How the Creed, Lord's Prayer, and Ten Commandments Ground Spiritual Formation and Soul Care

I have learned that an essential part of cultivating a flourishing garden is recognizing one simple fact: all plants are not created equal. Some thrive in direct sunlight; others wither under its heat. Some exhibit incredible resilience in the face of neglect; others are temperamental to the slightest environmental changes. Tending to each successfully requires acknowledging its distinct nature.

This is a reality that extends far beyond the garden: before we can ask how best to assist in the flourishing of something, we must ask “what kind of thing is it?” In other words, nature determines nurture.

There is a chasm of dissonance between our obsessive attempts to practice “self-care” and our fundamental misunderstanding of what kind of thing we truly are. Our confusion about our nature has led to less-than-flourishing results. This confusion, Samuel James says, follows a certain internet shaped logic––the logic of self-creation and self-curation. James argues that a self primarily cultivated through the profile page cannot conceive of a transcendent order to their identity. Simply put, possession of the imago dei is unthinkable for those who have created themselves.

It should be no surprise, then, that we experience increasing exasperation around self-care; we have an innate desire and need to be nurtured, but we have no clue what we need because we have no clue what we are. Our misunderstanding of what kind of thing we are (e.g. our own thing) has led to creating environments that are counterproductive to our flourishing. Options for nurturing self-made persons are untenably open-ended. And as our uncertainty swells, society is happy to assist us in our self-owned endeavor, providing us with various resources laid out by Alan Noble:

• Tools (the internet, antidepressants)
• Spaces (cities, the suburbs)
• Laws (no-fault divorce, free speech defenses of pornography)
• Values (efficiency, individualism)
• Practices (self-expression, consumption)

And these are not arbitrary resources. Tara Isabella Burton identifies four essential pillars of identity that religion has always provided: meaning, purpose, community, and ritual. Even in the absence of religion these pillars must be filled by something. Consider how Noble is highlighting the inherently religious shape of these societal resources:

We have an intrinsic need to find meaning, purpose, community, and rituals. But these societal resources outlined by Noble work together to construct and pass along a certain “social imaginary”––a cluster of implicit assumptions which skew this pursuit and hold us captive to a secular picture of flourishing.

One of the church’s purposes, then, is to nurture believers in accord with their nature in the context of a worshiping community (see Ephesians 4). This task begins with reimagining––or learning for the first time!––what kind of thing we are.

The Nature of the Church

The church is, by nature, a creature of the word. When Calvin said the Word is the soul of the church he was commenting on the inextricable relationship between the two; the word is what gives life to the covenant assembly. Bavinck adds that without the word there would be no church.

The word creates the church. The LORD’s voice calls his people out of slavery to be a qahal––an assembly, a congregation. James 1:18 describes the members of this called-out assembly (ekklesia) as being brought forth by the word. Similarly, 1 Peter 1:23 speaks of our being born again through the living and abiding word of God. Salvation for Moses, James, and Peter is, as John Frame describes it, a verbal work of God—not merely informational but covenantal. God saves by speaking: presenting and applying the person and work of Jesus Christ in a verbal capacity––the euangelion (verbal news) of his sacrificial death and resurrection.

Not only does this word create us, but it creates us as responsive persons. After discussing the (re)creative power of God’s divine speech-act in both creation and salvation, Scott Swain goes on to point out that God’s various purposes for speaking create various obligations for the hearer: what is proclaimed must be known, what is promised must be trusted, what is commanded must be obeyed, and what is threatened must be feared. Moses informed the qahal after giving them the law (prefaced with the good news of God as Redeemer) that their response was to be worshipful obedience (Ex. 35:1).

Thus, the sole source of our faith and practice is a word that is outside of ourselves and that we must respond to through faith. In other words, we are not our own. Therefore, we cannot—and should not!—set out to determine our own means for nurture. Because the church is a creature of the word, it must be nurtured by that same word. When God speaks, He does so with all of who He is; God is present in the very words He communicates.

Because of this, Swain says, God’s communication from him is communion with him. And it is this communion that provides the habitat—the garden—of nurture for the believer. It is Aslan’s breath-fueled song that brings the world into bloom. Peter goes on to say that the same living word that birthed us is the very word that continues to nurture us (1 Pt. 2:1-3).

A creature of the word must be nurtured by the word. Historically, such word-centered nurture has taken a concrete, catechetical form that modern self-curated spiritualities cannot replicate.

The Nurture of the Church

Vanhoozer contends that knowing the story of the word––the narrative of Jesus’ life, cross, resurrection, ascension, and session––is the proper context for determining our health as humans.

But this word knowledge cannot be reduced to mere information. Scripture, Vanhoozer argues, is not an inert object to be studied; reading the Bible is not an “I-It” relation, but an “I-Thou” affair. Therefore the nurture mediated by this living word must be aimed at what Richard Lovelace termed “live orthodoxy”. Encountering this word should not make us mere “brains-on-a-stick” but should cause our dry bones to rattle with life like those in Ezekiel’s valley.

