Kyle Strobel on Finding Power in Weakness

The Christian journey is a lifelong pursuit of being formed into the likeness of Jesus. But how does spiritual formation actually happen? As the director of Talbot School of Theology’s Institute for Spiritual Formation, Kyle Strobel helps Christians grapple with this and other questions to experience spiritual growth powered by God’s Spirit. 

Strobel is a systematic theologian interested in theological anthropology, Jonathan Edwards and prayer. He has authored or co-authored several books, including his forthcoming work When God Seems Distant: Surprising Ways God Deepens Our Faith and Draws Us Near (Baker, releases Feb. 3rd), written with John Coe.

Strobel sat down with Outreach to discuss how growing up as the son of famed apologist Lee Strobel impacted his faith, the nature of spiritual formation, and what it looks like for Christ’s power to be made perfect in our weakness.

Kyle Strobel on Finding Power in Weakness

My first question is a serious one. Your birth was somewhat famously depicted in the feature film The Case for Christ. Do you feel like you were fairly represented?

Well, it took two baby girls to play one of me, so that’s the sheer emotional range we were working with. I can assure you, though, there’s nothing weirder than sitting in a movie theater with strangers watching your birth. That was something I’m not sure anything could have prepared me for.

How did growing up in the home of a man who would become one of the most influential apologists of his generation impact your journey with Jesus?

I’m thankful that my dad’s visibility and status came later in life, and that he never really had his own organization, either a church or a ministry. Because it is a weird experience growing up very visible in evangelicalism, and I think I was saved from a lot because of that. I also had a father who is just profoundly honest, who was a convert who never lost sight of the fact that Jesus has rescued him so incredibly. 

I would say one of the great gifts I’ve been given was the realization before I began that I would fail. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who relate to me as a failure from the get-go because I’ll never be my father. And the gift in that is I don’t have to try [to be him]. I had a father who always encouraged me to follow the path the Lord laid out for me, and I’m incredibly grateful for having a father who has supported me in going in a very different direction than he went and understanding that we are both ministering to the church, just in different ways.

Was there a moment when you realized that, or was it a process over time? 

I can think of a handful of conversations where it was really clear that people found me to be a disappointment because I wasn’t doing the same sorts of things that [my father does].  

This is not just true of people with famous parents, but I would imagine it’s true of people who have wildly successful parents in the business world or the like. The temptation is to think, I could just be faithful with what I have, but then to see this [prescribed] path laid out for me. I mean, the number of folks I know who’ve been like, “I’ll just work for my dad’s organization. I’m guaranteed a job.” I never had any of that. So, there was never that opportunity, and then realizing that if I did try to ride [my father’s] coattails, I would ultimately be perceived as a failure, because that’s not who I am. 

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You’re the director of the Institute of Spiritual Formation at Talbot School of Theology. How do you define spiritual formation?

Spiritual formation, put very simply, is the Spirit’s work to form us ever increasingly into the likeness of Jesus. Now, right away, there are some important distinctions we have to draw. Spiritual formation, which every Christian believes in, I take to be unprovocative. Every Christian believes presumably that the Spirit’s at work, and the Spirit’s work is forming some likeness of Jesus. 

But that has to be differentiated from the spiritual formation conversation that’s happened … this current iteration of it. My own background is in Puritan and evangelical models of spiritual formation. And so because spiritual formation is a part of a field of theology, just like any other theological kind of doctrine or idea, there’s going to be a Lutheran approach to that. There’s going to be a Reformed approach to that, right? 

One of the great mistakes in the modern conversation is that a lot of folks naively assume that spiritual formation is a view. Oh, you believe in spiritual formation, therefore you must believe X, Y and Z. And that’s where a lot of confusion happens, where everyone gets lumped together. 

The distinct thing that Talbot has really emphasized is our interest in spiritual theology. What is the nature of the Christian life? What kind of life is this? What does it mean that Christ is our righteousness and Christ is our sanctification, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:30? What does it mean that we need to bear the fruit of the Spirit?

We’re also going to have to talk developmentally. What are the processes of growth? Why does the New Testament talk about my growth in the same way as physical growth? John uses the imagery of children, young men and fathers. You get this developmental maturation, where you’re on milk, but you should be on solid food. 

