Category: Interior Life

humility

Upside-Down Leadership-Part 1

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You just finished leading a great meeting. Everyone was happy and happy with you. Several smiled and thanked you personally. At home you are feeling thankful for being able to lead. Then as you relax your mind starts wandering and thinking about what a great person you are. You are a fantastic leader, so much better than most…whoa! What happened here? You were just thinking about being thankful then you started getting delusions of grandeur. How quickly spiritual pride rears its head. Scripture teaches that you have an old self, or “flesh” that you have to fight. This explains why these temptations and impulses rise up within us. We also have an Enemy that takes advantage of our old self. So we shouldn’t get discouraged by temptations to pride. The early devout Christians considered pride the deadliest of enemies for those pursuing spiritual growth. They observed that once someone decides Continue Reading →

How Do I Deal With Unwanted Thoughts? – Part 2

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This is the second of two blog posts on unwanted thoughts. The first post looked at the stages a thought goes through, and when we need to stop it. This post looks at specific strategies for dealing with unwanted thoughts. First: stay calm. Unwanted thoughts gain influence when we fear them, or stir up a lot of emotion. Instead, “be anxious about nothing” (Philippians 4:6) but rather, as the verse states, “give thanks” for what God will do, and “make your request known” to God to overcome this thought.   Offer your thought to God. Pray something like: “I don’t know where this thought comes from but I offer it to you. I depend on You. You take it. And help me to know how I should respond.” Also, “I can’t stop thinking about this, I can’t do it, You need to.” In this way the unwanted thought turns you Continue Reading →

How Do I Deal With Unwanted Thoughts? – Part 1

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You are innocently working on one of your daily tasks and all of a sudden an evil thought comes into your head. It plays for a few seconds, but you don’t embrace it. You mentally fight and reject it. Then you feel a little dazed and confused by its impact. Finally, the thought fades away. Then you start wondering where it came from. Is this from you? Is it some buried corruption you are not aware of? Or is it from Satan? Is it a combination of the two? Is it from neither one, just a quirk of the human mind? Was it triggered by something around you by the power of suggestion? Is it just free association? You can’t really figure it out. This will take more time. Regardless of how it came it is frustrating and sometimes discouraging when unwanted thoughts come in. You want to grow in Continue Reading →

Am I Trying Too Much Or Too Little To Be Christlike?

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PURPOSE: The purpose of this post is to help you get into the right level of cooperation with the Holy Spirit. It is to help you be aware of how you are exercising your willpower to become more Christlike. One question I ask myself fairly regularly is whether I am trying to hard to grow spiritually or whether I am not trying hard enough. In other words, am I doing my part according to scripture? Am I crowding out the Spirit by trying to do too much on my own, or on the other hand, am I not activating my will and thus expecting God to change me without my cooperation? Am I erring on one side or the other: too willful or not willful enough? I have erred on both sides in my life, and I still have to adjust regularly. This is an important question because it can Continue Reading →

Why Do Christians Have Dry Times or Dark Nights?

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The last two posts looked at stages of growth, both repeating and non-repeating. One of the stages we mentioned was dark nights, which is the topic of this post. This may apply to you or it might help you guide someone else through a dark time, so this should equip you to be a better servant for the Body of Christ. Most Christians go through one or more periods in their life when God seems absent. We use different terms for this such as dryness, dark night, desolation, desert time, or wilderness time. Even great Christians in history we admire go through such times. For example, Martin Luther, C.S. Lewis, Mother Teresa, and Oswald Chambers. Bruce Demarest mentions the last three in his book Seasons of the Soul, which I highly recommend, beginning on p. 84. He also discusses desolation in general which is very helpful. (There is a link to Continue Reading →