Three Shifts of Discipleship | Spiritual Cartography E3

Hey friends, it's John Mark, our team of practicing the way is really excited for our upcoming pastor conference happening January 26th through 28th of 2026 here in Los Angeles. The conference has sold out for in-person tickets, but if you are a pastor who still wants to gather with your team or a few friends and explore what formation looks like in your context, we have a watch gathering option for you. Our team can join remotely and watch each session live or on demand. We've also created resources designed to help your team process what you're learning and discern your next steps together. There is a lot riding on our shoulders as leaders, but we don't have to go on this journey alone. Learn more about watch gatherings at practicingtheway.org/pastorconference. Hello and welcome to the John Mark Conor Teachings podcast. My name is Yingadossan 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. We're finishing up our spiritual photography series today about our journey and apprenticeship to Jesus, featuring content from John Mark's book Practice in the Way that ended up on the Cutter Room 4. In this week's episode, John Mark impacts three critical shifts that we need to make in our journey of discipleship, moving from fear to trust, despair to hope, and self-focus to love. He has John Mark. Faith, hope, and love. In classical Christian theology, these are called the theological virtues of the Christian way. They are theological in that they have to do with God, theos, unlike the four cardinal virtues of Greek philosophy, wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. None of the theological virtues make sense apart from God and His kingdom. And they are virtues, not feelings, though they do shape our emotional life. They are settled conditions of the heart, the kind of people we become over many years of following Jesus. But none of us start out as people of faith, hope, and love. The opposite. We begin our spiritual journey self-focused, not God-focused. Therefore, discipleship to Jesus is a journey of three shifts. Number one, from fear to trust or faith. The Catholic theologian and psychologist Benedict Rochelle summarizes the entirety of the spiritual journey as a decrease in anxiety and an increase in peace. From anxious care to a deep calm trust in God. That's what faith is, a sense of trust, confidence, reliance on someone or something in this case on God. We all use faith constantly to navigate life. You have faith in a bridge to hold you up when you entrust your body to it and walk across it without fear. Same with God. You have faith in God when you rely upon Him and live as if He is who He says He is. And as a result, you feel very little fear. To have faith in God is not to trust that everything will work out perfectly, but rather, to trust that no matter what happens, even if our deepest fears come true, we have God, and He's enough, we don't need to be afraid. As we let go of our anxieties, which are all directly tied to our attachments, we become increasingly free to love, which is the ultimate aim of the spiritual journey. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear. Meaning fear and love cannot coexist because fear causes us to act in unloving ways toward other people, as we attempt to control what we cannot control, as we attempt to be God rather than trust in God, to run our own life rather than put our confidence in Him to shepherd us. It's worth quoting Dr. Mahaland at length here, "Anxious care arises when we are driven by the need to order and control our own lives. In a world where such order and control are partial at best, anxious care can become a consuming passion that mishapes all relationships, all events, and all activities of one's life. When this happens, anxiety-driven persons tend to become manipulative and dehumanizing in their relationships with others. Others must conform to their pathological attempts to order the world and maintain control of their lives. Healthy-driven persons are also compelled to impose their own order on the events of their lives. Layer upon layer of defenses and securities are constructed to keep the unpredictable and unexpected from intruding into their carefully ordered world. Such persons cannot be the person's God intends them to be. They are imprisoned by the need to maintain control of their existence. Such lives, closed within the fragile shell of their own limited order and control, are plagued with stress, anxiety, fear, doubt, despair, depression, and a legion of other destructive and debilitating demons. Tense and troubled, such persons expend prodigious amounts of energy to maintain and defend their tenuous control of their lives. Things that could have graced healing and wholeness to a broken and hurting world. Is this any way to live, trapped in a prison of anxiety, where the bars are made of our own futile attempts to play God and control our lives? That's what anxiety is, a kind of temporary atheism, where we imagine a future without God in it, where we are our best hope, where there's no good shepherd who goes before us, with us, and behind us, where on our own as the secular mantra goes. The alternative way of Jesus is that of radical trust in the Father, faith. But faith must be developed, like any virtue. Faith is like a muscle. It grows through resistance training. Like an infant, we start weak, but over time as we face challenge upon challenge, we have the chance to work out our faith muscle with fear and trembling and strengthen our confidence in God to care for us through whatever comes. You see this on display in mature disciples of Jesus. They are incredibly at ease. They are some of the most relaxed, confident, peaceful people you will ever meet. They live with this unshakable belief that everything will be just fine, even if things aren't just fine. They have matured from fear to trust. Number two, for melancholic despair to joyful expectation or hope. Psychologists call children pre-neurotic, meaning they are generally happy, even in less than ideal families and situations. But as we age, we begin to wake up to the terrible solemnity of the world, with its steady litany of evil. The digital newsstream sure doesn't help with its intentional curation of the worst happenings in the world on any given day. But the problem isn't just out there in the world, systemic injustice, climate change, the atrocities of war, it's far more personal. We've all been wounded. As we enter adulthood, we become more and more aware of those wounds. It's how deep they go and how impossibly damaged we are. In such a state, within and without, it's easy to lose hope. To fall into a melancholy