The New Testament uses our physical maturing into adulthood to talk about our spiritual growing into adulthood—or even with Paul, into the manhood of Christ, the completeness of Christ. And so spiritual theology needs to attend to what does it actually mean to grow, if the growth isn’t from me but, according to Colossians 2:19, it’s a growth that comes from God?

But then we also need to talk about directives, because whatever we’re doing, there are going to be imperatives. There’s going to be things we’re commanded to do. And so spiritual theology is the mode of theology that helps us articulate the nature of the Christian life as a life in Christ by the Spirit, the maturation of that life into the likeness of Jesus by the Spirit. But then [there are] the directives so that we can help shepherd souls, so that we can actually grow with a growth that is from God. Because at the end of the day, spiritual formation is about obedience from the heart.

What are the stages in spiritual formation that we can see and predict as a believer grows to fully mature in faith? Is there a predictable path that every Christian travels?

In some ways there is. The fact that Paul seems to presuppose that—that he can know who’s on milk and who should be on solid food—is an example. Scripture often talks about what we usually generically talk about as virtues but are more often in Scripture, things like the fruit of the Spirit, which I take with a lot of the tradition, including Jonathan Edwards, to be singular. So the fruit of the Spirit is love, semicolon. And then you see the remainder of that list, gentleness, kindness, faithfulness, self-control and these things are the way love characterizes a soul.

In Romans 5:5, we see the Holy Spirit’s pouring forth love into the soul. Love’s not a commodity I own. It’s not something that’s handed over to me. It is a way of me receiving God’s very life, so that his life begins to give shape to my life. And that’s in and through love. The way love characterizes my person needs to come out in various ways. I need to be transformed, and the way that transformation happens is going to be a work of the Spirit. 

But one of the things that the Christian tradition has always pointed at is these three seasons of the soul. Consolation, which is that kind of milk phase, is that living on the bottle. Young believers are often flooded with joy and pleasure in the Christian life. Every Bible study is the most profound Bible study that’s ever been had. Every sermon is the greatest sermon. Every worship set is flawless. Everything is full. 

The thing that gets confusing is that when you’re flooded with pleasure, you’re actually cut off a little bit from the brokenness of your soul. And this is, biblically, typologically, we would say, this is the plagues. When Jesus is raining down plagues on Egypt, and he marches out his people, and they’re just getting gifts of gold, they’re flooded with consolation. Everything’s wonderful. 

The next thing God does is he marches them into the desert to show them what is in their heart. Our tradition often would talk about this in terms of the desert. Sometimes, we just talk about it in terms of dryness. And this often will happen in a kind of adolescence of the faith, where we’re in this season where—and sometimes it takes a while to even realize we’re in the season—we realize it when we’re bored, or we’re no longer expecting the greatest sermon. You might actually be a little critical of a sermon, or you might critique the worship leader’s decisions on what songs to sing. 

The Lord often will lead his people into these seasons of the desert to show what is in our heart, and what we realize is the Lord is actually leading us to depend upon him. The Lord is leading us not to rely upon ourselves, not to rely upon our flesh, but to rely upon his Spirit. 

The problem is that in consolation, we came to wed together God’s presence with an experience of pleasure. For a lot of Christians, this season becomes undoing, because they now begin to go, Uh-oh, this doesn’t seem to be working. God’s not here. There’s a danger in the desert season to try to inject consolation into it, to try to get excited. 

But then the Lord will lead us into a season that much of the tradition will call dark night of the soul—our own tradition calls it spiritual desertion. And spiritual desertion is the counterpart to consolation. In consolation, God gives you a gift of his pleasure. In the desert, he just takes away pleasure, but he’s present to you. But now you have to learn God’s presence by faith and not by sight. 

The desert showed you that you still have sin in your life that you need to address. But now the Lord wants to show you that even your spirituality is fleshly, that you preach out of jealousy and selfish ambition, as James 3:13 and following says. You give to the church, but it’s actually out of a kind of greed. You worship God because you think that if you do so, you’ll get what you want.

This is where our tradition wants to remind us—because we really are the “filthy rags” tradition—evangelicalism is the tradition that reminded us it is actually your “good works” that you’re most liable to rely on, your own righteousness rather than Christ’s. And so instead of clothing ourselves in our nakedness, the call was always to receive Christ’s robes of righteousness.