You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, James K. A. Smith

– Worship is the “imagination station” that incubates our loves and longings so that our cultural endeavors are indexed toward God and his kingdom.

– Worship works as fiction does: both traffic in story and target the imagination.

– Worship works from the top down, you might say… In worship we don’t just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down. Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves. Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

-“YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK.” That is a very explicit way to state what many of us implicitly assume. In ways that are more “modern” than biblical, we have been taught to assume that human beings are fundamentally thinking things. While we might never have read—or even heard of—seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes, many of us unwittingly share his definition of the essence of the human person as res cogitans, a “thinking thing.” – The phrase is “Brains on a stick’” But what if Descartes was wrong? Alternatively are we first lovers? We love so that we can know. “Now why is all of this important for our project of sketching an alternative model of the human person? Because if you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit.”

– Teaching for Transformation does this by identifying a number of biblical “through-lines”—threads of the biblical narrative that wind throughout Scripture and invite us to keep playing them out. These through-lines are roles we are called to play as God’s image bearers in a good but broken world. We are called to be, for example, Creation Enjoyers, Idolatry Discerners, Order Discoverers, Beauty Creators. And in all of these God calls us to be God Worshipers and Image Reflectors.

Table of Contents:

You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, James K. A. Smith

Intro – Thesis of the book:

1 You Are What You Love – To Worship Is Human

2 You Might Not Love What You Think – Learning to Read “Secular” Liturgies

3 The Spirit Meets You Where You Are – Historic Worship for a Postmodern Age

4 What Story Are You In? The Narrative Arc of Formative Christian Worship

5 Guard Your Heart – The Liturgies of Home

6 Teach Your Children Well – Learning by Heart

7 You Make What You Want – Vocational Liturgies