It’s just a lot of bunk. It is. Look, it’s sort of a “contemplating [indecipherable],” “intuitive spirituality,” “digging deep in to find your spiritual core and your spiritual center” which is nonsense. But they throw Bible words at it. The words like “Jesus”, “God”, “Holy Spirit.”

It is mysticism. The assumption is that spiritual truth is somewhere inside of you. That is not true. Spiritual truth is outside of you. It is external to you. It is in a book outside of you. It is not in you. You can contemplate yourself all you want. You can go sit on a rock in the middle of nowhere and think and you will find in you no source of divine revelation whatsoever. Because divine revelation is external to you, it’s external to every human being. It’s in a book that God wrote. When you put the book down and start looking in your own brain, all you’re going to do is be led down a black hole.

But everybody’s into spiritual formation. I was looking at a church website the other day and it proclaims itself to be an evangelistic church. An orthodox church. It happened to be a Presbyterian church. And the whole website was about spiritual formation.

One of the things they were offering was dance class in order that you could learn to get in the rhythm of the Holy Spirit. That’s what Packer called zany. That’s just crazy stuff. But that’s what happens when you start trying to poke around inside of yourself for spiritual truth when its all contained in one book and that book is external to you and the spiritual truth resides in that book if you never lived or never had a thought.

It’s the external truth that we must understand because there is nothing inside. Until that truth gets in our minds. And then you can go into your mind and draw out biblical truth. But if you are trying to look deeper than what’s in your brain, I just don’t get it.

You know me, I’m about as mystical a rock. But I don’t even know what they’re doing. I don’t know what they come up with. All of that mystic stuff, Dallas Willard and others like him, confuse people because they use the name of Jesus, use the name of God, use Bible verses.

Well I think if you are good enough at deconstructing them at home it can be a teaching opportunity at home. […] I also understand the confusion among Christian leaders who pick up this kind of stuff and just pick it up as if it were valid.

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This is a grief to me because its just embedded itself in Christian colleges, in churches, all kinds of Christian organizations, Christian schools. I see it popping up.

And the best way to understand it is kinda what we said earlier. It assumes that somehow spiritual truth can be found within in you intuitively. Whatever form it takes, that’s what it is.