Christian Education

Journal
Special Focus Article

Christian Education Journal:

Research on Educational Ministry

Relationships: Discipleship 2019, Vol. 16(1) I 12-121

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1 177/0739891318820327
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Trevor Hudson
Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Center, Westmont College and Fuller Seminary, California, USA

Abstract
The acid test of the authentic Christ-following life is linked to a steady growth in
compassionate caring validated by the way Christians care and value the ones closest
to them. Ministers of spiritual formation need a practical theology for becoming
Christ-like in compassionate caring thus announcing salvation offered by Christ as
another kind of life, especially in its relational aspects, which generates a lasting
transformation that lets go of deception and, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
fosters the growth of authentic beings from the inside out.

Keywords
acid test, compassionate caring, assault, withdrawal, self-deception, surrender, self-
giving love

Introduction
In our work of spiritual formation we need to be clear about the acid test of the
Christ-following life. What counts the most is not how much we pray, or know about
Scripture, or whether we exercise the charismatic gifts of the Spirit, or how involved
we are in the struggle for social justice. All these things are vitally important and
each has a critical place in oiu discipleship. However, when it comes to discerning
whether we are genuinely growing in the Way of Christ, none of these can be oiu
most important criterion. We must look elsewhere (Willard, 2016).
In this article I want to propose that the acid test of the authentic Christ-following
life can best be described as steady growth in compassionate caring (Hudson, 1999,

Corresponding author:
Trevor Hudson, Martin Institute and Dallas Willard Center, Westmont College and Fuller Seminary,
Santa Barbara, CA 93 108, USA.
Email: trevorhudson@live.co.za
Hudson 113

p. 73; Leech, 1987, p. 10). Practices of personal devotion and worship that do not
result in others (especially those closest to us) being helped, or in feeling more
valued, are empty and hollow. Genuine growth in relationship with God evidences
itself for the most part in an ever-deepening capacity to love and to care for others.
When this does not happen, we have failed most certainly the acid test and end up
with a privatized faith or one of mere political engagement.
This challenge to grow in compassionate caring is rooted in our understanding
both of the God we meet in Jesus Christ and the nature of God’s kingdom. The
apostle John repeatedly states that God is love (1 John 4:8; 4:16). Jesus, God who
came in the flesh, lived this love and taught what he lived. The language of God’s
kingdom is self-giving love. Participation in this kingdom demands one central
commitment. It involves sharing with those around us the same kind of compassion,
love and mercy that we have received from God. This loving responsiveness to our
neighbors is the essential distinguishing characteristic (the “acid test” as I have
called it) of being a follower of Jesus. There is an ongoing need for us to ponder
again on those startling words spoken by Jesus: “I give you a new commandment,
that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one
another” (John 13:34-35, New Revised Standard Version).
As followers of Christ, how then do we learn to “live in love, as Christ loved us”
(Eph. 5:2)? To live in love is the central issue facing those who want to be ministers
of Christian spiritual formation today. We must be able to offer clear guidance to
those in our congregations who deeply desire to reflect the loving heart and mind of
Christ in their own immediate relationships. What is needed desperately is a prac-
tical theology for becoming Christ-like in compassionate caring (Willard, 1988, p.
14). Obviously, as we seek to induct others into this transforming experience, we are
on the journey ourselves towards becoming more deeply loving.
In order to develop a gospel-shaped imagination around the “how to live a life of
agape-love” question, I want us to immerse ourselves in the story of Jesus changing
water into wine at the Cana wedding celebration (John 2:1-12). Few practices guide us
more in finding our way into the transforming power of God’s good news than immer-
sing ourselves in the gospel stories. Rather than giving us a set of abstract “spiritual
techniques” that we need to apply, this particular gospel-story offers us a vision of the
abundant life that Christ makes available, evokes in us a deep intention to change, and it
underlines our responsibility to explore the practical means forward so that we can
experience the offered newness of life. Vision, intension, and means (VIM) is a pattem
that I have learned and followed from Willard (Willard, 2002, pp. 77-93).

