Category: Level: Intermediate

In the next few days I will release my new book, “A Quest for the Ultimate: A Spiritual Adventure of Seven Seekers.” It is about the ultimate purpose of the Christian life. I have asked several believers if they knew what the ultimate purpose of their Christian life was, and I received several different answers. None of them seemed to fit with what Scripture teaches, so I think this will be a helpful book. God wants to encourage you with an exciting ultimate purpose, so I hope you will read the book. Below is an excerpt from Chapter Five, which I hope will whet your appetite. The retreat leader is helping the seven participants to make their way to their ultimate purpose. “Now I want us to dive into the answer to the core question that’s been lurking beneath all our discussions.” He leans forward slightly. “What is our ultimate Continue Reading →

Would you like to understand your spiritual health better? Are you open to serious self-examination? We have created a questionnaire which you can download here Link to PDF of Spiritual Life Questionnaire (It will remain available on our website under Resources/Free Downloads.) We call it the Spiritual Life Questionnaire. We find that this assessment tool will help you understand your spiritual health. The Spiritual Life Questionnaire doesn’t rate someone’s spiritual life but asks important questions for examining one’s own spiritual condition. It is up to the individual to decide how to proceed based on how they answered the questions. If you use it to help others, the questionnaire makes it easy to cover many different topics quickly. One big advantage of the questionnaire is that people will often be more open when answering written questions than when talking face to face. Sometimes there is something they have been wanting to say Continue Reading →

I’ve read that in conversations we should find ourselves listening as much as talking. Of course, this just makes sense – it would be selfish if we were in the habit of listening 30% of the time and talking 70% of the time. But does this apply to our conversations (i. e. prayer) with God? Sometimes. God wants to do good things for us. He wants to speak his words in his way. He wants to continuously transform us into the image of Christ. So wouldn’t God want us to spend time in listening prayer, or at least being in a receptive mode so we could receive anything he might want to say? That’s why the image for this post is someone listening to headphones: they are in receptive, listening mode. It is common to think of prayer time as a time when we talk the whole time. We thank Continue Reading →

We all love to feel the presence of God. We love times when we feel his love or joy welling up inside us. We feel free and light or just tremendous peace. But what about the rest of the time when we don’t feel God’s presence or power? Do we find ourselves making every effort to reclaim the spiritual sweetness we had? Seeking spiritual sweetness is okay to an extent. God wants us to feel good and he wants us to feel joy and peace. He wants to be with us as much as we want to be with Him. But there are some things that are more important than spiritual sweetness in the Christian life. Two come to mind. First, submission to God’s will. If we truly want to be in Christ then we should find ourselves seeking God’s will more than seeking spiritual sweetness. God may not want to Continue Reading →