The Frontier of the Heart

Editor’s note:
This is the second installment in a series called “The New Frontier: Reflections on the Future of the Church.” View the entire series here.

In David McCullough’s book The Pioneers, I learned about a man named General Rufus Putnam. He was one of the first settlers of Marietta, Ohio, and also one of the most widely admired. His impact came from his leadership, perseverance, and unfailing strength of character. Putnam’s story taught me that what made the physical frontier crossable was not geography or technology. It was the interior life of the people who crossed it. 

The most important frontier any person will ever cross is not digital, cultural, or geographic. It is the frontier of the heart. Everything else—every external impact, every organizational accomplishment, every measurable result—flows from what happens on the inside.

This is the truth at the center of 2 Corinthians 3, and it is the scripture I return to more than almost any other when I am trying to understand what genuine spiritual life looks like—for a church, for a Christian, for any person willing to let God in.

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are Christ’s letter, delivered by us, not written with ink but with the Spirit of the living God — not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

2 Corinthians 3:2-3 CSB

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul makes a distinction that I believe is the most important distinction in the history of the church: the difference between the letter and the Spirit. The letter (religious rules and human abilities) modifies behavior. The Spirit (God’s presence and power within us) transforms the person. These are not two versions of the same thing. They produce entirely different kinds of people, and they produce entirely different spiritual conditions in a spiritual community. A church built on the letter will produce people who comply. A church built on the Spirit will produce people who are changed. The difference is not organizational. It is interior.

I have seen both. I have been part of both. I can tell you from forty years of experience that you can build an impressive organization on behavioral compliance. You can grow fast. You can have full rooms. You can produce people who say the right things and demonstrate the right behaviors. And you can look at all of it and feel that something essential is missing—the heart. The love. 

In my book, He’s Not Who You Think He Is, I describe the moment the letter had crushed me. It was at this moment that I began to see the problem clearly for the first time. I know I am not alone. Every person who has tried to sustain a walk with God through behavioral compliance eventually reaches that same breaking point—not because they are weak, but because the letter was never designed to carry the weight of a human soul.

It is not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God. He has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

2 Corinthians 3:5–6 CSB

The letter kills. This is not a metaphor. It is a spiritual reality. People who enter any Christian spiritual community with a behavioral Christianity framework—measuring their standing by compliance, their worth by performance, their relationship with God by how well they keep the rules—will eventually break. Not because the values behind the rules are wrong, but because no human being can sustain letter-based Christianity indefinitely. The letter was never designed to carry that weight. 

Jesus named this long before Paul did:

And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the old skins would burst from the pressure, spilling the wine and ruining the skins. New wine is stored in new wineskins so that both are preserved.

Matthew 9:17 NLT

The new wine of the Spirit poured into the old wineskin of behavioral Christianity will always burst. Not because the wine is wrong. Not because the spiritual community failed. Because the container was never designed to hold it. People carry different expectations into a spiritual community—different pictures of what church should look like, feel like, and ask of them. When those expectations do not match what God is actually offering, the friction is real and the pain is real. Though our temptation might be to just critique the wine, we should also examine the wineskin.

The invitation of the New Frontier is not to find a better set of rules. It is to become a new wineskin—to allow God to transform the interior life so completely that it can receive and hold everything the Spirit wants to pour into it. Only a genuine walk with God—a relationship, not a performance—produces the freedom that Paul says is available wherever the Spirit of the Lord is (2 Corinthians 3:17).

So put to death and deprive of power the evil longings of your earthly body [with its sensual, self-centered instincts] immorality, impurity, sinful passion, evil desire, and greed, which is [a kind of] idolatry [because it replaces your devotion to God].

Colossians 3:5 AMP

The old wineskin—the letter-driven behavioral Christianity—is not neutral. It is actively formed by the desires Paul names here—sensuality, self-centeredness, and greed. And every one of these desires, Paul says, is a kind of idolatry because each one replaces devotion to God with devotion to something else. The new wineskin is not a better container. It is a person or community of people whose interior lives have been reordered—by the Spirit, through a walk with God—so that devotion to God displaces every competing devotion.

The responsibility for this is shared. Leaders who emphasize behavior over relationship with God contribute to the letter mindset in the people they lead. I own that honestly, and I have been actively working against it since the early 1990s. But at the end of every pastoral effort, each individual person must make their own choice about how they see God. Making God known is our church’s mission precisely because knowing God—not knowing about God, not knowing the rules of God, but truly knowing God—is what changes the spiritual framework from letter to Spirit.

But at the end of every pastoral effort, each individual person must make their own choice about how they see God.

