Join us each week of Advent as we share bonus content from friends of Dwell, each reflecting upon their own Advent journey and life with God in and through Scripture.

Week 4: Rich Villodas

Rich Villodas is the Brooklyn-born lead pastor of New Life Fellowship, a large multiracial church with more than seventy-five countries represented in Elmhurst, Queens. Rich holds a Master of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary. He enjoys reading widely, preaching and writing on contemplative spirituality, justice-related matters, and the art of preaching. He’s been married to Rosie since 2006 and they have two beautiful children, Karis and Nathan. His first book, The Deeply Formed Life, is now available wherever books are sold.

Visit him online at richvillodas.com.

The Presence of God in a Season of Presents

How Do We Practice the Presence of God in Advent?

The Importance of Praying Scripture

Bonus Audio Content:

Titanic and the Deeply Formed Life

Transcript: First of all, Titanic came out in 1997. And what was I doing in 1997? Well, I was an 18-year-old worker at the movie theater in Manhattan, what was called Sony Theaters at the time. And so I cannot tell you how many times I watched Titanic, as you know, I was supposed to working, but I would sneak into the back of the theater and watch and all that. And I watched it numerous times, but I would say a few years ago, as I watched it again, as it came on, like on TNT or something like that, as it does every other hour, again I was struck by the contrast, essentially, that it sets out to sail (the Titanic) and hits an iceberg. And what you see in the movie from that point on is this terrifying contrast, where on the upper decks of the ship, there is celebration and opulence and all the rest, and then the water started rushing in into the lower decks of the ship, and you start seeing all kinds of chaos and pain. And sooner or later, you know, as though as the movie progresses, the issues of the lower deck begin to rise until the entire Titanic is capsized.

And as I thought about it one day and watched it, I thought, Oh, this is this is really a core metaphor of life, and the spiritual life in particular, where there’s so much happening on the lower decks of our lives that we often don’t pay attention to, and sooner or later, if we don’t pay attention to what’s happening on the lower deck, we’re going to capsize and so ironically, the logo of our church is an iceberg, so it’s all coming together here. But yeah, Titanic, I think, is a wonderful metaphor, because it’s about the ways that the lower decks of our lives often rise to capsize us if we’re not paying attention.

Can we Hope for Depth in an Age of Social Media and Superficiality?

Transcript: I do think there is hope, but I think the hope is contingent upon our ability to live in reality as it relates to technology.

You know, I think Dr. King said in one of his speeches, it might have been one of his sermons, that we have allowed our technology to outrun our theology, and that we’re not so good at weighing the price of technological progress. And I think to the degree that we are able to face the ways that technology, not just the gift, but the ways that it malforms us, I think, to the degree that we do that we can appropriately boundary it and see what it is and the gift that it brings, but not live in this illusion that we’re not being formed in some negative ways. So I think on one level, I think there’s great hope, but that hope is contingent upon our ability to live in reality.

But to your point, absolutely. I mean, so much of technology is based on this curated sense of self, this false self, really, that I’m trying to project out into the world. And I think so much of what we see with technology is it reveals all the ways that we don’t feel loved, and the ways that we’re trying to grasp that love.

There’s one quote from Aristotle, where he says that when people don’t feel loved, they seek to be admired. And I think that’s what we see a lot (with the) social media landscape, where people often don’t feel this deep abiding sense of love really coming from the heart of God. As a result, I have to figure out ways where I can earn admiration, which interestingly enough, I know we’re in the Advent season, but when you look at Jesus when he gets baptized, he gets baptized and the voice of the Father comes down, “This is my son in whom I’m well pleased,” and then he’s sent into the wilderness and the first thing that’s really tested is whether he believes in that word of affirmation. And the evil one says, “If you are the Son of God, turn this bread into stone. If you are the Son of God, jump from the temple and angels will catch you. If you are the Son of God, bow and I’ll give you all the powers, the kingdoms of the world.” In other words, do you truly believe in this message of your belovedness, or are you going to seek to figure out various ways to obtain it? And I think that is the struggle of social media. Am I living from the center of God’s love? Or am I working really hard to try to achieve something that truly is already mine?