Salvation: Another kind of life

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was
there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.
(John 2:1-2)
114 Christian Education Journal: Research on Educational Ministry 16(1)

In the first chapter of the gospel of John, Jesus gathers around him a little group of
five companions from Galilee. They represent the nucleus of the group of disciples
who would eventually be sent out throughout the world to make disciples of all the
nations. Vanier, in his commentary on John’s gospel, points out that we can imagine
Jesus would have wanted to give these men the very best spiritual formation possible
(e.g., give them a few lectures on the Torah, or take them into the desert for a few
days’ retreat). However, the first thing Jesus does is to take them to a wedding
celebration where he performs his first miracle (Vanier, 2004, p. 51). What are
we to make of Jesus’ approach to doing spiritual formation? A closer examination
of the text reveals several insights.
First of all, John makes it clear that the miracle happened “on the third day.” Of
course, this is a symbol of the resurrection when God raised Jesus from the dead.
Right at the outset of his gospel, the gospel writer wants us to know that the good
news of Jesus is all about entering into and experiencing abundance of life. This
theme of new life will run throughout the gospel. It underlines that the message of
Jesus himself and of the early disciples was not just one of the forgiveness of sins,
but rather it was one of newness of life, which involved forgiveness as well as his
death for our sins (Willard, 1988, pp. 28-43). With Willard, I want to emphasize
salvation as participation in another kind of life (e.g. John 10:10; 1 John 5:11-12; 2
Pet. 1:4).
Second, his first miracle proclaims the transforming power of the resurrected
Jesus to radically change our lives. It is almost as if gospel-writer John is saying
to us through this story, “Just like Jesus transformed water into wine, so he can
change our lives today.” Essentially this gospel story is about transformation
(Wright, 2002, p. 22). The connection between then and today is experiencing the
life Christ brings out, our inner transformation, which cannot be over-stated enough.
Unless gradually we are changed on the inside of our lives, we simply will not
experience God’s offer of a flourishing life. Willard (2002) writes, “Accordingly,
the greatest need you and I have—the greatest need of collective humanity—is
renovation of our heart” (p. 14, emphasis original).
Third, the wedding context of this miracle emphasizes that Jesus wants to frans-
form our relational lives. This story becomes a metaphor for spiritual growth.
Because we are essentially relational creatures, we can hear this wonderfiil good
news. We have been created in the image of the God who lives eternally in the
relational distinctions of Father, Son and Spirit. As God’s image-bearers, we have
been made by love, in love, and to love. Or, as stated, “Because we have been made
in the image of the relational God, we are divinely designed for relationship”
(Hudson, 2016, p. 36). For the good news of Jesus to be truly good news, it must
empower us to experience the fullest potential we have as persons-in-relationship, so
that we can experience a different kind of life in relationships.
Fourth, the wedding context of this miracle reminds us that our final destiny is “to
live the eternal wedding feast of love” (Vanier, 2004, p. 53). Vemey (1985) had a
complementary view: “A marriage on the third day... is a symbol of the new age
Hudson 115

which is to come” (Verney, 1985, p. 29). This new age is what Jesus came to
inaugurate as he made visible the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven. In
the same vein, Vanier (2004) explains that as Jesus changed water into wine at this
wedding celebration, so he came into our world to renew all things, and to change
our broken humanity into a new communion with each other. This indeed is our
deepest yearning within us: our desire to love and to be loved. In bringing his
disciples to a wedding for their first lesson in spiritual formation, Jesus wanted to
open their hearts and minds to his wedding-feast vision of all living together with
each other and with God in deep friendship and harmony (Vanier, 2004).
It is essential that we constantly nurture this clear gospel-shaped vision of the
abundance of life that Christ makes available here and now. Hopefully, the above
four thoughts have stirred your imagination. We are invited into another kind of life
in our relationships in which we are genuinely transformed into becoming loving
persons. The sparkling image of this wedding miracle, the transformation of water
into wine, suggests this newness of relational life, and it involves a transformed
capacity within us to love deeply. The end result brings joyful celebration, profound
fulfilment, and mutual blessing into our lives.

The struggle to love

When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “they have no more wine.”
(John 2:3)

This gospel-image of the wine running out serves as a powerful metaphor for what
often happens in our relationships. The deepest failures in our life of discipleship are
usually failures to love well those closest to us. Certainly, this has been my expe-
rience. We fail the acid test. Furthermore, almost all of us carry the heart-wounds of
not having been loved well. Most of us know a great deal about being rejected, being
left out, or just not received, not welcomed, not accepted. This may happen to us as
children, or in adult life through divorce, unfaithfulness, betrayal, or just never being
part of the “in” crowd. Willard writes about these wounds, “They may leave us
unconnected to others at levels of our soul where lack of nourishment from deep
connections means spiritual starvation and loss of wholeness in every dimension”
(Willard, 2002, p. 181).
As we nurture the vision of another kind of life in our relationships, we must
become aware of what constantly keeps us from becoming loving persons. There
will be very little growth in compassionate caring until we honestly realize just how
little love is within us most of the time. Our intention to learn how to love becomes
stronger when we are able to grow in consciousness regarding our struggle to love
truly those with whom we are engaged each day. Considering Ignatius’ use of the
Examen, Jim Manney suggests that taking time in the evening to reflect honestly on
the way we have related during the day will take us a long way in identifying those
116 Christian Education Journal: Research on Educational Ministry 16(1)

