When done properly Christian worship does not just target the intellect, but also the whole person. The singing and praying, the sermon, the sacraments of baptism and communion, the entire liturgy, appeals to multiple senses—the ear gate, the eye gate, the nose gate, the taste gate, the touch gate. Worship, therefore, is incarnational, affecting both head and heart—both soul and body—which are not separate entities but enmeshed.

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.
— Augustine

As James K. A. Smith reminds us in You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, Augustine’s prayer reveals several aspects about the human condition. First, human beings are made by and forthe Creator. Furthermore, to be human is to be for something—for a vision or some perceived good. Finally, the heart is just as important as the head. That is to say, the pull of a vision toward a perceived good is not primarily a pull of the intellect, but the heart.
Bob Dylan put it this way:
You may be an ambassador to England or France
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearls
But you’re gonna serve somebody, yes
Indeed, you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Or think of it like this: A guy goes to a marriage counselor and says, “I want a divorce from my wife.” The counselor says, “Why do you want to divorce your wife?” The man says, “Because I don’t love her anymore.” The counselor says, “Well, who do you love?”
Augustine (and Dylan) are saying it’s not a question of whether you love something because we all love something. You cannot not love. The more difficult question is who or what do you love? All people have a longing for God because it is built in—a distant echo from the Imago Dei. The problem is that sin has warped this longing. So, people spend a great deal of time trying to fill this vacuum. In doing so, they are all looking for some version of the Good—some version of the Kingdom.
Smith reminds us that people live for what they love. They get up in the morning and they do their thing day after day and this forms them. Our loves are formed by what we think and do—our habits. The ancients said that good moral habits constitute virtues and bad moral habits constitute vices. From a Christian perspective, virtue is what we mean when we talk about godliness. Likewise, vice refers to ungodliness.
Essentially, Smith’s book addresses the subject of sanctification, which is described in the Bible as a two-step process: renouncing and reorienting. Paul says, “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” (Titus 2:11-12 ESV).
In the same way, Paul says in Ephesians that the way of Christ teaches us to put off the old self, which belongs to our old way of life corrupted through deceitful desires, and put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in righteousness and holiness (Eph. 4:20-24).
Perhaps the most significant contribution of Smith’s book is his notion of cultural liturgies; that is, the daily rituals or routines that take up our time and affections, which tend to form our loves. For example, Smith says the American affection for shopping is a kind of cultural liturgy that holds out the good of consumerism.
Likewise, one could say the time we spend in front a television screen is a kind of cultural liturgy that holds out the good of entertainment. The time teenagers and preteens spend with their cellphones—taking it to bed with them—is a habit of the heart that constitutes a cultural liturgy. Facebook time is a kind of cultural liturgy in its own right, especially if the first thing you do in the morning is turn on your computer to see if someone has messaged you.
Of course, not all of our pursuits are not necessarily bad within themselves, but they shape us in ways we don’t always realize. Here is what we need to understand: People who design cellphones, build malls, or produce television programming don’t really care what you think, but they very much care about what you love.
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Genuine believers can fall into the fleshly trap of self-focus. They can become neutralized by this because that is what this does. On the other hand, walking in repentance, though quite painful at times, is the only way for us to continue in this growth pattern and remain fruitful. In this our assurance will grow in depth and breadth.

