‘A Heart Aflame for God’ is as good a book as any I have read this year and one I wish I had read last year. It refreshed my understanding of spiritual formation and deepened my confidence that the Reformed tradition has deeply satisfying means for developing, increasing, and moving forward as a Christian.

Sometimes I get it right and, admittedly, sometimes I get it wrong. I get access to most books long before they reach store shelves and I try to anticipate the ones that will be most important, most worthy of my time and yours. These are the ones I then read and review. But sometimes I miss.

That was certainly the case with Matthew Bingham’s A Heart Aflame for God. Though it has been more than a year since I received the book, and though I heard many good things about it in the meantime, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I finally began to read it. I was immediately drawn in and immediately disappointed that I had not read it a year prior.

A Heart Aflame for God is a book about spiritual formation, which is to say, a book about the Christian life. “A basic biblical assumption about the Christian life is that it ought to be a growing life. When the Bible describes walking with God, the expectation is that it will never be a static, settled affair but rather a journey characterized by continual development, increase, and forward movement.” Of course, there are many books on this subject, so what makes this one different? “What distinguishes our interest in spiritual formation from other books discussing the same is that here we are working to understand what spiritual formation sounds like when set in a distinctly Reformed-evangelical key.” 

Those who are familiar with the lay of the land when it comes to spiritual formation will probably recognize names like Richard Foster, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and Ruth Hailey Barton. While all of these people are Protestant, none could be said to be Reformed-evangelical. In fact, many of them draw from practices that owe more to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Could this perhaps be proof that the Reformed faith has little to say on the subject? No, not at all. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

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