Category: Interior Life

new earth

How To Improve Your Eternal Perspective

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This is a short meditation on our destiny, designed to produce a stronger eternal perspective so that we can follow Jesus more closely. The passage is: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp Continue Reading →

What is Christlikeness?

What Does It Mean To Be Christlike?

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We know that our highest calling is to be Christlike and love God. But what are the essentials marks of Christlikeness? This post summarizes Christlikeness into five categories. This should help us to examine our lives and pursue areas of growth. Christ fully abided in the Father, which produced everything else in his life. He was filled with the virtues of God, and these virtues led to fruitful deeds, which is one of humanity’s original callings (“Be fruitful”, Gen. 1:28). This is an important element of the image of God, for God is the fountain of fruitfulness. This included actively loving people and healing their bodies and hearts. On Earth, Jesus employed all his faculties to impact others with his words and actions and developed disciples who would carry on his work after him. We are to do the same in our families, occupations, communities and societies. Whoever abides in Continue Reading →

walk through dark times

How To Walk Through A Dark Time

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We will go through times when our awareness of God goes dark. Last week we described an exercise for developing deep faith. In these times we can’t sense God no matter what we do and no matter how hard we try to figure it out. These seasons are very disturbing and usually trigger fear and discouragement. But, these times are opportunities to develop deep faith, so we need to stay away from embracing fear and doubt. Below is a prayer to help us through these times. It is best to consider each line and choose to apply that to your heart; in other words, do what the prayer says. Prayer for Walking Through a Dark Time I let go of trying to see God. I let go of trying to feel God. I let go of making sure that God is there. I let go of fear due to my Continue Reading →

deep faith footbridge

A Simple Exercise For Developing Deep Faith

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In order to cooperate with God’s work in us we will need to be very intentional about choosing faith. This means not struggling against the darkness but rather embracing it and trusting God. This means learning a new way to “do” faith. It will be raw, deep, and unassisted by feelings or circumstances. This also means letting go of one’s old way of trusting God which is usually very difficult. It will probably help to develop one or two images that your mind can rely on in order to train it in deep faith. One image that combines fear and deep faith is the experience of walking on a footbridge over a small chasm. Perhaps you have been on a hike where others have already walked over a footbridge that you were not confident in. You felt fear, but you proceeded in faith because others had already crossed the bridge. Continue Reading →

suffering

Walking Through Prolonged Suffering

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The hardest type of suffering is prolonged deep suffering. This presents greater challenges to our faith since the pain is constant. Examples include the death of a loved one that leaves you lonely, a long debilitating illness, the loss of one’s social network, or working in a hostile environment. One-time tragedies are easier to recover from when they don’t have a drastic lasting impact. Prolonged deep suffering wears away at us like the ocean wears away at boulders. We may not notice how it gradually affects our mindset so we need to watch that it doesn’t make us into negative or dysfunctional people. And we need to keep prolonged deep suffering from damaging our confidence in God’s Scripture. With prolonged suffering you need to adopt a long-term coping strategy and focus your mind and energy on learning how to get through each day, day after day. You need to strengthen Continue Reading →