specific relational patterns that keep us from experiencing God’s relational vision for
our lives (Manney, 2011), a practice that has shaped many Christ-followers.
To help us with this reflective task I want to explore the grid that Willard provides
regarding the two basic forms of evil in our relationships to others (i.e., assault and
withdrawal) (Willard, 2002, p. 17). Willard believes these practices are so much part
of ordinary human existence that we think they are just part of “reality” and we
cannot imagine living without them. In a comparison with the scene of the wedding
in Cana, assault and withdrawal cause the wine to run out in our relationships with
those around us. If we are going to experience the abundance of relational life that
Jesus brings, we need to be delivered from the practices of assault and withdrawal.
First, however, we must deepen our awareness of what they may both look like in
our relationships with each other.
We assault others when “we act against what is good for them, even with their
consent” (Willard, 2002, p. 18). We see the lack of “what is good for them” ranging
from harmful personal responses in relationships all the way to participation in those
institutional structures that hurt and oppress others. This range of assaulting behavior
in our personal relationships would include verbal expressions of anger and con-
tempt aimed to hurt, seeking to control others and forcing them to do what we want
them to do, intentionally degrading others, speaking disrespectfully to and about our
neighbors, deceiving them with lies and untruths, and so much else.
We withdraw from others when “we regard their well-being and goodness as
matters of indifference to us, or perhaps go so far as to despise them” (Willard, 2002,
p. 19). In this regard, the tongue again is involved. Here we stop speaking to those
around us or avoid them, or we refuse to acknowledge their presence in our midst.
All these actions communicate the attitude, “I do not care about you. Your presence
is not important to me. In fact, I would prefer that you were not here.” Could it be,
Willard wonders, that the epidemic of addictions and dysfunctions from which many
suffer today relate to the fact that we are constantly in the presence of people who are
withdrawn from us and who do not really care about us? (Willard, 2002, p. 20).
Learning to love as Christ has loved us requires that we honestly identify how
these two forms of evil manifest themselves in our patterns of relating. Self-
deception is a major part of what defeats spiritual formation into Christ-likeness
in our lives. In self-deception individuals refuse to recognize factors in their life of
which they are partly conscious, or even know to be true, but are not willing to admit
or have the intent to change. Consequently, our lives and relationships continue to be
governed by assault and withdrawal, and what we say we believe and intend simply
does not happen in our lives (Willard in Elshof, 2009, Foreword). Back to the
metaphor, the wine continues to run out. The critical spiritual formation question
then is, “Are we willing to move beyond self-deception into authenticity?”
Significantly, the Twelve-Step AA Program, which Willard believes is an exam-
pie of what any successful spiritual formation should resemble, pays specific atten-
tion to our need to move beyond self-deception in our relationships (Willard, 2002,
pp. 84-45). In step eight, we are encouraged to make a list of all persons we have
Hudson 117

harmed, and become willing to make amends to all. The program assumes that if “we
want to progress along the spiritual path, we have to deal with the harm we have
caused other people. This will mean acknowledging our broken and bruised relation-
ships, taking responsibility for the part we have played in them, and making what-
ever amends are necessary” (Hudson, 2007, p. 82).

Surrender to perfect love

His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” (John 2:5)

