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John Mark Comer

Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did. Hardcover – Jan. 16 2024

by John Mark Comer (Author)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry calls us to rediscover the path that leads to a deeper life with God.

“One of the most important books I have read in a decade . . . If we would all follow in this way, our lives would change and the world would change.”—Jennie Allen, author of Get Out of Your Head and Find Your People

We are constantly being formed by the world around us. To be formed by Jesus will require us to become his apprentice.

To live by what the first Christian disciples called a Rule of Life—a set of practices and relational rhythms that slow us down and open up space in our daily lives for God to do what only God can do—transforms the deepest parts of us to become like him.

This introduction to spiritual formation is full of John Mark Comer’s trademark mix of theological substance and cultural insight as well as practical wisdom on developing your own Rule of Life.

These ancient practices have much to offer us. By learning to rearrange our days, we can follow the Way of Jesus. We can be with him. Become like him. And do as he did.

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Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

WaterBrook
Publication date

Jan. 16 2024
Dimensions

14.43 x 2.59 x 21.64 cm
ISBN-10

0593193822
ISBN-13

978-0593193822
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Be with Jesus, become like him, do as he did

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“In this spacious, eminently readable volume, John Mark Comer meditates on how Christian discipleship is, at its root, the radical task of becoming an apprentice of Jesus—to be with him, to become like him, and to do as he did. The deceptively simple call is to take Jesus at his word, to open ourselves fully to him, to organize our schedules, our routines, our study, our daily practices around him, and, by doing so, to become people who can do as he would in our day and our culture. Comer’s experiences as a pastor, teacher, thinker, and an apprentice himself are helpfully on display here. Sit with this book slowly and let it be your guide into a life of apprenticeship to Jesus.”—Tish Harrison Warren, Anglican priest and author of Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night

“I love John Mark Comer’s vision for life—to be with Jesus, become more like him, and aspire to do what Jesus would do. This book can help us all in our own walk with Jesus.”—Nicky Gumbel, pioneer of Alpha

“In Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer brilliantly shows us what it means to follow Jesus, and here is the best part: As you read, you will want nothing more than to be on Jesus’ heels. We are a disciple-less generation, and yet, walking this closely with Jesus is our way back to the purpose of life. This is one of the most important books I have read in a decade, and if we would all follow in this way, our lives would change and the world would change.”—Jennie Allen, New York Times bestselling author of Get Out of Your Head and Find Your People and founder and visionary of IF:Gathering

“In Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer offers us a portrait of following Jesus that is as profound and compelling as it is simple. Be prepared to take an honest look at your own life habits and prayerfully ask, What kind of person am I becoming and Is it more like Jesus or less? Here you will find a beautiful picture of the kind of life Jesus envisioned for his followers and a practical pathway to experience it for yourself.”—Tim Mackie, co-founder of BibleProject

“This is the book that I want everyone in my church to read. It is an invitation deeper for the lifelong follower of Jesus, and the perfect primer for the new believer. Somehow, in a way only John Mark can do, he has plunged the depths of the gospel invitation in a way that is relatable, accessible, and readable for the everyday seeker.”—Tyler Staton, lead pastor of Bridgetown Church

“Herein is a window to the meaning and significance of life that only Jesus affords. John Mark has given us the antidote to failed religion and generational hypocrisy. Read it slowly. Be changed deeply.”—Rev. Dr. Charlie Dates, senior pastor of Salem Baptist Church of Chicago and Progressive Baptist Church, Chicago

About the Author

John Mark Comer is the founding pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, a teacher and writer with Practicing the Way, and the New York Times bestselling author of multiple books, including Practicing the Way, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and Live No Lies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Practicing the Way—

Apprentice to Jesus

–

Imagine this: Your name is Simon. You’re a first-century Hebrew, likely in your late teens or early twenties. You run a fishing business in the Galilee, a string of villages in the north of Israel. Your life is pretty much mapped out for you. You do what your father did, and his father before him. Living under Roman occupation, there aren’t a lot of options. Keep your head down, be quiet, pay your taxes.

One day you’re waist deep in water, casting your net alongside your brother, Andrew, when you notice a man walking toward you on the beach. You instantly recognize his face. It’s him: Jesus, from Nazareth, just a few miles away. Everyone is talking about this man—he is saying and doing things no rabbi has said or done. Ever.

Here he is, walking straight toward you. You make eye contact. His eyes sparkle like stars, like there’s a cosmos behind them. He radiates joy, but there’s no small talk:

Come, follow me . . . and I will send you out to fish for people.

You’re absolutely stunned.

It can’t be.

Not you.

