Have we just dipped our toe into the Spirit? "Plunge in today & be made complete"

We seek to know truth and we teach others: There is a God. This is his world, and we with it. This God is totally good and totally competent. He comes to us in Jesus Christ, whom we can totally trust. He gives us a book and a history, through which his Spirit will lead us to all we need to know about him and about us. Respecting the priority of the mind in spiritual formation means that we seek to understand these things and to help others understand them. We work in depth. We can choose to turn our minds toward these truths. Belief will come as God’s gift within the hidden depths of our life and will grow under the nurturing of the Word and the Spirit. This is what is going on in a local congregation that is following God's plan for spiritual formation.

SOMETIMES THE WAY to this is blocked—even among people who have genuinely become apprentices of Jesus and have the best of intentions. They are not capable of receiving truth. Their body, soul, feelings, thoughts, and their social atmosphere are in such turmoil, or so badly inclined, that their mind cannot be reached just by periods of teaching. They cannot be significantly helped by “regular church services.” They may need ministries of deliverance, drawn from the healing God in our midst, and that must be provided. Or they may need to be taken out of their ordinary routine and given lengthy periods of time in retreat, under careful direction. We must be Spirit led, Bible informed, intelligent, experimental, and persistent. The Christian past holds a huge store of information on spiritual formation. It is a treasure--a God deposit--in Christ's people. We must take the trouble to know it and to own it in ways suitable to today.

Start with simple things like being genuinely kind to hostile people or returning blessing for cursing. Often we have plenty of opportunity to practice and refine these in our own families.
pp. 249-250 SOURCE
 

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