The goal of Christian spiritual formation is to learn to experience the love of God and to learn to love as God loves. This is the simplest way I know to explain the spiritual journey. But what stands in the way of this journey is often unseen. And what is unseen has formidable strength to keep us in bondage to the things that prevent us from experiencing the love of God and from loving others in the way that God loves them.

The experience of the love of God is at the center of this book.

The love of God is the only thing that empowers real change in our lives.

God is always present to us. And we are often not present to God. We are caught up in an array of distractions, pursuits, and thoughts that draw us away from the experience of God’s love.

An important process in the spiritual formation journey—one that can help free us from the things that keep us bound—is getting a clear view of what prevents us from loving and being loved.

What is in the way? What prevents me from living into all that God is inviting me toward and saying yes to every invitation that God extends?

The answer to this question is different for each person. As Roberta Bondi articulates, “What prevents me from loving may be entirely different than what prevents you from loving.”1

But getting a clear view of the things that disrupt our formation is becoming more difficult. We’ve lost some things along the way that the earliest generations of Christ-followers placed at the center of their way of life. The pursuit of humility, for starters.

This book is a vision for engaging and reimagining the way of life that emerged in those early years. It is meant to allow the way of life early Christians pursued to address the current crises of discipleship. But this isn’t early-church nostalgia. It’s a vision for reimagining a way of life that has bolstered the formation of the Christian person in the way of love since the very beginning.

Our culture increasingly obscures our view of what keeps us in bondage. It is easy for us to grow accustomed to the very things that hold us back from a life devoted to being united to God. Our culture is perfectly designed to keep us distracted, disembodied, and removed from our own self.

We often live in invisible chains, which cause us to settle for a vision of our life that is so much less than the vision offered by God in Christ, who is nonetheless kind and loving and gentle and patient with us.

Some of these invisible chains are built for us by giant computers whose primary job is to learn how to keep our attention on the small black mirror we hold in our hands. The feed on that screen reflects our own desires.

We make other chains all on our own. The first step toward freedom is the willingness to embrace the reality that this is the state of things: there are things hidden from our view that get in the way of what we really want.

We should not be afraid or ashamed of this fact. It’s just true.

But neither should we ignore it.

Many of us live with the assumption that whatever is in the way of a better life—and in the case before us, a better spiritual life—resides outside of us. When we consider why we are not growing spiritually or growing more in our love for God and neighbor—which sums up the whole spiritual journey as described by Jesus—we often assume it has to do with something external to us.

We change churches. We find new podcasts. We buy a new book (this one included). We search for some external thing that will give us what we’re looking for. A conference. A new method. New spiritual practices and workouts. The changes we often seek in order to bolster our spiritual life are primarily external. But the things that keep us bound up and stuck are not external to us. They are within us.

This is what all good spiritual guides have taught us. And it is within the tradition that gave us these guides that I offer this book. The things that bind us can only do so to the extent that they remain hidden to us. But once we see them clearly—those inner masters that rule us and rob us of our freedom—we can join Christ, who is already present doing the slow work of healing us.

This is not a self-help book. It’s an invitation to see the way the love of God is the only thing, in the end, that does the work of transformation.

Addressing the things that hinder our spiritual freedom—the shame, the patterns of personality, the habits that keep us stuck, and the stories we tell about ourselves and others—is becoming easier and more accessible as social scientists and psychologists continue to give us data.

Tools and books for spiritual formation are now ubiquitous in the twenty-first-century Western church. Even in church communities where two decades ago any talk of spiritual formation, contemplation, and spiritual direction were met with great caution (“Aren’t these New Age practices?”), you can now find Enneagram workshops, classes on centering prayer, and even a cadre of pew-sitters who have discovered the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Brené Brown’s war on shame is becoming household language,2 and others are building on that work.3 Having a therapist, being in a twelve-step recovery program, or pursuing marriage counseling is no longer met with suspicion from the church. The church, it seems, is growing in her capacity to care for souls.

The way of life that I’m inviting you toward is to live in such a way that those unseen things will quite regularly rise to the surface. What is now hidden will be revealed. And the church and the Spirit will guide you toward your freedom, which is your inheritance in Christ.

With all this talk about freedom, perhaps you are wondering how and why this book is also about constraint?