Faith Venture

Forming Your Spiritual Life.

“Spiritual Formation is not about changing behavior but changing the causes of behavior.” Dallas Willard recently made this statement in an interview.

We are in the first week of March. I know because there’s a foot of snow on the ground waiting for me to fire up the snow blower one last time (maybe). It’s also the time when New Year’s Resolutions are history.

Ah, January First. So much hope. We’re going to begin eating right. Working out. Reading the Bible.

We are going to change our behavior.

Didn’t work, did it. The extra 20 people who signed up for my Yoga class showed up once–or not at all.

Why are we overweight? Spiritually lax? Relationship challenged?

Andy Stanley, teaching on another topic, talked though about getting to what we call in manufacturing the “root cause.” In Lean Manufacturing, there is a technique called “Five Whys.” Confronted with a problem, you ask, “Why is that?” Then again, you ask, “Why is that?” Soon you will get to the real cause.

Back to Stanley. He was talking about emotions in a relationship. You might say, “I’m angry at you.” But if you went to the root cause (my words, not his), you might define the real emotion causing anger as insecurity, jealousy, fear.

What are the root causes in our lives that block us from living a life in the Spirit? Laziness, insecurity, feelings of inadequacy, pride?

Those are the things we need to work on. What kind of person do you wish to become? Focus on that, work on it, and the rest will follow.

This entry was posted on March 6, 2013 at 7:45 am and is filed under Disciplines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.