Chapter 1 — Loving God
A doctor who prescribes the same medicine for every ailment is a poor doctor, and the same lesson applies to the spiritual life. The “quiet time” — thirty to sixty minutes of personal worship, intercessory prayer, Bible study, and a concluding commitment — became, for many, the only prescription on offer: you want to grow as a Christian? Develop a quiet time and come to church every weekend. That was the answer for virtually everything.
The result is a particular kind of sadness. Some Christians have labored on for years but admit that the routine of their devotions has made them feel more like obligation than delight. Even delightful routines can grow stale. The deeper question is this: why should everybody be expected to love God the same way? God wants to know the real you, not a caricature of what somebody else wants you to be. He created you with a certain personality and a certain spiritual temperament, and he wants your worship according to the way he made you. Jesus accepted the worship of Peter’s mother-in-law as she served him, but he refused to force Mary of Bethany to worship in that same way. Mary was allowed to express her devotion in the silence of adoration. Both were accepted. Both were right.
Scripture shows this pattern across every era. Abraham had a religious bent, building altars everywhere he went. Moses and Elijah revealed an activist’s streak in their confrontations with evil. David celebrated God with enthusiastic worship. Ezekiel and John described loud and colorful visions of God in stunning sensuous brilliance. Mordecai demonstrated his love for God by caring for others, beginning with the orphaned Esther. Mary of Bethany is the classic contemplative. None of these figures is held up as the only model; all are shown as genuine expressions of a life oriented toward God.
Church history adds its own testimony. Roman Catholic worship focused on the altar and the mystery of sacramental rites. Luther elevated the pulpit and sola scriptura. Calvinists rejected monastic separation and expressed love for God by transforming society. Anabaptists sat quietly before God, waiting for the Spirit to speak through his people. The Orthodox Church maintained centuries-old sensuous worship — touching and kissing sacred items, bells, incense, elaborate clothing, color and mystery. All five were attempts to love God sincerely.
Nine pathways can be traced through Scripture and church history. Naturalists prefer to leave any building to pray beside a river or walk through the woods. Sensates want to be lost in the awe, beauty, and splendor of God through sights, sounds, and smells. Traditionalists are fed by rituals, symbols, sacraments, and sacrifice. Ascetics want nothing more than to be left alone in prayer, in silence and simplicity. Activists define worship as standing against evil, energized more by confrontation than by solitude. Caregivers serve God by serving others, often claiming to see Christ in the poor and needy. Enthusiasts are inspired by joyful celebration and mystery. Contemplatives seek to love God with the purest and deepest love imaginable. And intellectuals need their minds to be stirred before their hearts come truly alive, feeling closest to God when they first understand something new about him.
Chapter 2 — Where Is Your Gethsemane?
Mature Christians often display many, if not all, of the spiritual temperaments. Jesus himself is cited as an example of each one — he was contemplative and activist, caregiver and intellectual, sensate and traditionalist. The goal of understanding our spiritual temperament is not self-actualization. It is nourishment — feeding our souls so we can know God in a new way and express that love by reaching out to others.
Jesus had used the garden of Gethsemane on numerous occasions to meet with his Father, to gain spiritual strength, and to receive his marching orders. Long before Passion Week, the garden was a sacred space of refuge, refreshment, and fellowship — that is precisely why Jesus went there to prepare for what was about to take place. The experience of Gethsemane is unique to Jesus, but in using that sacred space repeatedly, he leaves an example to follow. When you need to hear from God, when you need to be strengthened, where do you go? For some it may be a garden or a local forest; others find prayer solace in a sanctuary or with a musical instrument in hand. Where is your Gethsemane?
If you are in a spiritual malaise, you may need a change in your spiritual diet more than a renewal of effort in the same old direction. You may not know how to be nourished according to the way God made you, and so you seek spiritual junk food in the form of sin or addiction somewhere else. Finding genuine fulfillment in God is the most powerful antidote to any sin. According to Jesus, four elements are essential to every true expression of faith: loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. The intellectual is not excused from failing to adore. The contemplative is not excused from harboring wrong beliefs. Every temperament is called to the fullness of love, and the sacred pathways are the means by which that fullness becomes practically possible.
