all live in radically different circumstances and contexts. And so I think part of working out your own salvation with fear and trembling, yes, involves asking the questions, In the life that God has called me to live in the circumstances in which he’s placed me, how do I live a life characterized by meditation on God’s law day and night, so that I might bear my fruit in season, as Psalm 1 says? Now, that’s going to look radically different if you’re a new mom with a baby, if you are a guy working the graveyard shift, if you’re a soldier deployed overseas, if you’re a person working a sort of traditional nine to five in an office. Each one of us is called to live the life that God gave to us. And those examples don’t even touch on people in other times and other places today, the texture of whose life is radically different than our own sometimes. But all of us, in our varied circumstances, are called to take up Scripture, prayer, meditation, the means of grace that we talked about already. And so that’s where, in the spiritual formation box, we meet with the kind of essentials that God says, Hey, if you are my child, you’re going to live a life characterized by these things. Then we have to apply wisdom and thinking and talking and questioning to ask how we are going live a life that allows that to happen and to flourish. And that’s where I think a lot of the things that folks in this broader spiritual formation conversation are talking about—I have no quarrel with so much of this advice. I just think it’s interesting to me that a lot of it is the same advice that our secular friends are giving, in terms of routines and exercise habit and all that. And so I would just say that’s a good conversation to have. As a Christian, I’m going to have that conversation with the biblical paradigm for spiritual formation clearly in view.

37:20 - Practical Advice for the New Year

Matt Tully
Let’s not neglect the latter as we pursue the former. Matthew, maybe as a final question for you, I wonder if you can speak to the person listening right now who, as they think about this new year and as they are assessing their own spiritual lives and the ways in which they want to grow in their faith and their devotion to the Lord, and they’re feeling discouraged. They’re feeling dissatisfied. They’re feeling like, I have so much room to improve and grow, and I’ve tried so many different things, strategies and techniques and habits, and I just struggle with them, as many of us do as we think about the new year and launch into the year. What encouragement would you offer somebody in that position right now who’s looking for something as they want to pursue the Lord this next year?

Matthew Bingham
First of all, I think calibrating our expectations rightly and in a biblical fashion is important. And so when I read Paul in 1 Timothy 4 saying, "Train yourself for godliness," I think we need to expect that training—which he compares it to physical training, which he says is of some value, but spiritual training is of value in every way—we need to expect that there will be a bit of a struggle. And sometimes I think if we go in imagining that I’m going to get where I want to be and be the man or woman that God’s called me to be without any kind of discipline or spiritual sweat, as someone put it, I think that’s a wrong expectation. The first thing I’d say to someone is make sure you’re clear on the gospel and on the relationship between justification and sanctification that we talked about. Because if you’re not clear on that, then I think you’re going to view Paul’s exhortation to train yourself for godliness in a totally wrong and distorted way. There is perfect rest in Christ and his finished work. And then actually, it’s resting in that that opens up this space to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, and to train and to push hard and to lean in to some of the metaphors Paul gives for the Christian life about running the race and these things that imply, yes, persistent effort. So first, I’d get clear on the gospel, get clear on my expectations for what this is going to entail. The second thing I would want to say to such a person is to, in some sense, yes, you’re going to be training for godliness. That’s not always going to be easy. I would also say don’t put undue pressure on yourself to get every little knob dialed in perfectly well. We’re not actually talking, at the end of the day, about some super precise program. We’re talking about living a life that is honoring to the Lord and using the means he has given you to walk worthy of the calling to which you’ve been called. And so if you’re struggling to know where to begin, maybe this isn’t the time to do the Murray M’Cheyne four chapters a day in your Bible. Maybe this is the time to say, I’m going to try to read in a a psalm each morning. Or, I’m going to read a verse in a psalm, and I’m going to write it down. This is what I always find helpful. I write a verse on a piece of paper from the morning, and I put it in my pocket, and I take it with me, and I look at it at different times in the day. You’re trying to frame your life according to God’s vision for your life. And we find that vision laid out in Scripture. So, calibrate your expectations. Secondly, though, I guess perhaps as an extension, don’t put undue pressure on yourself. And some of these elaborate spiritual formation programs I think do put undue pressure on people. There’s a simplicity to walking in the way God calls us to walk. Read his word, think, meditate on what you’ve heard, pray to him and ask him for help. And that would be the third piece of advice. Pray about these things. And that sounds obvious, and in a sense it is obvious, and I suppose it should be obvious. But at least for me, I need to be reminded that everything should be given to the Lord in prayer.

Matt Tully
We all know it, but we struggle to do it sometimes.

Matthew Bingham
We struggle to do it. Yeah. And maybe sometimes we think that we should only be praying about super big things. But in the morning, pray that the Lord would give you all that you require, that his blessing would be on your life, that you would be a man or a woman who’s in his word and living a life increasingly shaped by that word. And I think the Lord will honor such a prayer and bless it for his glory and our good.

Matt Tully
Matthew, thank you so much. I really appreciate you doing this.

Matthew Bingham
Yeah, thank you, Matt. I really appreciate it.

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