Walk into a Christian bookshop today and you’ll likely find a whole shelf marked “spiritual formation”. Churches run spiritual formation groups. Colleges offer spiritual formation degrees. Pastors speak of being formed rather than merely taught.

Some Christians love the phrase. Others hear it and grow uneasy, because it carries a faint smell of the monastery—of silent retreats, breathing exercises and practices that seem to come from somewhere other than the Bible.

Both reactions hold something true. So let’s do two things here. First, let us understand what people mean by spiritual formation, where the idea came from, and why it spread so quickly. Second—and this matters far more—let’s ask what the Bible itself says about how a Christian is shaped into the likeness of Jesus Christ. On that question Scripture is neither silent nor vague.

The short answer is this. God really is forming His people into the image of His Son. That isn’t a modern invention; it’s the plain teaching of the New Testament. But the Bible also tells us

• Who does the forming
• What tools He uses
• Where the work happens, and
• What it rests on.

We need to get those four things right for an account of growth that’s both deep and safe.

Where Did the Phrase Come From?

The word “formation” was borrowed. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church used it to describe the training of priests, monks and nuns. A man entering a religious order passed through “formation”—a long, supervised shaping of his habits, his prayers and his character.

The phrase entered the wider Christian world through a small number of very influential writers:

• Richard Foster—his book Celebration of Discipline (1978) reintroduced practices such as fasting, silence, solitude, simplicity and confession to Protestant readers. He later founded the Renovaré movement.
• Dallas Willard—a philosopher whose books The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988) and Renovation of the Heart (2002) argued that Christians had shrunk the gospel down to forgiveness and quietly dropped obedience.
• Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton—Catholic writers on solitude and the inner life, who supplied much of the movement’s emotional tone.

Knowing this history isn’t by itself an argument against anything. Very few people who use the phrase today know that it began in monasteries, and that matters when we come to weigh the practices it recommends.

Why It Caught On

It caught on because it named a real famine.

By the late 20th century many churches were very good at producing decisions and very poor at producing disciples. People walked an aisle, signed a card, joined a small group—and then stayed exactly the same for 20 years. Willard called this the gospel of “sin management”: a Christianity that handles the guilt problem and leaves the character problem untouched.

We should be honest enough to say the diagnosis was largely right. The hunger that drove people to bookshop shelves was a good hunger. Something in them knew being forgiven ought to lead to lasting change.

The question isn’t whether the hunger was real. It’s whether the food on offer was the food God actually prescribed.

What the Bible Actually Says About “Forming”

Here’s something that often surprises people. “Formation” isn’t merely a monastic word. It’s a New Testament word. The Greek word group behind it (morphē, meaning shape or form) appears at some of the most important points in Paul’s letters.

That last verse repays slow reading. Notice three things in it.

• The verb is passive. We are being transformed. We’re not the ones doing the transforming; we’re the ones being worked on.
• The method is beholding. Change comes as we look at the glory of the Lord—which Paul has just told us we see in the face of Christ, made known in the Scriptures.
• The worker is named. “For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is the agent. Not a technique. Not a retreat. Not a breathing pattern.

The Foundation: Union With Christ

Before we talk about how we grow, we must be clear about the soil we’re growing in. And that soil has a name: union with Christ.

John Calvin taught that everything a Christian receives comes from being joined to Jesus Christ, and that this union gives us two gifts at once—a “double grace”, as he called it. The first gift is justification: God declares us righteous, freely, because of what Christ has done. The second is sanctification: God begins to make us actually righteous, slowly, over a lifetime. The two gifts are different, but they can never be separated, because they come in the same package—Christ Himself.

This is why Calvin insisted we don’t receive forgiveness from Christ and then go looking elsewhere for the power to change. Both come from the same place.

John Murray sharpened this further with what he called definitive sanctification. Working from Romans 6, he pointed out something we usually read past: Paul doesn’t tell Christians to die to sin. He tells them they have already died to sin. The old master has been broken. The chains are already off. Only then does Paul say: now live like it.

This changes the whole shape of Christian effort. We’re not fighting to become free. We’re fighting because we’ve been made free.

Sinclair Ferguson presses the same point in a way many readers find liberating. The cure for legalism, he argues, isn’t a smaller dose of law and a larger dose of licence. The cure is Christ Himself—because both legalism and lawlessness grow from the same root, a suspicion that God isn’t truly generous.

Growth Never Buys the Verdict

This is the single most important safeguard in the whole subject, and it’s where the historic Protestant account parts company sharply with the Roman Catholic tradition that gave us the word “formation” in the first place.

Our growth doesn’t contribute one gram to your standing with God.

The Westminster Confession says sanctification in this life is never complete—that some remnants of corruption remain in every part of us. That’s not pessimism. It’s realism, and it’s kind. It means we can stop measuring God’s love for us by how well this month went.

