Welcome to the John Mark Comer Teaching's Podcast by Practicing the Way.

This teaching was first given at Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon

as a part of the Practicing the Way vision series.

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.

An 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

formation 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 meta-narrative by which you make sense of reality.

By our habits, good, bad, and in-between,

...