As we follow Jesus, one of the things we have to deal with is the attitude, “my way or the highway!” This attitude is ingrained in us as we grow up in our culture. We want things as we want them and not in any other way, shape, or form. This is one of the […]

6.19.23            The four Stages of the Classic Spiritual Journey   Benedict J. Groeschel, a Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, in his book, Spiritual Passages: The Psychology of Spiritual Development, writes about the traditional journey of following Jesus Christ with its four stages of spiritual depth: Awakening, Purgation, Illumination, and Union.[1] As I work on my […]

1.2.23  Metaphors teach us so much   The Bible is full of metaphors from Canaan as the Promised Land, that is, the kingdom of God on earth, to Jesus’s death on the cross and His resurrection as a promise of new life for us after every big or small “death” we go through in this […]

This week I want to highlight more experiences with the Holy Spirit, this time from readers who shared their stories of encounters with the Holy Spirit after reading last week’s post. I have only done some minor editing. I apologize for the length of this post, but I wanted to include them all.   Whether […]

If you ever wonder about the Indwelling Spirit of God and what He might be saying to you, the first thing to know is that His voice in our minds is usually the one we respond to this way, “Oh! No! I couldn’t do that!” as we dismiss what He whispers to us. So the […]

There are depths untold in us where the image of God dwells,[1] but we have to be willing to let God’s Spirit speak to us; we have to be willing to then do what He is suggesting. If we don’t have faith in God and knowledge about these depths, we’ll just go about our own […]

  God is the gardener, the pruner of the vine which is His son, Jesus Christ. Where we fit into this metaphor is as the branches off the one true vine. As the Gardener prunes our branch, He heals our sufferings and discards the unnecessary or the aberrant. He will bring us to our true […]

Recently, my church has begun to raise money to house the homeless in a to-be-renovated building on our property here in Charlotte. At one recent meeting there was a question raised about whether we could be true to this purpose. I was reminded of a commitment I made to God about my blog seven years […]

We yearn. Pant. Thirst. Long. Faint. Cry out. In the Psalms in Job and in Isaiah we cry out to the Lord with desire, with aching, with hunger. “I will see him with my own eyes.” [Job 19:25-27] “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” [Psalm 42:1-2] “I long to dwell in your […]

It’s not always easy to communicate what a life lived in Christ can offer another person. For those of us already in it, we’ve already turned our backs on much of the world. But we may not be always the best examples of how a believer in Jesus Christ should be, being the flawed human […]