Silence and our Experience of God

Transcript: What silence does is, in some ways, it reveals to us all the ways that we have become subjected to stimulation, and a need for greater and more experience. And so I remember a quote from Brennan Manning some years ago, where he said, “Do I worship God, or do I worship my experience of God?” And we have to be very clear about how we respond to that, because it’s very clear that many of us are worshiping our experience, and how do you know you’re worshiping your experience? Well, when the experience, especially the good experience is gone, am I still showing up? And I think that’s at the core of Christian spirituality, am I really pursuing God or what I can get from God?

Join us each week of Advent as we share bonus content from friends of Dwell, each reflecting upon their own Advent journey and life with God in and through Scripture.

Week 3: Marlena Graves

Marlena is a writer, deep thinker, and speaker who is passionate about the eternal implications of our life in God. She is a lover of beauty – especially the beauty of her family, others, and creation. Marlena is a justice seeker—trying to overcome evil with good. In addition, she seeks answers to these types of questions: What does abundant life look like (John 10:10)? If God is good and we are his deeply beloved children and safe in his kingdom, how then should we live? Marlena deeply believes that spiritual formation and justice should never be separated. She is most concerned with those who profess to follow Jesus but speak and behave so unlike him. She includes herself in the mix and therefore seeks to bridge the gap between what Christians profess to believe and how they live. She speaks regularly to congregations, university campuses, and to retreatants about the implications of following Jesus. Marlena loves to laugh and be around others and then recover in silence and solitude! 

Visit her online at marlenagraves.com.

Seeing Light in the Darkness

Finding Joy in Stillness and Silence

Scripture as Reorientation to Reality

Bonus Audio Content:

The Way Up is Down

Transcript: As I read the Gospels, I compared and contrasted the life of Jesus with the way that the American church in particular presents itself to itself and to the world, primarily the evangelical church, because that’s where I’m most familiar, but I would say, I could see this in the three branches of Christianity. A lot of the times we present ourselves as seeking celebrity, how many people attend your church as being the most important thing, and a lot of what I would say is (it) mirrors the American culture, the American dream, like health and wealth, and the church seems to reflect our American culture. Of course, I’m not speaking for every church or every Christian, but what’s being communicated to the public. And I just never have seen that in the life of Jesus.

When his brothers (or maybe cousins depending what stream you come from in Christianity) said to him, no one who wants to make something of themselves stays in secret. Why don’t you go to the festival and make a name for yourself. And in Matthew 4, when Satan tempted Jesus to jump from the high pinnacle of the temple, do something magnificent, Henry Nouwen talks about this, do something magnificent, make a name for yourself. Jesus was never like that, he told the devil to flee from him and those temptations.

I think we have believed that fame is what makes us important: fame, wealth and power.

And Jesus, he totally, just absolutely dismissed those. He did not seek to be the most powerful religious figure. He was not born in a palace. He almost shunned anything that distracted from the message, repent for the kingdom of God is near. He’s near. Jesus is near. And so I just wonder, what’s the big contrast?

I think of Philippians 2. Jesus gave up everything, his power, and if you want to say fame, but his control of all things to become a human being. He divested himself of glory, so that he could say, “Not my will, but yours be done.” And I think that’s the way up is down. And the Bible talks over and over about how God will uplift the meek and the humble, but the arrogant, and the people that put their trust in riches or fame, he will not look to. And I don’t mean that God will ignore these people, but what I mean is the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and the humble, the people at the bottom of the societal hierarchy are the people that God is drawn to and spends time with.

The Poverty of Jesus as a Path to Joy

Transcript: When I think of poverty, I’m thinking about several things: poverty of spirit, but also maybe it could be material poverty. But if we impoverish ourselves of everything in us that’s not of Christ, we make room for God to be in our lives, God bearers like Mary. If our life is too full of godless things, and godless postures and godless obsessions and orientations, there’s no room for God in our life.

We kind of chase after things that we know, but we keep falling for it, that don’t fill us. I love the Sermon on the Mount: the pure in heart will see God. Rich Mullins has a song where he said that too. And I heard this story by Fr. Henry Reardon in Chicago. He was driving somewhere, like a long journey, and his windshield wipers stop working in the winter and so he had to drive with his family and then wipe off by hand the windshield wipers because they kept getting mud from the snow and he couldn’t see. In the Bible, Matthew 6:22, another one of my favorites, Jesus says, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is good, your whole body is good.” And so, when we fill ourselves and our lives with that which is not of Christ, that which is not good, true, and beautiful—the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, like the Bible says—when we dwell on things that are not of God, we get full of it.