However, Lovelace was well aware that sound doctrine does not guarantee heart renewal. His classic work Dynamics of Spiritual Life includes a helpful survey of the dead religion which hastened the Great Awakenings. In his study of such historic revivals and genuine movements of the Spirit, Lovelace outlined a model for cyclical and continuous renewal, complete with a list of elements which must be present in any individual or community who desires to experience this kind of Spirit-infused nurture:

• Preconditions of Renewal

1. Awareness of God’s Holiness
2. Awareness of the depth of our sin

• Primary elements of Renewal

1. Justification
2. Sanctification
3. Adoption
4. Union

• Secondary elements

1. Mission – both word and deed
2. Prayer – both individual and corporate
3. Community – both micro and macro
4. Disenculturation – being freed from the social imaginary
5. Theological integration – having the mind of Christ

Lovelace’s elements can be organized under the common categories recognized for holistic Christian nurture:

While Lovelace’s comprehensiveness is helpful, left on our own we will inevitably gravitate toward one end of the spectrum or the other––toward orthodoxy (right thinking) which by itself can foster dry intellectualism, or orthopraxy (right doing) which by itself can foster detached activism. If nurturing “live orthodoxy” is our aim, we need a Spirit-designed shape to help bring balance and integrate these two with orthokardia (right desiring).

Historically, these three have been bound together with a certain approach. Packer and Parrett observe that even a quick survey of the Reformation-era catechisms, as well as later Puritan publications, reveal a shared structure: they nearly all contain certain “ingredients”; namely, expositions on the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. Similarly, in his Enchiridion Augustine notes three primary areas that the Christian must be formed in, following the biblical formula of faith, hope, and love. In addition to this threefold formula, Augustine taught those interested in the faith the narratio––the full sweep of biblical narrative.

We can see how this threefold formula, along with the biblical narrative, encapsulates the necessary elements of nurture and renewal, each being either the environment conducive for or the means to specific areas of nurture:

Many scoff at such an antiquated “program” of nurture via catechesis. After all, the Creed, Prayer, and Commandments can’t be purchased (a means Burton says we are encouraged to employ in order to obtain meaning, purpose, community, and ritual!). They aren’t marketable and nor do they appeal to our immediacy-trained imaginations. They will not give you the body you desire or grow your follower base. They are, however, ancient touchpoints that are becoming increasingly appealing to a transcendence-seeking culture.

Consider how these are able to provide answers for those seeking identity via Burton’s pillars:

In this way, Scripture, the Creed, the Prayer, and the Commandments offer a robust starting line for pillar-shaped nurture in line with our nature as creatures of the word. So yes, consider having direct contact with these three resources. Recite the Creed alongside your local church, pray the Lord’s Prayer corporately and privately, study the Ten Commandments and seek to live them out in direct application of the grace of the gospel. Resources like Packer’s Growing in Christ are helpful.

But I am not advocating for a merely flat, curriculum-bound approach to these three. Rather, each should be viewed as an entire way of life.

The Creed should invite us into the renewed life of the mind with its vast peaks and valleys of doctrine as we seek to have the mind of Christ and obey the Lord’s invitation to “Know me” (Jer. 29:13)

The Lord’s Prayer should welcome us into a lived experience with our Heavenly Father—one marked by the real-life poetry of hearts conforming to His will. *It’s worth noting at this point that the Lord’s Prayer was taught by the real person of Jesus Christ in the midst of real life to his very real and close friends. That relational context should factor heavily into our Christian experience.

The Commandments should continually broaden, challenge, and reshape our ethics of what it means to love God and neighbor in the specific time and spaces we inhabit with their unique needs.

Now, if this approach feels like a let down––like an underwhelming reach back to an outdated practice, that disappointment may be a symptom of our self-made era which only confirms our need for something not our own. Self-created means of self-nurture are much more innovative and exciting. However, the novelty quickly fades and we’re left just as empty and aimless as before. Nature determines nurture, and our nature as imago dei bearing creatures of the Word cannot be meaningfully nurtured and renewed by modern, self-curated means.

We see the futility of modern attempts at nurture when creatures of the word replace holistic, catechetical-shaped, word-centered nurture with the influence of wellness gurus, or the grit of self-mastery programs, or the technologies and techniques of Silicon Valley.

The Creed, the Prayer, and the Commandments are not spiritual techniques to implement or courses to be pounded out and checked off of a discipleship curriculum; they are entry points into the ongoing areas we need nurturing––Christian doctrine, Christian experience, and Christian ethics. Viewed as windows, we can come to each as a starting point, a means through which we see a vast and sacred theological, experiential, and ethical landscape––one inhabited by Jesus himself, and in which we learn to run freely as nurtured children of our God.