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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