Chapter 3 — Naturalists
Where we worship can have a profound impact on the quality of our worship. The naturalist seeks to leave the formal architecture and the padded pews to enter a sanctuary that God himself has built. The Bible is meant to be read outdoors — many of its illustrations and allusions are based on nature, and it is only in the context of creation that they regain their full meaning. When we lock ourselves inside, we leave part of God’s creation — and therefore part of our understanding — outside.
Many Old Testament theophanies happened in the wilderness. God met Hagar in the desert, Abraham on a mountain, Jacob at a river crossing, Moses at a burning bush. Jesus moved from Nazareth to live in Capernaum, which was by the lake. He often taught in the countryside. When God created a paradise for the first man and woman, he did not choose a resort house — he chose to walk with Adam and Eve in a garden with plentiful trees and four river heads. In 1998, seventy-seven-year-old John Glenn returned to space and was almost immediately overwhelmed with the presence of God: “To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible.” The psalmist declared, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Psalm 19:1). Paul writes that “since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20).
Nature also offers rest. In Psalm 23, David credits God with restoring his soul, but the pastoral setting clearly plays a role. Two temptations attend this pathway. The first is spiritual delusion: anything received on a walk with God should be tested against Scripture. The second is pantheism — worshiping nature itself rather than the God revealed in nature. Nature is like a room a daughter has left behind: the Creator has been there, his character is everywhere evident, and the creation testifies unmistakably that God is — but the creation is not God.
Chapter 4 — Sensates
Some Christians are moved toward God more by sensuous worship experiences than by anything else — by all five senses: taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight. When all Christian worship is reduced to mere intellectual assent, believers are forced to encounter God in a stunted and muted existence. But when Scripture is examined, God often appears in very loud and colorful ways. Ezekiel feels a wind, sees flashing lightning and fantastic creatures, hears the sound of wings like the roar of rushing waters, and is then asked to eat a scroll that tastes sweet. After it is all over, Ezekiel sits down, stunned, for seven days.
Sound was the first sense God made central to worship. Psalm 96 begins: “Sing to the LORD a new song; sing to the LORD, all the earth.” Luther argued that Scripture was meant to be heard with the ears more than read with the eyes, believing that hearts are most transformed when we hear the Word of God — a claim science has since supported, showing that hearing Scripture activates the mind more than silent reading. Smell is given a surprisingly prominent place in Scripture as well. God commanded Moses to collect offerings of spices to create sweet incense; Aaron was told to burn incense every morning; and incense continues to be offered to God in heaven alongside the prayers of the saints in Revelation.
Touch communicates, especially to the sensate Christian. A nail carried in a pocket during Lent, its sharp edge pressing against the leg, can call to mind Jesus’ sufferings with every movement. Orthodox worship involves frequent kissing of a cross or a holy instrument: touch with the lips as a way to recognize something as precious. A young college student once offered himself to God by touching various parts of his body in prayer — fingers and feet consecrated for service, lips for truth, eyes for purity — only to discover later that the motions resembled the blood consecration in Leviticus 8:24, where Moses placed blood on the lobes of ears, thumbs of hands, and big toes of feet.
Sight affects us perhaps more than any other sense. When Henri Nouwen’s soul was captivated by Rembrandt’s painting of the prodigal son, the truth of that parable pierced his heart with an entirely new passion — though there were probably very few theological points he hadn’t studied several times over. When God inaugurated Israel’s form of worship, he especially gifted and called out two individuals, Bezalel and Oholiab, to do all kinds of crafts — creating beautiful art forms out of gold, silver, bronze, and wood. To God, beauty mattered. Three temptations attend the sensate pathway: worshiping without conviction, since senses can deceive; idolizing beauty, since things of great beauty can steal the heart; and worshiping worship itself — pursuing sensory stimulation as an end rather than an aid. The senses are God’s most effective inroad to some hearts; they were made to be instruments of devotion, not replacements for obedience.
