How Spiritual Formation Works From the Inside Out
Modern Christianity often functions from a reduced and harmful idea of what it means to be human. We sometimes act as though people are “brains on sticks,” and that if we accumulate enough correct doctrine and biblical knowledge, our spiritual formation is largely complete.
This idea, driven in part by Descartes’ famous claim that “I think, therefore I am,” has helped create a culture—particularly in Protestantism—that is hyper-focused on sermons, Bible studies, apologetics, conferences, and biblical teaching. Instruction is essential, but the assumption that instruction alone produces formation has had consequences.
It has sometimes allowed controlling, insecure, and even narcissistic teachers to rise through Christian institutions because they can handle the Bible with wit, conviction, and confidence. As long as they teach effectively, we may quietly overlook the other qualities Paul lists as marks of a mature leader: gentleness, hospitality, integrity, humility, self-control, and love.
Biblical instruction matters enormously, but let us remember how scripturally literate the Pharisees were. J. C. Ryle once observed that a man possessed by thousands of demons recognized Jesus, while men possessing thousands of Scriptures did not.
The irony is that modern Christianity may be one of the few major formative movements in which we assume people are being formed simply because they are being instructed. That is like saying a husband and wife become more like one another by taking a weekly class, or that a civilian becomes a soldier by reading books about warfare.
Discipleship is far more relational, experiential, embodied, and mysterious than adding information to the brain.
How Spiritual Formation Works at the Center of the Heart
A young boy in a well-known commercial asks his animal friends, “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” The turtle confesses that he has never made it without biting into one and directs the boy to the wise owl. The owl decides to conduct the experiment, takes three licks, bites through the candy, and confidently announces that the answer is three.
We have spent considerable time exploring the macro problem of the Great Omission, the need for the inward journey, and the shortage of intentional communities that help people become more like Jesus. Those ideas prepare us to move toward the center of the matter, the spiritual equivalent of the Tootsie Roll buried inside the lollipop.
How does one person become more like another person? To use the Soil & Roots language, how are our deepest ideas and desires actually formed and transformed?
Genuine discipleship involves the ongoing formation of both our conscious and unconscious lives. If we hope to think, act, relate, and love more like Jesus without constantly forcing ourselves to do so, the hidden parts of the heart must be addressed. Ideas and desires are two of the most powerful forces governing us, and our hearts contain versions of both that bend toward light and versions that bend toward darkness.
We become more like Jesus as our ideas and desires increasingly take on His likeness.
Heartview and the Hidden Life
The first step in transforming hidden ideas and desires is becoming aware of them. At Soil & Roots, we call this practice Heartview, which involves paying close and gentle attention to eight indicators: our thought patterns, emotions, health, relationships, behaviors, words, and how we use time and money.
These outward indicators provide clues about the hidden life. If someone discovers a reckless and impulsive pattern with money, for example, that behavior may be revealing something deeper. It becomes an invitation to explore the ideas and desires driving the spending.
Perhaps the heart is desperately trying to feel known, soothed, secure, or valuable because important relationships failed to provide those experiences. A purchase may offer a brief emotional high, but the relief disappears quickly, so the pattern repeats.
The spending itself matters, but it is not the center of the Tootsie Pop. The behavior is an indicator pointing toward something deeper.
This is why the Eight Indicators of Heartview are so helpful. They allow us to notice what is happening without immediately condemning ourselves, and they invite us into a deeper conversation with Jesus about what the heart is trying to accomplish.
Why Safety Matters in the Inward Journey
The inward journey is best taken from a place of security and safety, rooted in the assurance of God’s love. Once we begin uncovering the hidden ideas and desires beneath our behaviors, we may encounter painful material.
Our mining expedition may reveal wounds, insecurities, betrayals, unmet needs, and the ways people we loved failed us. It may also expose the ways we have harmed ourselves and others.
If this process unfolds under the fear of rejection, judgment, or condemnation, we may become defensive, bitter, or ashamed. We may stop digging before reaching the deeper places that need healing.
The inward journey requires courageous curiosity, which grows best in the reassurance that God is not going anywhere. Graciously, He often allows us to experience that reassurance through a trusted friend who is also willing to remain.