The Tools God Uses: The Ordinary Means of Grace

So if God forms us, how does He do it? The confessions give a strikingly plain answer. The Westminster Shorter Catechism asks what the outward means are by which Christ gives us the benefits of redemption, and answers: His ordinances, especially the Word, the sacraments and prayer.

That’s it. No secret techniques. No advanced level for the spiritually gifted.

Notice two features of this list that cut across most modern formation literature.

It’s ordinary. These are the things available every week to every believer, including the illiterate, the exhausted and the poor. Michael Horton has written a whole book pressing this point: the Christian life is not a series of radical breakthroughs but a long, unspectacular faithfulness. God works in ordinary ways because He intends to reach ordinary people.

It’s churchly. Preaching needs a preacher. The Lord’s Supper needs a table and a congregation. Much of the popular formation movement is intensely private—the retreat, the journal, the solitary hour. Those have their place. But God’s appointed workshop is the gathered church on the Lord’s Day, and no amount of private practice replaces it.

The Canons of Dort add one more instrument that we rarely put on our lists: God preserves and grows His people through warnings, threats and promises, and through the discipline of the church. Being told off, lovingly and biblically, is a means of grace.

Two Movements: Putting to Death, Coming Alive

The Heidelberg Catechism describes true repentance as having two parts, and this remains the best short description of daily Christian growth ever written. It speaks of the dying of the old self and the coming to life of the new.

• Mortification—putting sin to death. Grief over sin, refusal to feed it, cutting off what supplies it. John Owen’s famous warning stands: be killing sin, or it will be killing you.
• Vivification—coming alive. Real joy in God, and a growing delight in doing what pleases Him. Not merely stopping the bad, but starting the good.

This is why formation is more like warfare than like gardening. It’s largely missing from the gentler modern literature, and its absence leaves readers unprepared for how violent the internal struggle actually feels. We’re not simply cultivating; we’re fighting.

God’s Main Classroom: Providence and Suffering

Here’s the part of spiritual formation that no one signs up for and everyone receives.

Scripture consistently says God shapes His people chiefly through what He sends them—not through what they schedule (Romans 5:3–5; Hebrews 12:5–11; James 1:2–4).

Notice how much of our actual formation happens in places we didn’t choose: the illness, the difficult marriage, the job that didn’t come, the child who wandered, the long stretch of ordinary weeks. God isn’t waiting for us to attend a retreat. He’s already at work.

Not the Cloister but the Kitchen

The medieval world had a clear picture of the serious Christian: he left ordinary life behind. Marriage, business and family were second-class; the monastery was where holiness happened.

The Reformation broke that picture in half. Holiness was moved out of the cloister and into the home, the field, the workshop and the market. The mother feeding a child and the farmer mending a fence were doing work as genuinely holy as any monk’s. Herman Bavinck later wrote at length on the Christian family as the ordinary school of Christian character.

This is worth remembering precisely because the word “formation” came to us from the monastery. The safest form of the practice keeps the Reformation’s correction firmly in place. Our formation happens mostly where our life happens.

Six Tests for Any Spiritual Practice

Christians ask constantly whether a particular practice is safe. Rather than ruling on each one individually, here’s a grid we can apply ourselves.

Most disputed practices sort themselves out quickly under these six questions.

How Do We Know It’s Working?

Jonathan Edwards wrote the most careful book ever produced on this question. In Religious Affections he examined 12 signs of genuine spiritual experience, and gave far more space to the 12th—Christian practice—than to all the others. Not the intensity of the feeling. Not the tears. Not the sense of having touched something. What a person actually does, over time, under pressure.

The New Testament agrees. The test of the Spirit’s work is the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control (Galatians 5:22–23). Every item on that list is measured by other people, not by our own inner weather.

So the honest questions are these: Am I quicker to forgive than I was five years ago? Do I hate my sin more? Is Christ more precious to me? Am I easier to live with?

When Growth Feels Like Going Backwards

In closing, it’s good to know where many sincere Christians think they stand.

We may read all of this and conclude we’re falling, not standing. We may feel we were more zealous 10 years ago, and that our sin looks worse now, not better.

Understand what’s happening. As the Spirit works, our sensitivity to sin grows faster than our sin decreases. We’re not becoming worse; we’re seeing more clearly. The room was always this dusty. Someone has opened the curtains.

John Newton, who knew a great deal about slow progress, put it in words worth keeping: “I am not what I ought to be, and not what I hoped to be, but by the grace of God I am not what I used to be”.

That’s spiritual formation. Not a technique we master, but a work God has begun in us and has promised to finish (Philippians 1:6). The Spirit is patient. He isn’t finished. And He doesn’t abandon what He starts.

Related Reads

• Why Christians Fast: The Biblical Discipline’s Very Real Rewards
• What Does ‘Pray In Secret’ Mean?
• Walk by the Spirit Daily: What Does It Actually Look Like?
• What Happens When You Read the Bible Daily?
• The Paradox of Prayer: Why Ask When God Already Knows?
• The Christian Sabbath: Why Did Sunday Replace Saturday?