fugue, sad, lethargic, self-focused, negative, even depressed, I'm not talking about grief here, which is an emotionally healthy response to evil. I'm not even talking about emotional pain, which is unavoidable in life this side of Jesus' return. I'm talking about a condition, a character that is gloomy, despondent, unnecessarily sad. I should know, this has been me for most of my life. They say 50% of happiness is genetics. If that's true, then I lost the genetic game of Russian roulette. This is a glaring weak point in my own discipleship to Jesus, yet it is an issue of discipleship, not simply of a chemical imbalance in my brain. Of course, we are whole people, and our body can fall prey to all sorts of things, but until very recently, Christians saw sadness as one of the seven deadly sins. Again, this isn't the sadness of grief over tragedy or the fitting emotional pain we all feel at times, but a mindset, a way of seeing the world that is directly at odds with the joy at the heart of the Trinity. Our spiritual ancestors saw that beneath our emotions of sadness are often more nefarious currents of the human heart, entitlement, a sense that were owed a suffering-free life, envy, a spirit of comparison and competition and a sense of jealousy for another's good fortune. Negativity, a decision to spotlight the bad, ignore the goodness all around us. Negative rumination, the inability to curate our consciousness and more. All of us have this in us at some level. Depending on your genetic makeup and personality structure, this may be a speed bump or a Himalayan pass in your spiritual journey, but we all must traverse it. The direction of growth is toward gratitude for the prodigal kindness of God in our grace saturated days. Under and odd, the miracle of life in God's world and a hopeful confidence in the future. Gratitude is the key stone practice by which we mature in this area. The more we practice gratitude, as well as practices like wonder and celebration, the more we wake up to the goodness of God in our present. And the more we wake up to the goodness of God in our present, the more we hope for more of that same goodness in our future. Hope isn't wishful thinking as it is in modern English. I hope it's sunny today or I hope I get money back on my taxes this year. Nor is it just a sunny optimism, which is often just denial and disguise. Hope in the theological sense is the confident expectation of coming good based on the person and promises of God. It's the unflinching sense that, no matter what happens, God will be with us through it all. Any suffering or pain we face has the potential to form us into Christ-like character. That one day Jesus will return and put all things to rights. And that in the meantime, He will bring forward good from His future into our present. The psychological research would indicate that anticipation of good causes just as much happiness and well-being as the good thing itself, or even more. Thinking about going on vacation is often far better than the vacation itself, as we anticipate the coming goodness of God in our life. We begin to live with an increasing joy and emotional buoyancy. Again, you see this in mature disciples of Jesus. They are incredibly hopeful, and they are usually deeply joyful or full of joy. They spill out excess joy to those around them. The happiest person you know is a saint. They are not ignorant. Most of them have known great times of suffering, but they have come through the valley and now walk in hope. They laugh easily, and as Proverbs put it, they smile at the future. Faith, hope, and of course love. Number three, from the egoic operating system to agape or love. In the narrative arc of the Bible, human beings are created by love, in love, for love. You don't need to be a theologian to realize something has gone terribly wrong. We come out of our mother's womb, open our eyes, and as beautiful as life is, we inherit a condition where our default setting is not agape, but what the Christian psychologist Dr. Gary Moon calls the egoic operating system. We run on self-love. What do I want? What do I need? If you don't believe me, have children. As wonderful as little kids are. Some of their first words are no and mine. They cry, yell, turn red-faced, bite, hit, and shove when they don't get their way. Many of us never mature beyond these selfish tantrums. We just grow more sophisticated as we age. But as long as we still run on the operating system of the ego, we will remain trapped in the prison of our self-will. And we will never be set free to become persons of love for others. By love, I mean agape, love as defined by Jesus. Not desire or feelings of affection or tolerance as it means in Western usage, but genuine good will toward another. As Thomas Merton said, "Love seeks one thing only, the good of the one love." For in Jesus' language, greater love has no one than this to lay down one's life for one's friends. A person who is loving isn't self-preserving and vice versa. A person who is self-preserving isn't loving. Therefore discipleship to Jesus is a journey out of the prison house of the ego into the wide open space of agape. It's living by a new operating system of genuine will to good toward others, putting their good ahead of your own. It's dying to self and rising into a whole new caliber of existence. And now these three remain faith, hope, and love. What the greatest of these is love. Our transformation into people of faith, hope, and love doesn't happen overnight. These shifts are the fruit of God's patient work in our lives throughout the seasons of our apprenticeship to Him. And our role is simply to be faithful to offer ourselves to God day by day. So to wrap up today, let's ask God what it looks like to be faithful to His transformative work. Begin by taking a few deep breaths and bringing our awareness to God's presence. And simply ask the Holy Spirit this question, "Holy Spirit, what does it look like for me to be faithful in offering myself to your transformative work this week? I'll leave a half a minute for you to listen and close with amen." Amen. Thanks for listening. This podcast is from practice in the way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. Thanks to the little thoughts for our show music. Word of crowdfunded nonprofits are everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by the circle, our community of monthly givers. Special thanks today goes to Jordan from Liberty South Carolina, Heather from Huntsville, Texas, Lifepoint Church from Palm Bay, Florida, Matthew from Plymouth, Michigan, and Paul from St. Matthew, California. Thank you all very much. To join these friends in the circle, I'll learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.