Having Eyes to See

Transcript: Whatever you spend your time on, whatever you focus on, you’ll become like that. I think it’s in Habakkuk, it says we become like the things we love. And our time, how we spend our time kind of tells us what we love, where our treasure is, Jesus said. So I see it as like, where does joy come from? I think when we are purified and cleansed of our sins, and again, I just say that which is not of Christ, that which leads to death, when we’re cleansed of those things we can see better, like Jesus talks about in Matthew 6:22. And I think it can give us joy, because we see that those things don’t satisfy, we see that as we practice the life of Christ in our lives, how it manifests itself in our lives, that we see that goodness.

This morning, I was driving back (I’m in a Ph. D. program), I was driving back from school. I had taught a class at the university, and last year at this time, I would call my mom and she would call me (“How did class go?”), and my mom just died on June 27 of 2021, and I was really sad. Like, I really missed my mom, I did this, like, a couple weeks ago, I was gonna call my mom, like, I can’t call my mom, I can talk to my dad, but I can’t call my mom. And then I saw a little butterfly a couple of times. The monarch butterfly, I saw it flying up by a light, when I was stopping at the light, then I was traveling down the highway. I’m like, “Some monarch butterflies are out.” And I was just thinking about all things being made new and that I’ll see my mom someday, that there’s pain right now, but I took joy in a little monarch butterfly, it was the grace of God to me today. And I think having eyes to see brings joy. Because if we just see the world from the world’s perspective, we’re gonna see everything we don’t have, or everything that’s wrong, we’re not going to be able to see the good and true and beautiful that is bursting all over, but we have to have eyes to see it.

Join us each week of Advent as we share bonus content from friends of Dwell, each reflecting upon their own Advent journey and life with God in and through Scripture.

Week 2: Rebecca DeYoung

Rebecca K. DeYoung (Ph.D. University of Notre Dame) has enjoyed teaching ethics and the history of ancient and medieval philosophy at Calvin University for over 20 years. Her research focuses on the seven deadly sins, and virtue ethics, as well as Thomas Aquinas’s work on the virtues. Her books include Glittering Vices (Brazos), Vainglory (Eerdmans), and a co-authored volume entitled Aquinas’s Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press). Awards for her work include the Book and Essay Prize from the Character Project and the C.S. Lewis prize for Glittering Vices. She speaks widely, including opportunities to teach in prison. She and her husband Scot live in Grand Rapids, near the beautiful Lake Michigan shoreline.

The Seven Deadly Sins: What Are They and Why do They Matter?

What ‘Deadly Sins’ Do We Need To Be Mindful of in the Advent Season?

The Importance of Slowing Down in a Season of Hustle and Bustle

Bonus Audio Content:

What Can Ancient Christians Teach us About Everyday Life?

Transcript: They do a good job of emphasizing daily discipline for lifelong transformation. I mean, it is not exciting stuff. It is day after day, it is woven into kind of the warp and woof of our everyday lives. But that’s, I think, the absolutely essential key to transformation. It’s like you don’t just turn over your daily devotions to God, you turn over all of the patterns and practices that are forming you in all of your daily activities.

We have a saying in the Reformed tradition that Christ is Lord over every square inch of our lives. So, the way you walk into work and how fast you drive and what you eat and who you eat with and when you talk and how you listen and how you work and how you rest – all the things! So that incremental, mundane, daily stuff is where the deep transformation happens. And I think that’s one of the keys to the vices too. We’re always being formed, always being formed. How are we being formed? Which “goods” is this formation directing us toward? Is it directing us toward life with God and greater communion with Him? Or is it directing us away towards something idolatrous or damaging?

Daily Practices for the Healing of Our Souls

Transcript: I’m all about sort of thinking about daily practices that help us lean into Christ’s likeness. But I want to emphasize that part of what we’re doing in this process is putting ourselves in the hands of what the Desert Fathers and Mothers called the Physician of Souls, and that was Christ the Healer. So this whole process of diagnosing and self-examination and confession is really meant to work like a diagnostic process in healthcare, right?

Why do you want a diagnosis? To feel bad about the diseases that you have? No, it’s to go to the right doctor to obtain healing, and to think about Christ as offering you healing I think is a really important dynamic in this whole spiritual formation trajectory. He’s not there to condemn you, he’s there to offer you life. So what is a more life giving way than envy? Well, how about the celebration, appreciation, and expression of gratitude for goodness, goodness in our own lives, goodness all around us, the goodness in nature.

