I easily recognize God’s voice within after all these years because he never thinks like I do. For example, yesterday morning as I was awakening: these words on my mind—cerebellum the 2nd. If you’re interested in what this phrase meant to me see the ** section below. When he speaks in my mind, he is […]

I think our lives are like huge ocean liners that used to take two to three hours to make a significant turn(modern ones can do a 360 degree turn in 30 minutes). Slow, steady as she goes…that is the pace of our “repentance,” of turning our lives away from the culture towards the kingdom. Like […]

Think of the Holy Spirit as the tuner of our souls and personalities. Like a piano tuner tackles a piano that has long sat idled, the Holy Spirit takes our neglected souls and our existing personalities and attunes them so that they agree in pitch and harmonize well. He adjusts the “keys” and the “strings” […]

When we say, somewhat glibly, that God is love, what are we really saying? God loves us. Yes. But more than that, he loves us with an unconditional, unchanging outpouring of love and affection, support and invitation to be in a deep relationship with him, an invitation to step into the fullness of who we […]

Surrender is a loaded word. Give up. Give in. Yield. Capitulate. Submit. Acquiesce. Concede. These are a few of the synonyms for surrender. For an American person surrender often looks like quitting or giving up yourself. Waiving the white flag is not something we are taught. We fight. We take possession. We conquer. We don’t […]

There is a quote from Shakespeare that has always rung so true to me that for a long time I thought it came from the Bible: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, that thou canst not then be false to any man.”[1] Today I am writing […]

  One of the reasons that we in the Christian Church are so challenged today is that each denomination, each individual church is an entity unto itself. Each one’s interpretation of the Gospel message is the best. Each one’s congregation is doing the right thing in the right way. Each congregation feels that they have […]

In the last two weeks I’ve been writing about how disfunctionally we see ourselves and God, that if we could clean the lenses through which we view life and ourselves, we would see that we are already loved by God, just as we are. We have nothing to do except to see this reality. We […]

What we believe about ourselves carries no weight with God. Long before the world began in the early stages of creation, God made us in his image, declared us good and blessed us.[Genesis 1:27-31] And in his eyes we are still good and made in his image and blessed. Do you think that the God […]

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the distorted lenses through which we see ourselves and life and the Godhead and how these distortions are the things that stand between us and a deep and loving relationship with Christ. So here’s the first one… If you’re having trouble accepting that God loves you, […]