The conversation between Mary and her son is instructive. She says to Jesus, “They
have no more wine” (v. 3). He responds by saying, “Woman, what concern is that to you
and to me? My time has not yet come” (v. 4). His mother says to the servants, “Do
whatever he tells you” (v. 5). As we follow the flow ofthis conversation between mother
and son, we catch a glimpse of the movement into deeper surrender that Mary’s words
reflect. This particular moment in the gospel-story creates the spiritual climate in which
the transformation of water into wine can take place. Allow me briefly to share three
thoughts about the place of surrender in our own journeys of spiritual formation.
First, caught up in the humiliating situation of a wedding without wine, Mary
surrenders herself to whatever Jesus says. Her words here echo those that she once
spoke as a much younger woman. When the angel told her that she had been selected
by God to be the mother of God’s son, she responded: “Here I am, the servant of the
Lord; let it be according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Even as a teenager she wanted to
do whatever God said. For us, Mary symbolizes what a fully surrendered human life
to the Lord looks like.
The renovation of our hearts requires a clear intention to surrender ourselves to
the Divine will. Our consent is necessary for God to transform us inwardly. How-
ever, we cannot manufacture or force this intention. Rather, this consent gets stirred
up as we are ravished by the vision of the relational newness that Christ makes
available to us. As we open ourselves to the astounding good news that God offers us
of another kind of life, our motivation undergoes a radical shift (Willard, 2002, p.
89). We find ourselves wanting to change, to become different and to relate in a
more compassionate way. We have discovered the “pearl of great price” and are now
willing to sell everything to possess it. This is the kind of intention that opens up our
lives to the possibilities of real inner change.
Furthermore, this intention to surrender our will to God only gets evoked when
we know that God, who wants to give us new life, also loves us unconditionally
and fully. As Benner points out, “Surrender to anything else but love would be
idiocy... Surrender involves too much vulnerability to be a responsible action to
anything other than unconditional love” (2003, p. 59). Ultimately, this means that
our full and free surrender only can be offered to Perfect Love. Wonderfully, the
bottom-line of our faith is that we have seen the loving face of God in the face of
118 Christian Education Journal: Research on Educational Ministry 16(1)

Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). Knowing that Christlikeness of God enables us to abandon
ourselves without reserve to him.
The intentional inward surrender of our lives to God reminds us that transforma-
tion is always God’s work in us. We are not struggling to fix ourselves up, seeking to
sort ourselves out, or trying harder to change. Rather, through our moment-by-
moment surrender to the Divine will, we are opening ourselves up to the transform-
ing work of God’s Spirit within our hearts and minds. As I have written elsewhere,
“Real change is always an inside work of the Spirit, a transforming gift of grace to
those who live with open hands before God—never a human achievement that we
bring about on our own” (Hudson, 2013, p. 67).
Last, we need to remind ourselves constantly that surrender is “both a definite
decision and a lifelong process that happens day by day” (Hudson, 2007, p. 30). It
starts when consciously we decide to hand our will and life to God. But it does not
end there. It is never a one-off experience. Each new day we need to renew our act of
surrender and offer ourselves to God again. To be sure, almost every day we will be
confronted with those parts of our lives that will resist the act of surrender, and we
will want to take back our lives. Shifting from a self-centred lifestyle to a God-
centred and other-centred way of life will take a lifetime.
The good news about our joyless and failed relationships is that they position us
perfectly to surrender ourselves to God. As I heard Dallas Willard say frequently,
“God’s address in our lives is endoftherope.com.” In our longing for relational
newness we can turn towards Christ, surrender ourselves freely to him and open
ourselves to receive the new life he offers. This ongoing surrender to God’s loving
will and to God’s Spirit creates the spiritual climate in which our “hearts of stone”
are gradually transformed into “hearts of flesh.” We then find ourselves on the edge
of the miracle of experiencing new wine in our relationships.

Practices of love

Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water.” (John 2:7)

Often I have wondered what the servants thought when Jesus told them to fill the jars
with water! After all, they needed wine, not water. However, they followed the
instructions given to them, and when they took the jars of water to the chief steward,
they discovered that the water had been turned into an excessive abundance of good
wine. Miracles of transformation seldom happen out of the blue. They usually
involve our participation and effort. We see this clearly in the wedding at Cana
gospel-story. Without the actions of the servants, the miracle would not have taken
place. Grace, we know, is opposed to earning. It is a free gift of God’s grace in Jesus
Christ. It cannot be bought, deserved or achieved. However, it is not opposed to well-
intentioned effort. God’s grace flows into our lives through practical means that we
undertake. Passivity can become an enemy of God’s grace. Let me elaborate further.
Hudson 119

