This is the second article in a series on the Christian Pattern. Read the first article here.

 

What Is Your Life Really About?

I have been a pastor for over thirty-five years.

In that time I have sat across from a lot of people in a lot of conversations — in hospital rooms, in counseling sessions, in coffee shops, in the aftermath of funerals. And one thing I’ve learned is that the gap between what people say their lives are about and what their lives are actually about is often — not always, but often — enormous.

I include myself in that observation.

Thomas à Kempis opens The Imitation of Christ without preamble or gentle introduction. He goes straight for the jugular. Not what do you believe, not what church do you attend, not how long have you been a Christian. Just this, in the very first chapter:

“What good does it do to argue brilliantly about the Trinity if you lack humility and thereby offend the very God you’re discussing?”

You can have impeccable theology and a cold heart. You can know everything about God and barely know God at all. You can preach grace and live performance. You can talk about transformation and remain fundamentally unchanged.

Wesley underlined this passage. He knew it described him before Aldersgate. The man had been ordained in the Church of England, had crossed the Atlantic to serve as a missionary in Georgia, had read every spiritual book he could find — and still wrote in his journal that he lacked the faith that would save him. He was, by any external measure, a successful minister. By his own internal reckoning, a man whose outer life had long since outpaced his inner one.

À Kempis had diagnosed him twenty years before the cure arrived on Aldersgate Street.

We must attend to our outer life — our actions, our disciplines, our choices and habits and public performances of faith. But the work of God keeps driving inward. Every chapter of The Christian Pattern asks the same underlying question in a different form: are you becoming more like Jesus, or merely more informed about Jesus?

 

When Theological Knowledge Replaces Spiritual Transformation

For those of us in ministry, this is a particularly uncomfortable question. We are professional Christians. We are paid to know things about God, to say things about God, to organize communities around God. The temptation — and I speak from experience — is to mistake fluency for transformation. To assume that because we can articulate the doctrine of sanctification, we must be making progress in it.

À Kempis will not let you make that assumption.

There is a chapter on reading and study that I find almost unbearable in its accuracy. He warns against the person who accumulates spiritual knowledge the way others accumulate possessions — as a form of pride, of status, of self-congratulation. Wesley himself, in a letter to a colleague, put it with characteristic bluntness:

“Beware that you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.” — John Wesley, letter to Joseph Benson, 1768

An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge. That sentence has been sitting with me for awhile now. How much of my reading life has been genuine hunger for God, and how much has been the intellectual equivalent of trophy collecting? How much of my studying has produced love, and how much has produced the ability to win arguments?

 

The Discipline of Silence in a Noisy World

There is a chapter on silence that feels genuinely radical in our age. À Kempis argues that the person who knows how to be quiet and still — who can close the door on the noise of the world and simply be present to God — is rarer than gold and worth considerably more. We live in the noisiest moment in human history. We have made noise a virtue and silence a problem to be solved. We fill every gap with content, every commute with podcasts, every moment of potential stillness with the next thing demanding our attention.

And in all that noise, something gets crowded out.

There is a chapter on friendship and trust that is remarkably practical and remarkably modern — à Kempis understood that intimacy requires discernment, that not everyone who wants access to your inner life should have it, that pastoral ministry in particular requires wisdom about who you allow to shape you.

 

Overcoming the Fear of Real Spiritual Growth

And then there is the chapter about going all in. No half measures, no spiritual hobby, no comfortable Christianity that asks little and delivers accordingly. À Kempis writes:

“One thing holds many people back from spiritual progress and real growth: fear of difficulty or the struggle involved. But those who grow the most spiritually are the ones who work hardest to overcome the things that are most difficult and contrary to them.”

I read that and felt the weight of it. Because it’s true in a way that is both clarifying and uncomfortable. We would rather make grand dramatic gestures than do the quiet, unglamorous, daily work of actually changing. We would rather announce a commitment to transformation than submit to the slow, painful process of being transformed.

Book One of The Christian’s Pattern will not let you stay comfortable. It holds up a mirror and keeps it there until you stop flinching.

But here is what I want to say to my fellow pastors and leaders specifically: this book is not an indictment. It is an invitation. À Kempis is not trying to crush you with guilt. He is trying to free you from the exhausting performance of a Christianity that never quite reaches your heart.

Wesley read this book throughout his entire ministry. Not once, not as a young man before he knew better, but repeatedly, across six decades, finding new depths each time he returned to it. He recommended it constantly to early Methodists — not as an academic exercise but as a companion for the journey of holiness.

That journey begins with a question.

What is your life really about — not what you say, but what your choices reveal?