You immediately drop your nets, drag Andrew out of the boat (though he doesn’t need any coaxing), leave everything behind, and fall in step behind Jesus, elated to be in his company. Or in the words of the biographer Mark, “At once they left their nets and followed him.”

Now, if you’re familiar with this story, it’s easy to miss how bizarre it is. What would make Simon literally walk away from a profitable business and leave behind his family and friends, with zero planning, all to follow a man with no income stream, no organization, and no official position into an unknown future? Is this drinking the Kool-Aid before there was Kool-Aid?

Or are we missing something?

Jesus was a rabbi

If you were Simon, and Jesus were to visit your synagogue one fine Sabbath morning to preach, the category you likely would have put him in was that of a rabbi, or teacher.

The title rabbi literally means “master.” Rabbis were the spiritual masters of Israel. Not only were they expert teachers of the Torah (the Scriptures of their day); they were also magnetic examples of life with God—those special few who shine with an inner luminescence.

Every rabbi had his “yoke”—a Hebrew idiom for his set of teachings, his way of reading Scripture, his take on how to thrive as a human being in God’s good world. How you, too, could taste a little of what they’d tasted . . .

Rabbis came from a broad cross section of society. They could have been farmers or blacksmiths or even carpenters. Most trained under another rabbi for many years, then began to teach and call their own disciples around the age of thirty. But there was no formal certification like in our modern educational system. Authority worked differently. Your life and teaching were your credentials.

Rabbis were itinerant, and most were unpaid. (Some worked their farms or ran businesses for seasons of the year, then traveled in the off-season.) They walked from town to town to teach in whatever synagogue would have them, relying on the hospitality of people of peace. They often spoke in parables and riddles. Normally, they traveled with a small band of disciples, teaching not in a classroom but in the open air and along the road—not from a textbook or curriculum but from the Torah and the school of life.

Over and over again in the four Gospels, Jesus is addressed as “rabbi.”

But he was no ordinary rabbi.

Everywhere he went, the crowds were “astonished” and “overwhelmed with wonder.” The biographer Luke wrote, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips.” Mark said, “The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.” They gave feedback like “Where did this man get this wisdom . . . ?” and even “No one ever spoke the way this man does.”

Of course, saying that Jesus was a rabbi is about as insightful as saying that he was Jewish (although that’s another truth copious numbers of people forget). But sadly, very few people—including many Christians—take Jesus seriously as a spiritual teacher.

To some, he’s a wraithlike apparition, there to inspire later generations to a fuzzy kind of goodwill. To others, he is a social revolutionary—resist!—fist up to the Roman Empire then and all empires now. To a large number of Western Christians, he is a delivery mechanism for a particular theory of atonement, as if the only reason he came was to die, not to live.

As a result, many Christians don’t consider Jesus all that smart. Holy, sure. Kind, yes. Even divine. But intelligent? Not really.

An increasing number of Christians don’t agree with him on crucial matters of human flourishing. They would rather trust a politician, celebrity, or pastor gone rogue than Jesus the teacher and the disciples who studied directly under him. They would never even think to consult Jesus on the pressing matters of our time: politics, racial justice, sexuality, gender, mental health, and so on. As Dallas Willard said, “What lies at the heart of the astonishing disregard of Jesus found in the moment-to-moment existence of multitudes of professing Christians is a simple lack of respect for him.”

This is vital, because if to “follow” Jesus is to trust him to lead you to the life you desire, it’s very hard (if not impossible) to entrust your life to someone you don’t respect.

But what if Jesus was more intelligent than any other teacher in history? More than Stephen Hawking or Karl Marx or even the Buddha? What if he was a brilliant sage with insight into the human condition that is still, two millennia later, without parallel? What if he simply has no equal or peer?

Now, that could be someone to put your trust in.

Of course, to call Jesus a brilliant rabbi is not to say he was just a brilliant rabbi. The sign hanging above Jesus’ head when he was crucified said King of the Jews, not Guru. It tells you a lot about Jesus that his enemies perceived him as a political threat.

This would have made perfect sense in Jesus’ culture. Moses, the great historical luminary of the Jewish people, was called Moshe Rabbenu (“Moses Our Rabbi”) and Israel’s Great Teacher. First-century Israelites were waiting for a new Moses to appear and lead a new exodus out of the Roman Empire—a figure they began to call the Messiah. Some expected the long-awaited Messiah to appear as a warrior or military leader, but many expected him to come as a great teacher. As two scholars put it, “The Jewish people believed that becoming a great scholar of the Scriptures represented life’s supreme achievement. In such a culture, it made sense that the Messiah should be the greatest of teachers. No wonder Jesus became a Jewish rabbi.”