One of the things that I love to encourage my students to do is to find non-competitive goods. So goods that aren’t a matter of, “If I have more of it, you have less of it.” That’s an envious mindset, to make everything sort of a zero-sum competitive game. I want to turn people more toward common goods, things like music, we can both listen to music together, we can both appreciate it. It doesn’t make you better, me worse, you have more, me have less. It’s just something we can enjoy together.

Nature is like this as well. You can go out and enjoy the natural world in a way that’s appreciative of something that is God given and a common good, and something that we can celebrate, enjoy, and appreciate together. And I think the envious need to get out of the mindset of rivalry and competition and get into the mindset of common, sharable goods.

The Centrality of Scripture in a Well-Formed Life

Transcript: I think what Scripture does is it puts us in the presence of God, in dialogue with God.

So if you want to become like someone, and you want to grow in a love relationship with someone, that requires being with them, and Scripture, especially if you inhabit the language of the Psalms, is a kind of direct dialogue with God and a kind of deliberate encounter with him and being in his presence, and that is the most powerful mode of transformation possible. If we spend time with people, they rub off on us. We always say as parents, be careful who your friends are, because your friends will form your character. Well, if we befriend God and spend time with him, that will be formative for our character, too. So I don’t think of Scripture as primarily instructional, I think of it more in terms of, it’s just a place to be present and be in dialogue with God.

My own, probably most formative experience in that mode was when I was going through cancer treatment, and I found that the Psalms spoke for me when I no longer had the words to say to God about what was happening to me. And so to find that he had even provided the language felt like a gift. When I was speechless and had nothing to say, he had a word for that too, a word designed for me and in first person language. So that was a really personal gift, and a place where I found comfort and solace during a very difficult time.

One other thing that I have found really helpful with respect to Scripture in terms of disciplines and practices, again, something I practice with my students, we memorize Scripture together. And so I’m a fan, not only of reading, but of re-reading, of coming back to a single text and internalizing it. If you read Augustine’s Confessions, a large percentage of the actual text of his own story of his own life is directly in the language of Scripture. There are Scripture quotations inter-woven throughout the story. And I thought, isn’t that just a powerful picture of an internalization of God’s Word, such that you can’t tell your own story without using his words for your story.

The Benefits of Listening to the Bible

Transcript: I wonder if this is an opportunity to become an aural and visual culture again and we could go back and reclaim a few things from history there. I think the Dwell App is actually pretty helpful in that regard. What if it retaught us to receive the Word aurally? That would necessarily be a good antidote to a lot of our skim and scroll habits on the internet.

If you’re listening to somebody say something, it’s going to take longer than if you’re zipping through it, sort of speed reading. So, if it’s a way of reading that slows us down, maybe it is a way to let the Word of Christ dwell in us more richly than it would be if we stuck it on a printed page.

Join us each week of Advent as we share bonus content from friends of Dwell, each reflecting upon their own Advent journey and life with God in and through Scripture.

Week 1: Trevor Hudson

Trevor Hudson has been part of the Methodist movement for over 40 years. Serving primarily around Johannesburg, he is deeply committed to the work of spiritual formation within local congregational contexts. A significant part of his weekly work presently consists of leading people through the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius and offering spiritual direction. Besides his local commitments, Trevor travels widely, preaching and teaching. He lectures at Fuller Seminary, the Renovaré Institute, the Dallas Willard Center for Christian Spiritual Formation, and the Jesuit Institute in South Africa. He is the author of 17 books including Discovering Your Spiritual Identity (IVP) and Beyond Loneliness (Upper Room).

Hope as a Christian Virtue

A Daily Openness to the Coming of Christ

Meeting God in Advent Through the Dwell App

Bonus Audio Content:

The Universal Power of Hope

Transcript: Hope is a very human thing. I think it was Lewis Smedes, who was at Fuller, who once said that “hope is for the human spirit what oxygen is for the body.” That there’s a sense in which hope, at a human level, just at a human level, is a very, very powerful force in our lives. My mom often used to say to me, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” and I’ve come to see and to believe that where there’s hope, there is life. Such is the power of hope in the human spirit.

