Hello and welcome to the John Markoma Teachings podcast. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm your host.

Each week we feature teachings by John Mark or other voices in the formation space and it's great to have you with us.

This week we're moving on from the community element of our working theory of change

and shifting gears to talk about the role of the Holy Spirit in the transformation journey.

John Mark shows us how the Holy Spirit not only meets us with profound breakthroughs,

but also plays an animating role in each step of our formational journey.

Here's John Mark.

We're nearing the end of a fall-long vision series on practicing the way of Jesus

together in Portland.

And really for the last, I don't know, month plus, we've been asking this singular question.

How do we change?

How are we, in the language of the New Testament, transformed

to become like Jesus of Nazareth? Because for most of us, in our apprenticeship to Jesus,

there's a gap between who we are and who Jesus is, between who we are now in the present,

and who we ache and want and desire to grow and mature into in the future.

And apprenticeship is about closing that gap.

And so we've been working through our spiritual formation paradigm.

And if that language of spiritual formation is new to you, all we mean by that is the process

by which we are formed, like an embryo in the womb, to grow and mature into the man or woman that God had in mind on the day you were born.

And the reality is, to be human, we're all being formed. Every second of every minute of every day, you are being formed into somebody or something.

We're being formed, one, by the stories that we

believe, the kind of metanarrative by which you make sense of reality, by our habits, good, bad,

...