What comes to mind when you hear the phrase spiritual formation?

Is it prayer and fasting, spiritual encounters, carefully designed programs meant to accelerate growth?

Today, many popular approaches to spiritual formation simply drift away from Scripture.

In A Heart of Flame for God, Matthew C. Bingham draws from the Puritan tradition to show how

believers can cultivate spiritual disciplines rooted in grace alone. This book explores prayer, meditation,

and self-examination within a reformed framework that keeps Christ at the center of the Christian life.

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When we talk about perspicuity, we tend to mean not that every verse is equally understandable within the scriptures.

We mean something more like this.

Everything God needs you to know for salvation is very clear in the scriptures.

The narrative of fall into sin, God's faithfulness to Israel, the fulfillment of the promise, the dying and rising of Jesus,

the mission of the church. These things are very clear in the scriptures. And if you just sit down and

read them, it should make sense to you. What it doesn't mean is something like this. Everybody's

going to understand everything equally in the same way. The scriptures are clear, but that doesn't mean the interpreter is going to get it right.

The scriptures are clear because they're God's word,

but we have a lot of baggage that we bring to the text that muddies the waters sometimes.

And so what we have to constantly be doing is going back to the scriptures

and having the scriptures correct us

with the clarity of what they teach. So I think that's perhaps a good starting point, that at least

it's clear on what's necessary for salvation. Applying the riches of the Reformation to the modern church.

This is Whitehorse Inn, a weekly roundtable discussion about theology and culture.

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