Chapter 5 — Traditionalists
For all our suspicion of religious practices, we must remember that God invented and at times commanded much of them. When God formalized Israel’s religion, he commanded that Moses make an altar for offerings, and Aaron and his sons were given elaborate religious rituals to follow that would distinguish between the holy and the common so that reverence for God would not be lost. The traditionalist is fed by what are often called the historic dimensions of faith — rituals, symbols, sacraments, and sacrifice. Jesus himself made it his custom to go to the synagogue on the Sabbath, and Peter and John both observed regular, set times of prayer.
Ritual creates sacred order in otherwise chaotic time. Reading Scripture aloud, praying the Psalms regularly, setting fixed prayer windows at morning, midday, and evening — these practices provide structure for the faith. The Christian calendar can function as a year-long teacher: Advent reminds us that there is a time to wait; Lent, a time to repent and mourn; Easter, a time to celebrate; Pentecost, a time to be empowered and emboldened to go out and minister.
Symbols help overcome one of the great difficulties of the Christian life: a poor memory. God endorsed the use of symbols explicitly when he commanded tassels on the corners of garments with a blue cord, so that Israel would look at them and remember all his commands and not chase after the lusts of their hearts. Some Christian traditions keep baptism cloths as a memorial of baptism and use them as a covering for the body after death — unusually beautiful symbolism that proclaims the hope of baptism even in burial. Christ is frequently symbolized by the chi-rho symbol, the first two Greek letters of his name. Symbols become dangerous only when they become the center rather than a reminder of faith, as happened when Israel began to worship the bronze serpent that Moses had built.
Sacrifice is also at the heart of this pathway. Lent is its clearest modern expression, though we have become a culture that celebrates Mardi Gras but rarely gets around to Lent. Fasting does not earn extra merit, but it can chasten demanding hearts and create space for deeper dependence, gratitude, and obedience. The temptation is hypocrisy — Young Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli and yet did not yet know the Lord personally; intimately involved in the religious observances of Israel, but not knowing the God of Israel. Rituals can powerfully enhance an individual’s faith, but they can also destroy corporate faith if used to criticize, measure, or divide others. The tradition must remain a signpost pointing beyond itself to God; the moment it becomes an end in itself, the pathway has become a detour.
Chapter 6 — Ascetics
John the Baptist immediately comes to mind when we think of the solitary and the ascetic, but Jesus also had these tendencies. Before launching into his public ministry, Jesus spent forty days in solitude and fasting. He taught that prayer should be done in secret. He assumed his disciples would eventually fast. And he returned to solitude at difficult moments in his ministry. The ascetic pathway can be broken down into three overlapping dimensions: solitude, austerity, and strictness.
Solitude is the ascetic’s native environment. Even in a crowd, some ascetics try to steal a few moments of interior quiet — those solitary moments in which colors regain their brightness, truth regains its clarity, and reality loses its fog. Without some time alone, the anchor is lost. For a young mother or father, getting completely away may not be possible — but the important thing is what contemplative monk Basil Pennington calls “the sense of apartness.” Austerity strips distractions. One woman’s closest moments with God occur when the children have gone to bed, all the lights are turned out, and everything is quiet. If the children will not be quiet, she has been known to go into the bathroom, turn on the faucet to block other noise, and pray to God there. The point is not discomfort for its own sake but freedom from sensory overload — freedom that makes it possible to hear what could not be heard before.