This is one reason the inward journey with God must begin in safety. Honest self-knowledge becomes much more possible when we are convinced that what we discover will not cost us belonging.
Ideas Are Experienced Realities
Ideas are not primarily intellectual conclusions. They are experienced realities.
A woman may sincerely believe that she is a child of God while struggling with an eating disorder rooted in self-hatred, abandonment, or shame. Her belief is that God accepts her, but her heart may operate from the idea that she is not worth accepting.
She may have heard countless times that she is a marvelous creature of inestimable value. She may agree with every word, memorize the relevant passages, and teach the truth to someone else. Yet her heart remains unconvinced because something beyond instruction is required.
I may intellectually believe that God is in control and that I am safe in His care. Yet my thought patterns may reveal a different idea as I worry constantly about the future or replay the past.
A deep disciple increasingly learns to live in the present, rather than trying to control tomorrow or mentally rewrite yesterday. My beliefs may declare that I am safe, but my inner life may operate from the assumption that everything depends on me.
This is the distance between belief and experience. It is an internal disconnection, and information alone rarely resolves it.
Three Ways Ideas Are Formed
Ideas appear to be formed in at least three broad ways: initially, abruptly, and progressively.
Some ideas seem to be present from the beginning. Children often appear to possess an intuitive awareness of good and evil, permanence, justice, and the possibility that life means more than what we can see. A two-year-old who steals something from a sibling may hide the evidence before anyone teaches a formal lesson on morality.
Of course, adults become quite skilled at talking themselves out of these early intuitions. Many eventually reject the possibility that we are eternal creatures or that good and evil possess any objective meaning.
When that happens, spending time in a first-grade classroom can be clarifying. Children are often more attuned to some of life’s foundational realities than the rest of us.
Ideas may also change abruptly through tragedy or divine intervention. Emotional, verbal, sexual, or spiritual abuse can rapidly alter a person’s ideas about identity, value, safety, love, and power. Divorce, betrayal, illness, abandonment, job loss, or the death of someone close may have similar effects.
A parent’s abandonment may form the idea that love is temporary. Betrayal may produce the idea that intimacy is dangerous. Spiritual abuse may create the assumption that God is controlling, punitive, or impossible to please.
Tragedy does not always bend ideas toward darkness, however. Suffering can sometimes strengthen trust, deepen compassion, clarify values, and loosen our dependence on control.
Divine intervention may also produce sudden transformation. Some people enter the Kingdom and experience an immediate change in how they understand identity, forgiveness, value, or power. Their hearts quickly embrace adoption, release shame, or relinquish control in ways that surprise everyone, including themselves.
Most formation, however, happens progressively.
Progressive Spiritual Formation
Hearts and spirits can break quickly, but they usually heal slowly.
Many people who follow Jesus function from the hidden idea that they must perform in order to gain or maintain God’s favor. If we look carefully, much like staring into one of those Magic Eye pictures from the 1990s, we can find the idea woven through Christian subcultures and practices.
Yes, God loves us unconditionally, but we should evangelize more, pray more, serve more, give more, attend more, read more, and accomplish more. Like children wondering whether they can ever satisfy their parents, our hearts begin to wonder whether God really likes us when we fail to do everything expected of us.
God is unfathomably patient, gracious, kind, and tender, but those words do not describe the formative environments many people experienced, inside or outside the church.
The wider culture reinforces the same idea. Get better grades, become the best athlete, earn more money, buy the right car, maintain the right body, and appear more successful than everyone around you. Watch advertising for five minutes and you will be reminded of what you lack, what you should have achieved, and how much better someone else appears to be doing.
We inhabit an idea system built on constant comparison, and comparison inevitably tells us that we are not measuring up. Even if a church does not explicitly teach performance-based acceptance, we may easily project the wider culture’s assumptions onto God.
Why Harmful Ideas Do Not Change Overnight
A harmful idea like performance-based worth does not reform overnight. It also does not disappear simply because someone tells us that it is false.
Repeating that God loves His children unconditionally may strengthen our belief, but it may not reach the deeper place where the heart expects affection to be earned.
If our hearts are rooted in the idea that we are what we accomplish, the transformation of that idea must be experienced, not merely explained. We may need to spend significant time with someone who loves us simply because we exist and who wants to know us for no reason other than that we are worth knowing.
