And so we are people who long and want but who long at want wrongly.  And while we long and want sinfully, we sometimes long for and want things for reasons beyond us.  How do we learn to long and want differently?  Where do we go to “train for godliness,” as the apostle Paul might say?  James K. A. Smith suggests the following in You Are What You Love:

The church— the body of Christ— is the place where God invites us to renew our loves, reorient our desires, and retrain our appetites. Indeed, isn’t the church where we are nourished by the Word, where we “eat the Word” and receive the bread of life? The church is that household where the Spirit feeds us what we need and where, by his grace, we become a people who desire him above all else. Christian worship is the feast where we acquire new hungers— for God and for what God desires— and are then sent into his creation to act accordingly.

These can be odd words for evangelical Protestants raised primarily on “personal relationship with God” talk.  It definitely clashes with the “it’s not a religion; it’s a relationship” ideology that’s so easy to find.

Retraining, reorientation, takes time.  We often think that 21 days is the magic timeline, but that’s up for debate.  Regardless, repetition is an odd beast for many of us.  It reeks of insincerity.  And yet our worship is full of it, for good or for bad.

Here’s a video of a conversation with Smith from Biola University about the question of repetition, particularly as it pertains to an “evangelical allergy” to the concept.