The Christian Pattern (Part 2) by David Juliano

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.