Category: Spiritual Theology

This week we are featuring an excerpt from my book Flourish since the kindle version is on sale for 99 cents at Amazon.com this week through Friday. Here is the link: http://www.amazon.com/Flourish-Growth-Community-Living-Gospel/dp/0986382302 . Flourish is for anyone who desires to become mature in Christ. You can reach a place where common temptations are easily overcome and you are able to connect with people in God’s way. The book explains most of the important elements of following Jesus. There are over 50 chapters and most of the chapters in the book are short so you can pause and absorb what you have just read. Relationships and community are the unifying themes of the book. Here is the entire main body of chapter 29: “An essential principle of following Jesus is learning to live with a heavenly perspective. This means living our lives, knowing that we are citizens of heaven, (Philippians 3:20), Continue Reading →

Discovering our false self is very important for spiritual growth. God wants to reveal our falseness and destroy our false or ideal self. Our false or ideal self is the “self” we created since childhood in order to avoid being rejected and instead be accepted by others. It includes all the inauthentic strategies we develop to cope with our world. Some people create a false self that always smiles and cooperates and agrees with everyone. Others create a false self that prefers to oppose and fight others; their false self is the “tough” self. Some create a false self that escapes rejection altogether by hiding behind hobbies or studies or career. There are endless varieties of false self and we all have our own individual version. One very common version of the false self for Christians is the religious false self. This false self pretends that everything is okay inside Continue Reading →

Most Christians will face seasons in our lives when we cannot sense God anymore. We’ll feel like He left us, or maybe doesn’t even exist. This usually happens after we have overcome most of our major external sins and then made considerable progress in loving God and others. But in spite of our progress, we still can’t connect with God. We think back to times when we felt God’s presence or could clearly see His activity in our lives. We remember the pleasure we had with God, especially during worship, or reading scripture, or prayer. But suddenly our spiritual life seems dry or even dark. We don’t feel the enthusiasm for God we had before. This stage of the Christian life has been experienced and written about by many of the great Christian teachers since the earliest centuries. Some have called it “desolation”; in the 16th century John of the Continue Reading →