1 Simeon Peter, a slave and apostle of Jesus Christ,To those who have received the same kind of faith as ours, by the righteousness of our God and Savior, Jesus Christ: 2 Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the full knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord; 2 Peter 1:1-2 (LSB)
God is good. I struggle at times trying to explain certain doctrines in a way that anyone reading these posts will clearly understand them, but God, being good, really helps me put these posts together and also, I’m convinced helps those who are truly seeking HIs truth to understand what He has helped me post.  In this post  I hope to cover true Christian assurance, God willing.” He is obviously willing because all I had thrown up to me all day today was how unworthy and sinful I am yet how marvelous His grace is and how awesome it is that I have obtained faith in righteousness of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ even though all I deserve is His wrath. When I look at how well I keep the commandments like “Love your neighbor as yourself” I know that I am a selfish, self-centered, prideful, self-loving person who is a total failure at this. I have never kept this commandment by trying to do so. The only time I have ever done so is as I have humbled myself before my Lord as He worked through me as I served in ministry and I found myself loving and serving people in ways that I cannot do no matter how hard I try. On the other hand, as I walk (and drive) through each day with me in control with my focus on me and what I want, that is most certainly not the case. 
If my assurance was based on that performance then I would be in a sorry mess. Oh, and I most certainly do find myself before the throne of grace pouring out my heart quite a bit agreeing with God about my sinfulness and His righteousness and my lack thereof. It is through this humbling process that I am in the process of denying myself, denying what my flesh wants, mortifying it so-to-speak, as I give praise and glory to God as I trust that He is in control of all things and then I simply pursue righteousness from a grateful heart and turn from evil as I am led. This is how I take up my cross daily and follow my Lord. This “knowledge” that this is necessary does not come from the flesh or from man, but from God. It certainly didn’t come from me.
Look at the passage I placed at the top of this post. The word “knowledge” translates ἐπιγνώσει the dative, singular form of ἐπίγνωσις (epignōsis), which means “knowledge, understanding.” However, this is a strengthened form of “knowledge” implying a larger, more thorough, and intimate knowledge. Despite what is popularly taught by some so-called “Christian leaders” in our time, the Christian’s precious faith is built on knowing the truth about God. Christianity is not a mystical religion, but is based on objective, historical, revealed, rational truth from God and intended to be understood and believed. The deeper and wider that knowledge of the Lord, the more “grace and peace” are multiplied. Therefore, even though this whole day was a test of my faith, I was able to turn in faith to my Lord in repentance and agreement with Him about my sinfulness completely at peace in the knowledge that all my sins were paid for at the Cross and that these sinful, fleshly struggles of pride and selfishness in me are part of God’s cleansing fires of sanctification to make me ready for eternity.
To get to that place where we can part ways from trying to justify our sinfulness and, instead, agree with God about it in light of His Holiness and Righteousness, and our need of His grace in order to anything good (John 15) we must come to know our salvation. We must know what be believe and why be believe it. We must know what Christ has done for us on our behalf and what our responsibilities are in light of that. A good place to start is 2 Peter 1:3-11.
3 seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the full knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. 4 For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust. 2 Peter 1:3-4 (LSB)
This is, of course, a continuation of vv1-2. Do genuine Christians have to try to live the Christian life by will power or by their own strength? No! Christ has given by His divine power everything that pertains to life and godliness through what? Here is that word epignōsis again. Knowledge is a key word throughout 2 Peter. This knowledge is an intimate knowledge that only genuine believers have granted to them by God Himself.
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We must view false teachers the way God describes them. We must see their teaching as that which can sink a soul into the pits of hell like a reef takes down a cruise ship or oil tanker. We must see the doctrine they teach like sea foam filled with death and decay, knowing that they are fruitless and uprooted, awaiting God’s judgment, and then we should be spurred on to guard our own doctrine even as we pray that some will be snatched out of the flames.

Since the beginning of time, there has been a war against God’s truth. From Satan’s fall to the garden of Eden to the false prophets of Ezekiel’s day who cried “peace” when there was no peace, to our day, there have always been those who speak against God’s Word and lead God’s people astray if they can. The world has always known false teachers.
In our day, we are bursting at the seams with them. Everyone knows they exist, even if they are unable to identify them, but not all seem to realize the danger they pose. For some, false teachers are the fringe group that is better ignored; for others, they are just Christians who think differently than we do. So how do we rightly view false teachers, and are they as threatening as some suggest?
We should first define what we mean by a false teacher. What we do not mean is someone who gets a doctrine such as the issue of baptism wrong. That would be an error, not a heresy. When we think of a false teacher, we think of the example given by the Apostle Paul, who writes to the Galatian Church, “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!” (Gal 1:8). A false teacher distorts the gospel in some way. In other words, false teaching often touches the person or work of Christ. Doctrines such as salvation by grace alone through faith alone, the sinless life of Christ, the deity of Christ, the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ, the gospel, and the necessity of repentance, are non-negotiable doctrines, and to teach anything contrary is to become a false teacher.
A second distinction of a false teacher is someone who, after having an error corrected, refuses to adjust his teaching. Of course, we all teach error, and for most of us, if we realized where that error was, we would correct it. But refusing to correct an error once exposed as an error makes one a false teacher when we speak of central doctrines that affect one’s faith. One has to move from “I didn’t know what the Bible said” to “I don’t care.” At that moment, a false teacher is born.
In the book of Acts, Apollos is an excellent example of someone teaching an error because he was teaching the Baptism of John, not knowing anything different. However, when corrected, he adjusted his teaching accordingly, and it is said that “he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 18:28).
So the first question is: just how dangerous are false teachers? Secondly, how do we respond to false teachers? To answer these questions, there’s no better person to turn to than Jude, the half-brother of our Lord. Jude paints the most robust imagery of the false teacher anywhere in Scripture. He describes false teachers using five main illustrations and, in those, answers the question, “how dangerous are false teachers?”
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