Sacred Pathways: Discover your Soul's Path to God - Gary Thomas
When you became a christian did you look around other people's lives and seek to model some of their spiritual disciplines? Did you find that somehow they didn't work for you in quite the same way as they seemed to work for them? Did this lead you to a place of discouragement? Did you think that, somehow, the things that bring such life to other people but don't bring life to you must mean that there is something wrong with you? Or that maybe God doesn't love you as much as He loved those people whom you sought to emulate?
These are very real questions that all christians probably grapple with at some point. As we grow and mature in Christ we eventually reach a place of liberty where we realise that we are unique and therefore we shouldn't be surprised when our Father deals uniquely with us - and the way we most easily 'connect' to Him is also unique.
Or perhaps we find over time that the following of our spiritual disciplines has actually taken the place of our relationship with God. In other words, we feel good because we've had a quiet time in the morning or that we have read our allotted passage of scripture for that day, even though we have no conviction that we have met with the Lord at all - we are going through the motions!
If either of these things ring true for you or resonate with where you're at with the Lord then I want to recommend this book to you.
In it the author explores what he calls 'spiritual temperaments'. He gives us the opportunity to think about how we connect most effectively with God. It is crucial to develop this awareness because then our devotional life becomes one of developing and building relationship rather than one of going through the motions or worse going to someone else's motions.
I found this book incredibly stimulating. Just for the record I am an ascetic, contemplative, intellectual! But hey, that's just me ... I encourage you to read this and would love to hear how this has helped you build your relationship with God and what fruit it has born in your life as a result!
Press on!
When you became a christian did you look around other people's lives and seek to model some of their spiritual disciplines? Did you find that somehow they didn't work for you in quite the same way as they seemed to work for them? Did this lead you to a place of discouragement? Did you think that, somehow, the things that bring such life to other people but don't bring life to you must mean that there is something wrong with you? Or that maybe God doesn't love you as much as He loved those people whom you sought to emulate? These are very real questions that all christians probably grapple with at some point. As we grow and mature in Christ we eventually reach a place of liberty where we realise that we are unique and therefore we shouldn't be surprised when our Father deals uniquely with us - and the way we most easily 'connect' to Him is also unique.
Or perhaps we find over time that the following of our spiritual disciplines has actually taken the place of our relationship with God. In other words, we feel good because we've had a quiet time in the morning or that we have read our allotted passage of scripture for that day, even though we have no conviction that we have met with the Lord at all - we are going through the motions!
If either of these things ring true for you or resonate with where you're at with the Lord then I want to recommend this book to you.
In it the author explores what he calls 'spiritual temperaments'. He gives us the opportunity to think about how we connect most effectively with God. It is crucial to develop this awareness because then our devotional life becomes one of developing and building relationship rather than one of going through the motions or worse going to someone else's motions.
I found this book incredibly stimulating. Just for the record I am an ascetic, contemplative, intellectual! But hey, that's just me ... I encourage you to read this and would love to hear how this has helped you build your relationship with God and what fruit it has born in your life as a result!
Press on!
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