 

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day releases June 16th from Invite Press. Part 3 — The Inner Life and Hearing God’s Voice — follows in two weeks.

J. David Juliano is the pastor of First Sebring Church in Sebring, Florida, and the author of The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day (Invite Press, June 16, 2026). Pre-order at inviteministries.org. Learn more at jdavidjuliano.com and follow his writing at Walking the Edges on Substack.

I was nineteen years old when I wandered into the First Methodist Church of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and fell in love with John Wesley.

I didn’t know much about him at first. But the more I read, the more I was captivated — by the way God had raised him up, by his faltering journey to faith, by his struggles with works-righteousness and his never quite feeling that he measured up. I recognized myself in Wesley before I’d lived enough life to know why.

 

The Three Books That Shaped John Wesley’s Faith

It didn’t take long before I was reading everything I could find. And in every biography, every account of Wesley’s early spiritual formation, three books kept appearing — the books that had shaped his faith and set him on the road to Aldersgate. Jeremy Taylor’s Rules for Holy Living and Dying, William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, and Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ.

I read all three. Each of them painted a thrilling vision of a life fully devoted to God. But the one that stayed with me — the one that Wesley himself kept returning to throughout his entire life, calling it a book “next to the Bible” — was à Kempis.

I bought a copy. I read it. I put it on my shelf.

That was more than forty years ago.

The book moved with me through seminary, through four years of ministry in the Tennessee Conference, then four years in the British Methodist Church, through the move to Florida, through thirty-five years of pastoral ministry. It survived six children, three houses, and more committee meetings than I care to count. It sat on my study shelf in Sebring, Florida, a little battered, the spine soft with age, waiting.

Last year my church gave me a sabbatical. Ten years as their pastor, no real break in twenty, running on fumes in ways I was only beginning to admit. Coming out of that sabbatical I made a decision: I was going to be more intentional about my daily devotional life. No more fits and starts.

I looked at my shelf. My eye went straight to that old familiar copy.

 

Why The Imitation of Christ Is Still Hard to Read (And What to Do About It)

I took it down and started reading a chapter a day.

And the first thing I thought was: this is hard. Considerably harder than I remembered from nineteen. The language was dense, the demands uncompromising, the medieval framework not exactly designed for someone living in Florida in the age of doom-scrolling. I found myself rereading paragraphs, losing the thread, struggling to connect à Kempis’s 15th century monastery world with my 21st century pastoral life.

And then the idea hit me.

Wesley had done this before me. In 1725, a young Oxford student picked up The Imitation of Christ while preparing for ordination. Something in it grabbed him — the same thing that had grabbed me at nineteen, that same vision of a life fully surrendered to God. Ten years later, in 1735, he produced his first English translation from the Latin — dense, academic, scholarly. But it was his 1741 edition that changed everything. By then Wesley was leading a movement, and he wanted à Kempis in the hands of ordinary people — farmers, miners, mill workers, the men and women flooding into his Methodist societies. So he revised and simplified, producing an edition directed at a general readership rather than Oxford scholars.

 

What Wesley Did for His Generation — A Modern Devotional for Ours

What Wesley did for his generation, I wanted to do for ours.

What if someone took Wesley’s translation — all four books, all 88 chapters — and modernized it for contemporary readers? Added reflections connecting each chapter to the world we actually live in? Prayers to help you respond to what you’ve read?

That’s the book I spent the last year writing.

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day releases June 16th from Invite Press.

Over the next three articles I want to take you inside the four books — what they contain, what they challenged in me, and why I think Wesley was right that this is the book every Christian needs after the Bible.

But for now, I want to leave you with something Wesley wrote about why he treasured à Kempis above all other books except Scripture:

“True religion is seated in the heart. God’s law extends to all our thoughts as well as words and actions.”

— John Wesley, Journal

That insight — that Christianity is fundamentally an interior transformation, not merely an outward performance — is what à Kempis gave Wesley. And here’s what strikes me most: this isn’t a message just for Methodists, or for pastors, or for people who’ve been in church their whole lives. À Kempis wrote for anyone who suspects there might be more to the Christian life than they’ve yet experienced. Anyone who is tired of going through the motions. Anyone who longs for a faith that reaches past the head and into the heart. Six centuries after he wrote it, and nearly three centuries after Wesley translated it, that invitation is as urgent and as open as it has ever been.

The book has been waiting on my shelf for forty years.

It’s been waiting for you too.

 

David Juliano is the pastor of First Sebring Methodist Church in Sebring, Florida, and the author of The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day (Invite Press, June 16, 2026). Pre-order at inviteministries.org. Learn more at jdavidjuliano.com and follow his writing at Walking the Edges on Substack.