I laughed out loud when Willard noted that there are now “38,000 Christian denominations on the earth.” His point is well made. If we depend on our associations to define what it means to be “a christian” we will likely have an inadequate view of what God is really up to through Jesus Christ in our lives. We must get to the heart of the matter. He defines spiritual formation as the “Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.” Now this definition has challenged something in me, because after reading it I realized that my idea has most often been to see that my life conforms to the life of Jesus Christ. This is not to say that I have ignored the interior life of myself; it is just that I have not spent a great deal of time thinking about the interior life of Jesus Christ. I am most confronted in the Scripture by the exterior life of Jesus that was surely a product of his relationship to the Father. I have had a mental map that looked for correspondence between what was on the inside of me and what was demonstrated on the outside of Jesus. This is probably OK because Jesus was fully integrated. What we see on the outside perfectly represents what was on the inside of Him and perfectly represents what is in the heart of the Father. I’m not that way; but I on a journey of becoming as I walk with Jesus. So, I am now reading the New Testament with an eye and ear for the interior life of Jesus.