The Painful Reality of Hope

Transcript: While hope is a very, very powerful thing, it is also a very painful thing. The reality of our context is that hopes, human hopes, get shattered. I think all of us, to some degree, are living with the pain of shattered hopes, and I think that’s a reality that we really need to face very honestly and not gloss over it in any way. I live in South Africa and we struggled to overcome apartheid. In 1994, we became a democracy and our hopes were really, really high for a new lease on national life. But there has been a sense in which many of those hopes have crashed, in terms of corrupt leadership, etc. And what happens at a national level also happens at a very, very personal level. We have hopes for relationships, we have hopes for a marriage, we have hopes for our work, and they can shatter.

But I think the one redemptive factor in a shattered hope is that it pushes us down, to go beyond human hoping, and to discover a divine hope in the God who does God’s best work on a cross. And so there is a sense in which the pain of shattered hopes pushes us down into the promises of our divine hope. So that’s the one thing I would like to say.

How to Remain Hopeful in a Time Like This

Transcript: I have found it very, very helpful just to keep a simple biblical image in my mind, a very simple biblical image that comes from Hebrews, where the writer to the Hebrews speaks of hope as an anchor, and I love that image. Hope as an anchor. The image that comes to mind is that an anchor sinks through into the very depths and into the very darkness of the ocean, it goes right down to the end of the rope, as it were. And there is a sense in which that image of an anchor dropping to the ground, to the bottom, is that God meets us at the bottom. God meets us, as it were, at the end of the rope. That is God’s meeting place for us, in terms of the Divine Presence breaking into our life in a real and deep way. I just find that image, just carrying that image around with me, very, very helpful.

The Wonder of the Incarnation

Transcript: The wonder of the Incarnation is that Christ continues to come to us in all things material, that that we live in a sacramental world, and that, as you know, Ephesians six, I think it’s verse ten, that his ascended presence fills the universe. And so he comes in all things. And so, I think Christmas invites me to wonder again about how Christ is coming to me today, in that which is ordinary, in that which is hidden, in that which is unspectacular, just like a manger. And so that helps me to live on tiptoe, and it begins to renew within my life a sense of wonder, of how is Christ meeting me, how is Christ going to come to me in the present moment of my life in terms of my relationships, my work, and my daily living?

The Christian life is highly communal and deeply personal.

We are invited to live daily in the tension of these two realities. If we dismiss or downplay our life with other believers, faith can easily become narcissistic and navel-gazing, lacking regular interaction with trusted women and men with whom we share life and encourage one another towards faithful living. On the other hand, we cannot expect the community of faith to do all the work for us, carrying us along, without any personal investment in our faith journey. No, the way of the cross and the blessing of resurrection life must be applied to the specifics of our stories.

You are the only one who can live your life. Only you can make daily decisions to live a courageous story that finds its fulfillment in the grand narrative of God. The call to humility and self-giving love is universal, yet these values are embodied and embraced in the intimate details of your unique existence.

Though Dwell cannot capture the full range of the Christian experience (nor do we try!), we do long for this app to give expression to these two values: communal formation and a personal encounter of our living Lord.

Since our launch in 2017, we have curated hundreds of shared plans, playlists, and passages. We have invited you to read Scripture in communal ways, such as daily readings from different Christian traditions, a Bible-in-a-Year challenge, or a collection of passages around a single theme. And while these resources will continue to grow and expand, today we are extending a complimentary invitation: create your own personal playlists using Dwell.

Simple as it may sound, in launching this new Create Your Own Playlist feature, we are opening up the entire Dwell platform for customization and personalized expression. Whether you want to create a custom list of verses to memorize or meditate upon, research a specific topic of faith that is on your heart and mind, or even create a custom reading plan to share with a small group of friends or family, there is no limit to the number of ways you can integrate this feature into your personal walk with the Lord.

Our life with Christ is wonderfully corporate and intimately personal, and now with Dwell you can embody this beautiful mystery as you create space to daily encounter God through his Word.

John’s Gospel reveals to us the true identity of Jesus.

In his own words, Jesus shares with his first followers, and with us, the heart of his mission of love to the world. Commonly known as the “I AM” statements, John invites us to see the Lord Jesus afresh through a vivid collection of imagery and metaphor – a gate and vine, shepherd and light, resurrection and the life – each inviting us deeper into the mystery of Christ, the Word made flesh (Jn 1:14).

Listen now as Richard Foster guides us through the first of these statements, Jesus Christ, the “bread of life” (Jn 6:35).

We hope this meditation is a blessing to you today, and make sure to join us for Create Space, together learning to dwell with God as we meditate on his Word.