G. K. Chesterton wrote about Francis of Assisi: “He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. And it is precisely the positive and passionate quality of this part of his personality that is a challenge to the modern mind.” Ascetics are strict only because they want to reserve a major portion of their lives for their passionate pursuit of God. True Christian asceticism does not seek suffering as an end; it seeks it as a means, a way to love something else so that God might be loved more. True ascetics are strict with themselves but treat others with supernatural gentleness — the legalism of the Pharisees caused them to set impossibly high standards for others while basking in other luxuries themselves. Jesus spent lengthy periods of prayer in solitude, but these were always followed by public times of ministry. Solitude should renew service, not replace it.
Chapter 7 — Activists
The activist defines worship as standing against evil and calling sinners to repentance. These Christians often view the church as a place to recharge their batteries so they can go back into the world to wage war against injustice. They may adopt either social or evangelistic causes, but they find their home in the rough-and-tumble world of confrontation, energized more by interaction — even in conflict — than by being alone. The activist cannot expect to faithfully serve God and be liked by God’s enemies. That is part of the cost.
The difference between Christian activism and mere quarrelsomeness lies in motivation: true Christian activists live for God and for his love alone. Walking prayer is one particularly helpful practice — an evangelist may intercede for a city block by walking around it while praying silently; an intercessor may walk around a government building while praying for justice. The temptations of activists cluster around three areas: becoming judgmental — forgetting that the holiest man who ever lived ate with sinners and was called their friend; ambition and its companion sexual temptation, rooted in a fight against powerlessness; and elitism — the tendency of those who have worked hard to believe they have earned more than those who have not. When David’s men wanted to withhold plunder from those who had stayed with the supplies, David corrected them: “God, not our own strength, gave us this victory, so everyone is going to share.”
Chapter 8 — Caregivers
Caregivers serve God by serving others. They often claim to see Christ in the poor and needy, and their faith is built up by interacting with people in need. Whereas caring for others might wear many people down, this activity recharges a caregiver’s batteries. The biblical portrait of Mordecai shows caregiving at its finest. In two chapters of Esther, Mordecai provides for an orphan and protects a king. Once Israel was victorious, he established a yearly festival and decreed that the Israelites celebrate by sending presents to one another and giving gifts to the poor. His epitaph captures what a caregiving life looks like in summary: he “worked for the good of his people and spoke up for the welfare of all the Jews.” At every point, Mordecai was looking after others — first an orphan, then a king, then a nation, then the poor.
The New Testament writers are unanimous in connecting love for others directly to love for God. John tells us that if anyone has material possessions and sees a brother in need but has no pity, how can the love of God be in him? The writer of Hebrews equates helping God’s people with loving God himself: “God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.” James says that pure and faultless religion is to look after orphans and widows in their distress. And Ezekiel’s devastating indictment of Sodom reveals that her gravest sin was this: “She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” Mother Teresa said it plainly: “God died for you and for me and for that leper and for that person dying of hunger. It’s not enough to say you love God. You also have to say you love your neighbor. Love, to be true, has to hurt.” The opportunities for caregiving are limitless — adopting a prisoner, helping a friend through a personal crisis, volunteering on a rescue squad, working in a soup kitchen, donating time at a battered women’s shelter. In his book Conspiracy of Kindness, Steve Sjogren suggests mixing service with evangelism — cool drinks in rush-hour traffic, hot chocolate on a university campus, raking leaves for senior citizens. The surprise of neighbors when they see such generosity is itself a powerful witness. We have to pass through the pain of sacrifice before we experience the joy of obedience.
Chapter 9 — Enthusiasts
Excitement and mystery in worship are the spiritual lifeblood of the enthusiast. They are the cheerleaders for God and the Christian life — let them clap their hands, shout “Amen!” and dance in their excitement. If their hearts are not moved, if they do not experience something of God’s power, something is missing. Three major feasts were prescribed in the Old Testament — Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles — and the Feast of Tabernacles involved a seven-day feast in which the Israelites were commanded to rejoice. David danced enthusiastically before the ark of the covenant. According to the book of Revelation, worship in heaven involves the roar of a great multitude shouting “Hallelujah!” — the enthusiast finds herself at home in these texts in a way that quieter temperaments may not.