The dark idea of performance is slowly unwound by experiencing love that does not control, manipulate, compel, or demand usefulness. This is not usually a single event. The heart learns unconditional love through repeated expressions over time.
A quiet evening on the porch with a spouse may become one of those expressions. So may the wild, reckless hug of a three-year-old child, the whisper of a morning breeze, the attentive ear of a loyal friend who listens to the same story for the hundredth time because telling it is part of the healing, or the experience of allowing God to speak first in prayer.
Holding someone’s hand in a hospital room can form the heart. So can being the person whose hand is held.
These moments may appear small, but progressive formation is often carried through ordinary experiences of presence, safety, delight, and love.
Information and Experience Belong Together
None of this suggests that sharing Jesus, studying Scripture, serving, praying, or teaching are unimportant. They are essential parts of discipleship.
The difference lies in what is driving them.
There is a profound difference between doing more because we quietly fear disappointing a temperamental God and doing more because we are increasingly free, joyful, and secure in His love. One posture is driven by anxiety and appeasement, while the other flows from affection and abundance.
The actions may look similar from the outside, but the hearts beneath them are entirely different.
This is why information and transformation are not the same thing. Truth matters, but truth becomes deeply formative as it is embodied, practiced, experienced, and received within relationships over time.
The head needs instruction, while the heart also needs relationship and experience.
The Five Elements of Progressive Formation
The progressive transformation of dark ideas is usually a patient and relational adventure involving all five formative elements: time, habits, community, intimacy, and instruction.
Time allows repeated experiences to accumulate. Habits help us become attentive and receptive. Community gives us a shared environment in which formation can occur. Intimacy allows the hidden life to become known, while instruction provides language, truth, and direction.
When these elements operate together, ideas formed through fear, shame, abandonment, control, or performance can slowly be reshaped.
This is the heart of the Formation Gap. Many people receive instruction without the time, habits, community, and intimacy necessary for that instruction to travel deeply into the heart.
We may know the truth without inhabiting it.
How Spiritual Formation Works Through Relationships
Human beings are deeply relational, which means our ideas and desires are often formed through the people around us.
The presence of a safe person can contradict the idea that vulnerability is dangerous. A loyal friend can challenge the assumption that everyone eventually leaves. A patient spouse may reveal that conflict does not have to end in rejection.
Someone who delights in us can help reform the idea that we are merely useful. Someone who listens without fixing can teach the heart that our story is worth hearing.
This is why presence is essential to spiritual formation. We are not only formed by what people say. We are formed by how they experience us and how we experience them.
God frequently uses human relationships to make His own patience, attentiveness, affection, and faithfulness increasingly believable.
Becoming More Like Jesus From the Inside Out
The goal of spiritual formation is not simply better behavior. It is the transformation of the inner realities from which behavior flows.
A person may force themselves to act generous while remaining governed by scarcity. They may suppress anger while continuing to live from fear. They may perform humility while secretly craving admiration.
Behavior matters, but the deeper work occurs when ideas and desires are changed. Generosity becomes natural as the heart becomes secure. Patience emerges as control loosens. Love becomes less forced as fear declines.
This is how spiritual formation works from the inside out. Jesus does not merely help us manage outward behavior; He invites the hidden foundations of the heart to become increasingly like His.
As those foundations change, our actions, relationships, words, and choices begin to change with them.
The Joy of Progressive Formation
Spiritual formation is rarely quick or tidy. It can involve painful discoveries, long seasons of uncertainty, and the humbling realization that our hearts do not always agree with our stated beliefs.
Yet it is also a joyful adventure.
We begin to experience increasing integration between head and heart. We discover that God’s love is not merely a doctrine to defend but a reality in which we can live. We become less anxious, controlling, defensive, and driven by performance.
Over time, we become more available to God, other people, ourselves, and the world around us. Our hearts grow brighter and calmer, not because life becomes easy, but because the ideas and desires beneath our lives are slowly being reformed.
We are not, after all, human doings.
We are human beings.
Duc in altum.
Brian Fisher is the founder of Soil & Roots and the author of Soil & Roots: Cultivating Deep Discipleship. He writes and speaks about spiritual formation, the inner life, and how people become more like Jesus from the inside out.
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