But we Christians believe he was even more than the Messiah. Jesus made claims that no Jewish king would ever dare utter—claims that got him accused of blasphemy, a capital offense in his world. As one of his critics put it, “We are not stoning you for any good work . . . but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”

But to say Jesus was more than just a rabbi or even the Messiah is not to say he was anything less than a brilliant, provocative, wise, spiritual master of how to live and thrive in this our Father’s world.

He was a rabbi. And like most rabbis of his day, Jesus had disciples . . .

Three goals of an apprentice

Contrary to popular opinion, Jesus did not invent discipleship. Rabbis with a small coterie of disciples were regularly seen walking around Galilee. Just a few years before Jesus, Rabbi Hillel called eighty disciples. Rabbi Akiva—a famous teacher a few decades after Jesus—had only five, but thousands were said to “follow” him around Israel. In the New Testament itself, John the Baptizer had disciples, as did the Pharisees; the apostle Paul was formerly a disciple of a nationally known rabbi named Gamaliel. Discipleship (or, as I’m about to relabel it, apprenticeship) was the pinnacle of the first-century Jewish educational system, much like a PhD or graduate program is in our system today.

That means to understand discipleship, we first must understand the Jewish educational system. (Don’t worry; I promise to keep this short.)

Jewish kids started school around five years old at the local bet sefer (“the house of the book”), which was the equivalent of elementary school. Normally the bet sefer was built onto the side of the synagogue and run by a full-time scribe or teacher. The curriculum was the Torah, and in an oral culture, by the age twelve or thirteen, most kids would have the entire Torah—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—memorized. At that point, the vast majority of students went home. They would apprentice in the family business or help run the farm.

But the best and brightest would go on to a second level of education, called bet midrash (“the house of learning”), where they would continue their studies. By the age of seventeen, they would have memorized—wait for it—the entire Old Testament.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ WaterBrook (Jan. 16 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593193822
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593193822
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 374 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.43 x 2.59 x 21.64 cm

Best Sellers Rank: #512 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Feminist Christian Theology
- #1 in Christology (Books)
- #1 in Feminist Theology

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John Mark Comer

John Mark Comer

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John Mark Comer is the New York Times bestselling author of Practicing the Way, Live No Lies, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and four previous books. He's also the Founder and Teacher of Practicing the Way, a simple, beautiful way to integrate spiritual formation into your church or small group. Prior to starting Practicing the Way, he spent almost twenty years pastoring Bridgetown Church in Portland, OR, and working out discipleship to Jesus in the post-Christian West.

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A Beacon of Wisdom and Reflection

Reviewed in Canada on March 27, 2024

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In a world brimming with books clamouring for attention, it's rare to find one that captures your interest and enriches your soul. John Mark Comers' latest book is one of those rare gems that leave a lasting impact long after you've turned the last page. His ability to intertwine vast knowledge across different fields while maintaining an engaging and accessible writing style is nothing short of remarkable.

What truly sets this book apart is Comers' adeptness at drawing from an expansive well of sources to deepen the narrative. The breadth of perspectives he incorporates broadens the reader's understanding and enriches the journey through the subject matter. As a Pastor, I paused at intervals, reflecting on the profound insights shared. His work serves as a reminder of the necessity to embrace and practice our beliefs amidst the whirlwind that often characterizes ministry.

This isn't just a book; it's a masterclass in thoughtful reflection and practical wisdom. Through meticulous research and compelling storytelling, he invites the reader into a broader, more varied conversation about following Jesus. It's a conversation that not only educates but also transforms.

To John Mark Comer, I extend my deepest gratitude. Your book has been a beacon of light in the complexity of ministry, reminding me of the importance of grounding myself in practice and faith. Your contribution is invaluable, and this Pastor thanks you for the reminder to navigate the whirlwind of ministry deeply anchored to The Way. I cannot wait to internalize this and share it with those I have been called to lead.

One person found this helpful

Best book on how to truly live like Jesus

Reviewed in Canada on May 20, 2024

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I’ve read a lot of books on Christian living. This one tops them all. It’s the why, the how, and the what of really being transformed by your faith in Jesus. If you want to really embrace a life with Jesus, look no further.

Practicing the Way

Reviewed in Canada on June 8, 2024

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Great read so far. Love John Mark Comer!

A thoughtful approach to Christian Living

Reviewed in Canada on April 28, 2024

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John Mark Comer is a modern Dessert Father. He moved on from leading a mega church and calling people to a deeper life in Christ. This book helps readers to change from habits that bring darkness to the soul to a Rule of Life that allows one to be a follower of the Way. We so desperately need this in the North American Church.

Reviewed in Canada on May 9, 2024

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Gotta love it. Another great book by JMC. Used these as gifts and everyone was excited to receive them.

