God’s aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.
If you have a group of people come together around a vision for real discipleship, people who are committed to grow, committed to change, committed to learn, then a spiritual assessment tool can work.
The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percent of what we say to them, but they will never forget the kind of persons we are.
Feelings too must be renovated: old ones removed in many cases, or at least thoroughly modified, and new ones installed or at least heightened into a new prominence.
It would be of course a low voltage spiritual life in which prayer was chiefly undertaken as a discipline, rather than as a way of co-labouring with God to accomplish good things and advancing his Kingdom purposes.
The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.
You can no more trust Jesus and not intend to obey him than you could trust your doctor and your auto mechanic and not intend to follow their advice. If you don’t intend to follow their advice, you simply don’t trust them. Period.
Does Christ commend the famous ‘apathy’ of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling or desire.
The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about.
In solitude we find psychic distance, the perspective from which we can see, in the light of eternity, the created things that trap, worry, and oppress us.
Belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so.
Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of presence of the kingdom among us. They are ‘societies’ of Jesus.
Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together.
There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.
A leader enables people to love and honor the role they play in the organization or group they are part of.
Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God’s kingdom and God’s cleverness.
What we can accomplish as good as it may be does not compare to what God can accomplish.
In Spiritual formation we are aiming at a character and life that is so shaped that the deeds of Christ routinely and easily come from what is inside.
Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life.
The Spiritual disciplines are wisdom and not righteousness.