Celebratory worship must still include reverence. In the midst of a celebration of the ark’s return to Israel, Uzzah reached out to touch the ark and immediately died. Without reverence, celebration degenerates into shallow triviality. Creation and creativity also belong to this pathway — building a business, writing a poem, painting a picture, or planting a garden can be profoundly holy experiences. One of the most powerful antidotes to addiction, in fact, is participating in creative activities that lift people out of themselves. Enthusiasts need to be especially careful to remain true to seeking God rather than always searching for new experiences. As soon as dreams or ecstatic experiences are sought for their own sake, the path has slipped from true Christianity toward what might be called circus spirituality.
Chapter 10 — Contemplatives
Contemplatives refer to God as their lover, and images of a loving Father and Bridegroom best capture their vision of him. The focus is not serving God or obeying commands — rather, these Christians seek to love God with the purest, deepest, and brightest love imaginable. The classic biblical example is Mary of Bethany, who sat and worshiped at Jesus’ feet and was commended by Jesus for doing so. To enter the devotion of contemplatives, one must begin by emptying life of those things that choke out desire for God. Calling to mind the stations of the cross has historically been a popular method — praying through the various events surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion, pausing at each point to allow the full weight of each moment to settle.
The temptations of the contemplative are subtle. The tendency to withdraw entirely from others must be resisted, because God gives himself through community as well as solitude. Spiritual gluttony is a related danger — beginning to seek the feelings of closeness with God instead of God himself. The contemplative path is not about pursuing spiritual states; it is about pursuing a person. Contemplatives remind us of a startling fact: there is one thing that each individual Christian can do that nobody else can — give personal love and affection to God. Sometimes it seems that God, seeing his people rushing about in all their doing of good, might say to himself: if only they would stop for a few minutes and give me themselves.
Chapter 11 — Intellectuals
Intellectuals need their minds to be stirred before their hearts come truly alive. They feel closest to God when they first understand something new about him. Jesus himself revealed intellectual tendencies — at twelve years old he was found discussing the law in the temple, and teaching was a large part of his ministry. Though forceful in his denunciation of intellectual contrivances that kept people from God, he understood that the mind, as well as the heart, had to be transformed. The brutal fact is that not one person in a hundred has the faintest notion what the church teaches about God, man, society, or the person of Jesus Christ. What we believe about God will affect how we serve him, in the same way that what we believe about a person will affect how we treat that person.
Intellectuals can broaden their faith by gaining understanding of the basic disciplines of theological training: church history, biblical studies, systematic theology, ethics, and apologetics. The major creeds deserve familiarity even when they are not part of one’s own tradition — the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Westminster Confession together form a solid foundation. The temptations of intellectuals are equally well documented. Paul warned Timothy not to have anything to do with foolish and stupid arguments because they produce quarrels — the Lord’s servant must be kind to everyone, not resentful. Knowledge puffs up; love builds up. The intellectual pathway is most beautiful when love and learning walk together.
Chapter 12 — Tending the Garden of the Soul
Discovering our strong tendencies and predominant spiritual temperament gives us the information we need to construct a comprehensive plan for spiritual growth. If we tend our garden, we will have plenty with which to feed others. If we completely neglect our garden, we will become so hungry that we turn into consumer Christians, feeding off of others rather than offering anything in return. The pathways are not an end in themselves; they are means of sustaining a relationship that then overflows into the lives of everyone around us.
We were made to love God. Each of us stands before an open plot of land. God will scour heaven and earth to provide what we need to plant and maintain a beautiful garden of love, intimacy, and fellowship with him. Not a second of our existence passes without God thinking about how to turn our hearts toward him. The almost unbelievable joy is that each person can enjoy a relationship with God that he will have with no one else. And God eagerly, passionately, yearns for that relationship to begin — and to deepen, season by season, all the way to the end.