Skip to main content

Helpful read ...

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!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Feel free to add comments or ask questions:

Popular posts from this blog

Does God really lead us?

  Often as evangelical believers we talk about the concept of ‘calling’ explaining it along the lines of God speaking to his people, sometimes this is narrowed even to the experience of a special, select ‘few’ and limited in scope to those who are engaging in full-time Christian ministry. The following are some notes I prepared for a talk: Firstly, I would like to say that most Christians would believe that God communicates with his people, and that this may happen in many different ways. What is of utmost importance is that it does happen. We are in relationship with a Living God, who we call Father, and who communicates with us His creation and covenant people.   God communicates in a number of ways and one special way in which He leads and guides his people might be termed a vocation or calling and it’s this particular aspect of His communication I want to focus on.   So what is the calling? Who is called? And what are we called to? The whole i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts from a previous incumbent ...

In reference to 2 Tim 1:7 "For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of p o wer, of love a nd of sel f-discipli ne."   Norman Grubb decl are d that; "We are set in our day and generation to be overcomers, not to sail through calm seas but to walk on storms, to replace need with supply, to transform aspiration into realization. The language of defeatism, fear, lack and weakness is not to be in our vocabulary. "Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it. As for these giants, they are bread for us," we say with sturdy Caleb.  We are to act as the men of faith of old; we are to visualize our goal in clear outline; we are to take it for granted that we shall reach it, for we have both the commission and anointing of God?   We lay our plans ,build our organisations, produce our written and verbal pronouncements,  prayer our prayers, do our work, not as those who will fail and fall by the way, but...
2 comments
Read more

Homes I have lived in #3

This year I am celebrating my silver wedding anniversary ... Just for something to do I have begun to sketch all the houses we have lived in during that time. So here is house number #3 On our return to the UK we were faced with the question that faces all people in transition, what next? For us, we were encouraged by our friends to investigate further training and opted to spend a year with Kerygma ministries. We joined with a group of some 20 other people from various different cultures and backgrounds to join the ministry led by Dr Bob Gordon, based at Drayton Hall near Norwich. We spent one year here, between September 1993 and July 1994.   Significant events that took place here included: Suffered reverse culture shock, as I grappled with the transition from life in a mudhut in Africa to life in the UK in a Manor House! (Struggled with the amount of money being spent on a sign that was being placed outside ...
Post a Comment
Read more