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?

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

On this joyful and glorious day, we join with Christians around the world in celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave. This is the holiest of holy days. Everything in creation builds to it, and all life and meaning flows from it. The journey of Holy Week begins in humility, models perfect self-giving love, and here today reveals that death is trampled down by death, destroying and taking captive every enemy of God.

Easter is the fulfillment of the cross. It definitively shows that death does not have the last word, that Christ is not left in the tomb but is ruling and reigning today! 

When Christ arose on that first Easter morning, the world was forever changed.

We face a temptation to rush past this glorious truth. Easter may be a day of prayer, reflection, and celebration, yet how quickly does this vision give way to sun dresses and suits, chocolate bunnies, egg hunts, and meals with family and friends? Before we know it, Monday morning has arrived, and with it Easter is all but forgotten, quickly fading into the recesses of our mind and lived experience.

Having put in the Lenten work of preparation, do not miss the glory of the Easter season! 

Now that we have deepened within us our desire for the Lord and the joy of walking in his ways, let us keep the feast (1 Cor 5:8). Remember, Easter is not a single day but is a fifty-day season of feasting and celebrating! Find creative ways over the coming weeks to show forth the joy of Easter in your life with God and your relationships with others.

Prayer of the Day

O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Prayer for Easter Day

As we enter into the fifty-day feast of Easter, celebrate Jesus’ victory over sin and death with these daily readings, inviting the Lord to speak to you through them. Glory is our destination, and hope is the path that leads us there!

Good Friday invites us into the great paradox of the Christian faith: death is the path that leads to life.

Though centuries of familiarity have numbed and distanced us, the cross was originally envisioned as a universal symbol of shame, meant to dehumanize anyone hanging from its beams. Yet as Hebrews reminds us, Christ takes a symbol of disrespect and “disregards its shame” (Heb 12:2). Through the shame and scandal of the cross, Jesus Christ restores humanity to its true glory.

Walking the way of the cross is not for the faint of heart. It requires an unshakable belief that death can give way to life. That the sickness within our hearts and in our world is healed when it is revealed for what it truly is, and then transformed through the renewing power of God.

In today’s reflective passage, St. Paul reminds us that we are “crucified with Christ” (Gal 2:20). To be crucified is to have your brokenness and shame laid bare, and this is exactly what the Lord asks of each of us. We must be willing to open our lives fully to the Lord, not shying away from our sin, but believing in the power of God to make us by grace what Christ is by nature.

Prayer of the Day

Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Prayer for Good Friday

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Where charity and love are, there is God.

So begins the ninth-century hymn, Ubi caritas, a song that is likely unknown to most of us, yet finds an enduring home in the life of the church on this day of the year. Maundy Thursday, drawing its name from the word mandatum, Latin for mandate or command, reminds us of the new commandment given by our Lord Jesus: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34).

With these words, Jesus places love at the center of our relationship with him, and perhaps more difficultly, at the center of our relationship with others. So you must love one another.

We cannot allow our Lord to wash our feet and fail to wash those of others in response.

While we rightly focus our attention during Holy Week on the self-giving love of God shown in Christ, his words in John 13 remind us that the love we receive is also meant to shape and animate the lives we live. 

If we long to be close to the Lord, to be in the place where God dwells, then our lives must be defined by a radical commitment to charity and love. We must daily cultivate a habit of looking to Jesus, and allowing his example to inform and reform our own understanding of love.


Love is not the fulfillment of your every desire, neither is it the filling in of parts of you that feel empty or hollow. No, love is the active and intentional choice to let go of your personal preferences and desires for the sake of someone else. Love says no to self in order to create room to genuinely say yes to others.

And so today, with our Lord’s example in the Upper Room on our hearts and minds, we join our voices with this ancient hymn and say:

Where charity and love are, there is God.
The love of Christ has gathered us together.
Let us rejoice in him and be glad.
Let us fear and love the living God
and love one another with a sincere heart.

Prayer of the Day

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Prayer for Maundy Thursday

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Do you believe Jesus is powerful?

So often we refer to Christ as a “servant king,” yet I believe we struggle to feel the full weight of these paradoxical words. In fact, general familiarity with this phrase removes from us the inherent tension and contradiction contained within. We may understand the nature of servanthood, as well as a ruling power, yet what do the two have in common? 

What king triumphantly enters a city on a colt, only to then willingly walk the way of shame and embrace the scandal of the cross?

For most of human history, humility was not seen as a virtue but a vice to be avoided at all costs. The humble were weak and easily exploited or dominated. To serve was to live subordinated to someone else’s agenda and vision of the good life, or at least their good life. 

Perhaps, then, the problem lies less with service and is more closely tied to the one being served?

Power is the ability to enact the choices you make. People in power see a certain outcome, and bring that vision into being. If their heart is darkened by sin and ordered towards self, power is used to a disastrous end. Yet if we believe God to be the fountain of all that is good and true, his power is profoundly good news, working to bring about a perfect end.

Jesus has the power to bring into being the most radical of ideas: humility allows us to see God and our neighbor, weakness is the way of strength, death is the way of life.

Hosanna is the deepest longing of the heart for deliverance and rescue. As we enter Holy Week, we are reminded of the ways in which our Lord uses his power to save us from every force of destruction and disorder, and perhaps most notably, to save from ourselves. He acts decisively for our good by showing us the true nature of power. He is the servant king who embodies the virtuous and redemptive nature of humility. 

Jesus envisions a world in which we are free from self-love and liberated to give ourselves away in service and sacrificial love, and he has the power to bring that world into being.

Prayer of the Week

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Prayer for the Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday

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