Reviewed in Canada on March 10, 2024

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I enjoyed the practicality of this book. It was clear and decisive in how one might reach toward apprenticeship under the tutelage of the Master.

One person found this helpful

Reviewed in Canada on March 13, 2024

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Some things are hard to express. Such as deep gratitude for this book. I was fortunate to attend his book tour stop in Vancouver, Canada. JMC is as humble, sincere and authentic in his walk with Jesus as they come. I found practicing the way almost 16 months ago and now it is such a privilege to share this book with those I love and care about. That they too might come to discover/ rediscover how to practically implement the spiritual practices into our very ordinary lives so that we can be faithful followers of Jesus right here right now.

One person found this helpful

Practicing the Way = Apprenticeship to Jesus

Reviewed in Canada on January 31, 2024

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A great read that continues to help Christians of all stages into a deeper understanding of what it means when Jesus tells us to "come follow me". Daily apprenticeship to Jesus through a Rule of Life is a game-changer in our city of instant gratification and immediate results. Transformation will take time but the goal is not to try harder but to train hard! Thank you John Mark.

3 people found this helpful

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SarahBeth

Highly recommend, easy and encouraging to read yet deeply impactful

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2024

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This will be one of my favorite books this year when I recap my reading year, and one I will want to read again. Comer has a way of challenging so gently and warmly that you are encouraged by the thought of changing your habits and not daunted by it. I especially appreciate how the latter quarter of the book gives practical application and examples, this is not one of those books with philosophical aspirations that leaves you wondering “but how would I ever actually do this?”, instead you are left with new ideas for how you really can make small changes with deep impact. Another aspect I loved was reading this book alongside my New Testament in a year, it brought out new perspectives in Jesus’ words when He declared “I am the Way”, and when he was calling the disciples (and us) to follow Him. This book helped bring that call into a relevant modern perspective while staying grounded in truth. It is in some ways a simple read but all the more impactful because of that. Obviously I highly recommend.

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9 people found this helpful

WMC

Easy to read and gets to the heart of things

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 13, 2024

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A quietly wise book that speaks into our age of anxiety and shows the way to developing a deeper more spiritual life. An intelligent book grounded in a breadth of knowledge and biblical truth whilst remaining humble in its approach.

2 people found this helpful

Sabrina Schürenberg

Must have!

Reviewed in Germany on April 25, 2024

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Wenn du in der Nachfolge das nächste Level erreichen möchtest ein absolutes Must Have! Dieses Buch, wie schon the ruthless elimination of hurry haven mein Leben und meine Gottesbeziehung entscheiden beeinflusst!!! Danke John Mark Comer 🎉

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Arend

An absolute delight

Reviewed in the Netherlands on March 7, 2024

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I must say I'm a fanboy of JMC but with good reason.. the honesty with which he approaches the subject matter is refreshing.. no quick fixes from know it all guru.. but true christlike honesty and humility
If listened to most of the book twice on Audible.. some parts more.. and still decided to get the book as well.. a lot of the content needs in dept integration into my life.. It does align well with where I'm at in my current journey with Jesus..

The fact that every relationship requires proper maintenance.. also one with the Almighty Creator.. is not a very popular subject in the western Church.. but we all need to hear this.. and act on it like there's no tomorrow

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Ian Acheson

If you seek to follow Jesus, read this book!

Reviewed in Australia on February 6, 2024

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It's quite hard to summarise this book in a few lines for review purposes, simply because it is such an excellent piece of work. But here goes.

I expect this is the book Comer has been wanting to write for years. The deepening of his faith, his experiences at Bridgetown Church and then his business 'Practicing the Way' and his ferocious appetite for learning and reading have all led to the book.

Comer writes in an easy to understand manner. It's active, so he's always encouraging the reader to respond to his words. Using short sentences with plenty of space, he challenges the reader to consider their own relationship with Jesus and how to deepen it.

How? By apprenticing oneself to Jesus.

He doesn't shy away from saying that this will require change and eliminating certain things in our lives, but that's part of what surrendering our lives to Jesus involves. He appreciates that it's hard and not everyone will do it, hence, why there aren't more Jesus apprentices wandering the earth.

Comer provides a path to follow with guidelines regarding 9 practices that will help people to apprentice themselves. In addition, his vast reading library provides some excellent references and support for his words and recommendations.

But what I like most about this book is that Comer has walked that path (he's still walking it because it never stops) and as s such is a walking demonstration that such a life is possible.

I initially received an early ebook copy of the book from the publisher via Net Galley but I'd already ordered my own copies and 10 more for friends so it clearly had a positive effect on me.

I suspect this book will be being read by our children and grandchildren in years to come.

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