In Matthew 23, Jesus warns against the hypocrisy of the religious leaders (called Pharisees), but his warning is not primarily about hypocrisy in the pejorative sense. It is about the catastrophic spiritual result of living—or leading others—without touching the heart. You can be clean on the outside and empty on the inside. You can be zealous and spiritually empty. The Pharisees were not evil. They were afraid—afraid to examine or engage the heart, their own or those they led, because the heart is the one frontier that cannot be managed from the outside. ​​That fear is the spiritual root of every form of behavioral Christianity.

The alternative is not softer expectations or less commitment. It is what 2 Corinthians 3:18 calls “transformation from glory to glory” —every Christian, with unveiled faces, looking at the glory of the Lord and being changed into the same image:

But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

2 Corinthians 3:18 NASB

The Greek word Paul uses for “transform” is “metamorphoó” — the root of metamorphosis. This is not about improvement. It is about regeneration at the deepest level. It’s not a better version of the person who walked in. It’s a new creation entirely. That is what the transformative purposes of God produce in a person who crosses the frontier of the heart and stays there.

This transformation works through all four dimensions that make up a person, which Jesus named in the Great Commandment (Mark 12:30): heart, soul, mind, and strength. These are not four separate compartments. They are four integrated dimensions of a human being formed by God. I have explored this in depth in my Chemistry Lab series on Deep Spirituality. The formation God produces is not partial. It is whole-person transformation. It is emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical. And it is available to every person who is willing to walk with God.

The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

Galatians 5:6 NIV

Faith without love is letter Christianity. Faith expressing itself through love is the Spirit giving life. This is the standard: not how well we comply, but how genuinely we love—love for God, love for the people God loves, love expressed in service and sacrifice for something greater than ourselves. This is what Jesus called greatness in his kingdom (Mark 10:43-45). Not position. Not platform. Loving service.

In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks asks a question that reorients everything: Not “What do I want from the world?” but “What does the world need from me?” I have explored this question and found it to be the secular expression of what the apostle Paul declared before King Agrippa in Acts 26:19—that he was not disobedient to the vision from heaven; he would live for God’s purpose for him rather than his own human desires. The person who has crossed the frontier of the heart has made exactly this shift—not from a philosophical place but from a spiritual one. They have stopped asking what they can get from their relationship with God and started asking what God can produce through them for the sake of others. That is not a strategic decision. It is a spiritual transformation. It is the frontier of the heart fully crossed.

They have stopped asking what they can get from their relationship with God and started asking what God can produce through them for the sake of others.

As we cross over into the frontier of the heart, God produces in us four qualities: devotion, conviction, vision, and impact. These describe what a genuine disciple looks like—the kind of person formed by a walk with God rather than shaped by religious compliance. 

The first of these four is devotion. Devotion is not a feeling or a spiritual discipline but the orientation of the whole person toward God—the interior posture from which everything else in the Christian life flows. 

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Devotion: the walk with God that turns what was into what is meant to be.

Their leader will be one of their own; their ruler will arise from among them. I will bring him near and he will come close to me — for who is he who will devote himself to be close to me? declares the LORD.

Jeremiah 30:21 NIV

God himself asks the question: not about who is the most talented, or the most organized, or who produces the most impressive results. God’s question is, Who will devote himself to be close to me? That is the question the frontier of the heart answers in every person willing to cross it.

Devotion begins with love. Love is not just sentiment; it is expressed through obedience, trust, humility, and reliance (Deuteronomy 11:1, 22). When Jesus said “Abide in me” (John 15:4-5), he was describing the spiritual posture from which everything else flows. When we abide in him, we are connected to him, and thus produce fruit.

During his days on earth, Christ offered prayers and requests with loud cries and tears as his sacrifices to the one who was able to save him from death. He was heard because of his godly devotion.

Hebrews 5:7 CEB

This is what devotion looks like in the life of Jesus, the most devoted person who ever lived. It was not a quiet sentiment. It was loud cries and tears. It was the whole person—mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically—aware of and connected to the Father. 

When we follow Jesus’s example we do not have a compartmentalized relationship with God but a holistic one. One where God speaks, Jesus reveals, and the Holy Spirit animates our lives. Jesus was heard not because of his performance, not because of his position, but because of his godly devotion. That is the model for us to follow.

This is what the LORD says: “Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom, nor the strong man in his strength, nor the wealthy man in his riches. But let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the LORD, who exercises loving devotion, justice and righteousness on the earth — for I delight in these things,” declares the LORD.

Jeremiah 9:23–24 BSB

The world’s formation system produces people who boast in wisdom, strength, and wealth. These are the world’s credentials—the dominant faculty, the institutional achievement, the recognized position. God’s formation system produces people who boast in knowing him. That is not a religious cliché. It is the most radical reordering of human identity available—from what you have accomplished to who you know and who knows you.

