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Summary

What does it look like to live a “deeply formed life?” What are the practices that equip us for a life with God for the world? Joanna and Brian talk with Rich Villodas, pastor of New Life Fellowship and the author of The Deeply Formed Life.

Highlights

On The Deeply Formed Life:

“The Deeply Formed Life is really about a life that’s shaped by and for Jesus in a way that’s robustly integrative. My goal is that people are being formed by Jesus, for Jesus, and for the world in a way that integrates elements of Christian discipleship and formation that are often segmented.”

On reconciliation and love:

“Reconciliation at its core is about love, and love always costs us something…As a parent, love costs me something. It costs me hours of sleep. It costs me money. It costs me time. To be married, it cost me something. To be a friend costs me something. Love will always cost us something, and it costs Jesus his life…If the end goal [of reconciliation] is love, then I think we need to open ourselves up to what it means to cost us and what it means for us to give something up.” 

On balancing the monastery and mission:

“I think our Lord shows us this dynamic of being in the monastery, a place marked by solitude and prayer and silence and introspection, and then coming out and offering a word of power and wholeness and healing to the masses…We are called to do out of our being with God; we’re not called to be-without-doing or do-without-being. We’re called to do out of our being with God.”

On work as spiritual formation:

“Work is a gift, God is a worker, and God creates us in God’s image, gives us the holy task of creating and shaping, of establishing order out of chaos, of creating community, of stewarding the gifts. Work in itself is a good thing. Moreover, work is the place where we spend most of our lives. So the reason why it must become a place of formation is because we spend most of our adult waking hours at work.”

Resources

Read Rich’s latest book, The Deeply Formed Life.*

Hear Rich preach his two sermons on race and structural sin.

Download the episode transcript.

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*–Purchase with purpose. Amazon donates to Denver Institute when you shop at smile.amazon.com.