As ministers and teachers we need to realize that while it is always God who
transforms us, inner change does not just happen. Experiencing another kind of life
in our relationships is not something that happens automatically. We need to co-
operate with the Holy Spirit. Faith without action is dead. Transformation in rela-
tionships requires thoughtful and well-directed effort. “Personal change requires our
determined, intentional and planned participation. We work with the Spirit to
become all that God intends us to be. Compassion is not for the lazy and passive.
Our connection with God only deepens as we take appropriate measures to open our
lives to the Holy Spirit” (Hudson, 2013, p. 68).
What are these “means” by which we can continue to work out our salvation with
fear and trembling? (Phil. 2:12), or, to use the image from our gospel-story, how do
we fill our jars with water so that it can be turned into wine? Christ needs our freely
offered cooperation in order to deliver us from our deeply embodied relational
patterns of assault and withdrawal. They will not simply disappear. Nor can we free
ourselves from them through will-power alone. However, through certain “practices
of love” we are able to place our lives before God so that we can be transformed by
God’s Spirit. Here are three possible “practices of love” that may be helpful when it
comes to transforming the social dimension of our lives (Hudson, 2010, pp. 73-80).
As Christian educators and spiritual formation guides we do well first to practice
these ourselves.

The practice of confession

Confessing our inability to love the Jesus way connects us to God’s resources and
strengthens us to pursue the way of love. Already we have seen how prone we are to
self-deception when it comes to our tendencies to assault and withdraw in our
relationships. We want to love, yet we fail constantly. Confession of our failures
to love well (i.e., whether this happens in the inner sanctuary of our soul or pre-
ferably with a trusted companion) opens clogged channels with God, allows for
God’s compassionate love to pour into us, and provides us with needed spiritual
resources for the work of loving better those around us (Hudson, 2010, pp. 73-80).

The practice of learning to listen

Listening is one of the most precious gifts that we can give to someone we love.
Listening says to the other person, “I care for you. I respect your uniqueness. How
you feel and what you say matters to me. And in order to make this clear, I am
willing to set aside my concerns, give you space to share yourself and offer you my
focused attention. I want to learn to understand the inexhaustible mystery of your
inner world.” This kind of listening will involve learning to be attentively silent in
the presence of another, perhaps asking a respectful question and giving someone
our focused attention. It is a practice that we can and must learn. “We learn how to
listen because we want to learn how to love” (McHugh, 2015, p. 12)
120 Christian Education Journal: Research on Educational Ministry 16(1)

The practice of acting in a loving way

To Jesus, love meant far more than a fleeting feeling, a sentimental thought, or a
wistful emotion. His love was always love-in-action. It implied a priority decision
and conscious commitment to act in a loving way that would leave the other person
feeling valued and important. Likewise, we are invited to act in a similar way no
matter how we may be feeling. The ways in which we do this are down-to earth and
simple (e.g., cooking a favorite meal, sending a thank you email, making an encoura-
ging phone call, helping with the household chores, and the list is endless). We
simply need to learn how to be thoughtful, creative and kind. In Me Knight’s words,
we can “practice one faith action of God’s love a day” (McKnight, 2004, p. 31).
To reiterate what has been said thus far, we are not relying on these practices to
change us inwardly. Only God can transform us on the inside into loving persons.
But we can embark on these practices trusting that God will meet us in them with
transforming grace and power. The journey toward our lives becoming permeated
through and through by God’s agape-love is gradual, slow, and sometimes erratic.
More often than not, it seems like taking three steps forward and two backwards.
However, the witness of Christ-followers throughout the centuries is that, as we give
ourselves to these practices (confession, listening, and loving actions) in dependence
of the Holy Spirit, we begin to experience another kind of life in our relationships.
The new wine begins to flow through our lives, into our relationships, into our homes
and congregations, and through them into our hurting world around us.

Conclusion
Steady growth in compassionate caring signposts the pathway of genuine growth in
God. In Jesus Christ we have discovered that God not only loves us, but is Love.
When we step into the world of compassion, we step into the world of the self-
giving God. In this article I have suggested that this transformative journey hap-
pens as we glimpse the vision of another kind of life, intend to become different,
and employ those means necessary to open our lives more widely to God’s trans-
forming Spirit. Through the practices of confession, empathetic listening, and
loving actions we embark by God’s grace and power upon the loving way. Mira-
cles of the Spirit begin to occur. Water gets turned into wine. Our lives and
relationships are gifted with healing and newness. “Hearts of stone” become
“hearts of flesh.” We pass the acid test.

Note on contributor
Trevor Hudson, a minister in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, resides in
Benoni, near Johannesburg. Presently, he serves as a Senior Fellow of the Dallas
Willard Centre and Martin Institute situated at Westmont College. He is also part of
the lecturing faculty for the D.Ministry program in Spiritual Direction at Fuller
Seminary. He is the author of 17 books, including Discovering your spiritual identity
(IVP, 2010) and Beyond loneliness (Upper Room Books, 2016).
Hudson 121

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