The Christian Pattern (Part 3) by David Juliano

This is the third installment on the Christian Pattern. Click here for part one and part two.

 

The Inner Life and the Voice We’ve Stopped Hearing

There is a spiritual condition that most pastors recognize but few talk about publicly.

It goes by different names in the tradition. The desert fathers called it acedia. The medieval mystics called it desolation. John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. Whatever you call it, it amounts to the same thing: a season when God feels absent, when prayer feels hollow, when the disciplines that once fed you now feel empty, when you are going through the motions of a faith that has temporarily lost its pulse.

I know this condition. I suspect you do too.

Books Two and Three of John Wesley’s The Christian’s Pattern address it with an honesty I haven’t found anywhere else in Christian literature — and they do so in ways that surprised me deeply when I sat down to modernize them.

Book Two is about the inner life. If Book One asked what your life is really about, Book Two asks something harder: what is actually happening inside you? Not your theology, not your public ministry, not your carefully maintained pastoral persona. The actual interior landscape of your soul — the fears, the hungers, the secret motives, the places where you are still running on empty no matter how full your calendar looks.

 

Why Ministry Activity Can Hide a Neglected Inner Life

À Kempis opens Book Two with a distinction sharp enough to cut:

“If you seek Jesus in all things, you’ll surely find Jesus. But if you seek yourself, you’ll also find yourself — but to your own destruction.”

That is not comfortable reading for those of us who have spent decades in ministry. Because the honest truth is that ministry can become — if we are not ruthlessly watchful — a sophisticated form of self-seeking. The platform, the reputation, the sense of being needed, the identity that comes from being the person with answers. None of these things are evil in themselves. But when they become the point, when Jesus becomes the means by which we build the life we want rather than the Lord to whom we surrender the life we have — we find ourselves. And that, à Kempis says with terrible clarity, is not good news.

 

How to Respond When God Feels Absent

Then comes the chapter on desolation. And here À Kempis does something unexpected: he doesn’t fix it. He doesn’t offer a program or a technique or a series of steps for recovering the sense of God’s presence. He simply says:

“There’s no better remedy than patience and surrendering my will to the will of God.”

Patience. And surrender.

I confess I wanted something more actionable than that. I am a pastor. I like solutions. But the longer I sat with this chapter while writing the modern reflection, the more I recognized its wisdom. Some seasons of the soul cannot be fixed. They can only be endured, with open hands and surrendered will. The attempt to engineer your way out of desolation — to manufacture the feeling of God’s presence through increased religious activity — usually makes things worse. Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is simply wait.

Book Three shifts everything. Suddenly you are not reading a devotional manual. You are listening to a conversation.

 

Learning to Listen: Hearing God’s Voice in a Noisy World

À Kempis wrote Book Three as a dialogue — an intimate exchange between the Christian soul and Christ himself. The believer speaks. Christ responds. Back and forth, chapter after chapter, the two voices weaving together in what à Kempis imagined as the interior life of authentic prayer. Not prayer as a monologue aimed at the ceiling. Prayer as a conversation with someone who actually answers.
It opens with a posture that I have been trying to practice ever since I took on this task:

“I will listen to what the Lord God speaks within me.”

Not “I will tell God what I need.” Not “I will present my requests and await results.” Just: I will listen. I will position my soul to receive rather than demand. I will be quiet enough to hear.

In a culture that has made noise a virtue and silence a problem, this is genuinely countercultural. We have lost the ability to be alone with our thoughts, let alone alone with God. The moment we have a free minute, we reach for our phones. The moment silence descends, we fill it. We are afraid of what we might hear — or more honestly, afraid of what we might not hear — if we actually stopped and listened.

But Christ speaks. À Kempis is insistent about this. The question is not whether God is speaking. The question is whether we have become too noisy to hear.

There is a moment in Book One that has haunted me since I first read it — and that Book Three keeps pressing home:

“I’d rather experience genuine sorrow for my sins than merely understand the theological definition of repentance.”

I know the definitions. I have preached on repentance, on contrition, on the anatomy of godly sorrow. I have explained these things in confirmation classes and counseled people through them. But do I know them — in my bones, in the place where real change actually happens, in the gut rather than the head?
That is the question Books Two and Three keep asking. Not can you talk about this? But do you know this? Have you heard God’s voice on this? Have you sat still long enough to let him speak?

Wesley believed that the interior life was not a luxury for the spiritually advanced but the foundation of everything else. The outer ministry — the preaching, the organizing, the endless riding and writing — flowed from an inner life of prayer and self-examination that he maintained with fierce discipline throughout his life. He read à Kempis because à Kempis kept him honest about the interior. Kept him from mistaking activity for transformation.

We need that same honesty. Perhaps more urgently than ever.

In our noisy, distracted, endlessly performing age — where ministry has never been more visible and the interior life has never been more neglected — Books Two and Three of The Christian’s Pattern feel less like ancient wisdom and more like urgent medicine.

God is speaking.

The question is whether we are listening.

 

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day releases June 16th from Invite Press. Part 4: Wesley’s Lost Vision of Holy Communion 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.