Greetings from Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ. I was sent to help God’s chosen people have faith and understand the truth that produces a life of devotion to God.

Titus 1:1 ERV

Faith and understanding produce a life of devotion, not the other way around. Formation precedes devotion. Crossing the frontier of the heart—allowing God to touch and transform the interior life— is what produces the person whose whole life becomes an expression of devotion to God.

Faith and understanding produce a life of devotion, not the other way around.

The frontier expands in proportion to the depth of the devotion. Wherever we walk with God, our spiritual frontiers will stretch (Deuteronomy 11:24-25). This is not a promise for one category of person alone. It is a promise for every person who loves God and walks in his ways.

After removing Saul, he made David their king. God testified concerning him: ‘I have found David son of Jesse, a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.’

Acts 13:22 NIV

“A man after my own heart.” Not “a man after my standards.” Not “a man after my rules.” A man “after my own heart.” 

David crossed the frontier of the heart and lived there. He did it imperfectly, painfully, with real failure and real consequences, but he always returned to God. David was always devoting himself to be close to God. And God’s testimony about him was not about his performance. It was about his heart. 

The frontier of the heart is where devotion is developed. And devotion is what every person who follows Jesus is called to—not as a religious duty, but as the natural expression of a heart that has been genuinely touched by God.

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The formation crisis: What culture is actually doing to people

You will hear of wars and revolutions on every side, with more rumors of wars to come. Don’t panic or give in to your fears, for the breaking apart of the world’s systems is destined to happen. But it won’t yet be the end; it will still be unfolding.

Matthew 24:6 TPT

The breaking apart of the world’s systems—institutional trust, cultural coherence, the certainties people built their lives on—is not a surprise to God. Jesus saw it coming; it is the unfolding of what he described here in Matthew 24. And his instruction was not to panic. It was to understand what is happening and refuse to be moved by fear.

We are all formed by something. We can choose to be formed by the world’s systems and by fear, or we can choose to be formed by God. That choice will determine our destiny. 

We can choose to be formed by the world’s systems and by fear, or we can choose to be formed by God.

I live and minister in Silicon Valley, where the world has most aggressively pursued the idea that technology can solve every human problem. I have watched that experiment run for decades. What I observe is not a more formed culture. It is a more distracted one. People are being formed —formation is always happening, it cannot be stopped—but they are being formed accidentally. By algorithm. By grievance. By the success trap. By ideological echo chambers that confirm what they already believe and rarely challenge who they are becoming.

… having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.

2 Timothy 3:5 NIV

When formation happens accidentally—by the spirit of the current age rather than the Spirit of God —the spiritual result is exactly what Paul warned Timothy about in the above verse: the shape of faith without its power. The structure of a spiritual life without its source. People who look formed but have never been transformed.

Formation is inevitable. The question is whether God forms you, or the culture forms you by default. The question has never been whether formation happens. The question is whether it happens intentionally, by the Spirit of God, or accidentally, by the spirit of the age. And the spirit of the age has a very clear formation agenda:

Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you. For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions. These are not from the Father, but are from this world. And this world is fading away, along with everything that people crave. But anyone who does what pleases God will live forever.

1 John 2:15–17 NLT

Craving for physical pleasure. Craving for everything we see. Pride in achievements and possessions. That is the formation curriculum of the spirit of the age. It is being delivered through every screen, every algorithm, and every cultural signal that tells a person what to want, who to be, and what counts as a life well lived. A church that does not offer something deeper and more durable than this agenda has nothing to say to a searching world.

Formation is inevitable. The question is whether God forms you, or the culture forms you by default.

In his book Identity: Youth and Crisis, psychologist Erik Erikson explored the construction of identity through the life of George Bernard Shaw. Through Shaw’s life, Erikson identified what every human soul requires to flourish within human limits: a dominant faculty developed through meaningful vocation; a limitless resource of companionship and tradition; and an intelligible theory of the processes of life — which even the old atheist Shaw called a religion. Erikson’s framework is remarkable for what it sees. Every human being needs a center of identity, a community of belonging, and a framework for understanding life. He was pointing toward formation without being able to name its ultimate source.

But Erikson’s framework stops at the ceiling of human possibility. It describes who we can become through vocation, community, and an intelligible theory of life—within the limits of what human formation can produce. It cannot account for what happens when God enters the equation. It cannot explain the person who was told they would never graduate—and did. Or the person whose family history said dysfunction was their destiny—and broke free. Or the person whose biology said addiction had the last word—and discovered it did not. These are not the rare exceptions. They are the ongoing testimony of what God does when a person allows spiritual formation to replace secular formation as the source of their identity.

The Apostle Paul understood this distinction from the inside. He had every credential Erikson’s framework would count as successful identity formation. He named them all—before declaring them worthless:

I was circumcised when I was eight days old. I am a pure-blooded citizen of Israel and a member of the tribe of Benjamin — a real Hebrew if there ever was one! I was a member of the Pharisees, who demand the strictest obedience to the Jewish law. I was so zealous that I harshly persecuted the church. And as for righteousness, I obeyed the law without fault. I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ.

Philippians 3:5–8 NLT

His identity was not constructed from the outside in. It was formed from the inside out by Christ. And here is what that formation produced:

For I am the least of all the apostles. In fact, I’m not even worthy to be called an apostle after the way I persecuted God’s church. But whatever I am now, it is all because God poured out his special favor on me — and not without results. For I have worked harder than any of the other apostles; yet it was not I but God who was working through me by his grace.

1 Corinthians 15:9–10 NLT

“Whatever I am now, it is all because God poured out his special favor on me.” The NIV renders this as “By the grace of God, I am what I am.” It is the personification of God-confidence. I am not a self-constructed identity. I am not the sum of credentials and achievements. I am a person formed by grace into something human formation alone could never have produced.

This is the difference between identity formation and spiritual transformation. Erikson describes identity formation—the best of what human effort and community can produce within human limits. Scripture describes spiritual transformation—the miraculous regeneration that allows people to exceed those limits entirely, or metamorphoó, as discussed earlier. A caterpillar does not become a better caterpillar through better formation. It becomes a butterfly — something the caterpillar could never have imagined. That is spiritual transformation. And it is what God produces in every person who crosses the frontier of the heart and stays there.

A caterpillar does not become a better caterpillar through better formation. It becomes a butterfly — something the caterpillar could never have imagined.

This is why we cannot simply live according to the culture of the day. Secular formation—however sophisticated, however well-intentioned—limits us to what is humanly possible. It forms us in the image of the age. But spiritual formation has a different destination entirely:

For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

Romans 8:29 NLT

God chose us to become like his son. He did not choose us to achieve more or become better versions of ourselves. He chose us to be transformed into the image of Christ, and Christ exceeds every human limit. When a spiritual community trades this transformation for mere affiliation— offering membership instead of regeneration, attendance instead of relationship, or organization instead of family—it abandons the very thing the searching soul is hungry for.

Steve Jobs once said,

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

The same is true of the human soul.

People stop coming to church not because they stop needing what the church carries. They stop coming because the church stops providing what they were hungry for. As Steve Jobs intuited about consumer desire, people cannot tell you they need spiritual transformation. They have never experienced it. They only know that what they have been given has not been enough. The interior life remains untouched. The heart remains unchanged.

Our souls long for formation. We have seen evidence of this for centuries, across cultures. When Paul walked the ground of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Athens (Acts 17:16-34), he recognized the longing in their philosophy and their altars. He did not condemn it. He named it. God made every culture and every generation so that people might seek him and find him, though he is not far from any of us (Acts 17:26-27). The ancient Greeks named the formation of a soul “paideia”—the molding of a person into full humanity through encounter with truth greater than themselves. The German intellectual tradition called it “Bildung” —becoming fully human through that same encounter of formation. 

Jesus did not invent the longing for formation. He provided the only source capable of completing it. A walk with God is not one formation option among many. It is the formation for which every human soul was designed. Jesus identified what every human being needs thousands of years before Erikson pointed toward it. Devotion is the dominant faculty—a way of being in the world rooted in God rather than self. The family of God is the limitless resource of companionship and tradition. Conviction and vision together are the intelligible theory of life. And impact is the result when all three are operating from the right source. But unlike Erikson’s framework, which describes what is possible within human limits, a walk with God opens what is possible beyond them.

Beloved friends, what should be our proper response to God’s marvelous mercies? I encourage you to surrender yourselves to God to be his sacred, living sacrifices. And live in holiness, experiencing all that delights his heart. For this becomes your genuine expression of worship. Stop imitating the ideals and opinions of the culture around you, but be inwardly transformed by the Holy Spirit through a total reformation of how you think. This will empower you to discern God’s will as you live a beautiful life, satisfying and perfect in his eyes.

Romans 12:1–2 TPT

“Stop imitating the ideals of the culture around you, but be inwardly transformed through a total reformation of how you think.” This is not a call to cultural withdrawal. It is a call to allow God to form you from the inside out so that you are no longer a reaction to your environment but a force within it—bold, loving, and uncompromised.

My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.

1 Corinthians 2:4–5 NIV

This is what genuine spiritual formation offers that no cultural formation system can match—not persuasive words, not cultural intelligence, not the wisdom of the age, but the demonstration of the Spirit’s power producing faith that rests on God himself. That is what the world that is fading away can never give us and can never take from us.