Restful Journey

ROMANS 12 – Think back over past holiday gatherings. Were they full of joy? Or bickering? Mocking? Put-downs? Belittling? Our hope today: that godly brothers/sisters/authors and God’s Word can shed some light on how we can bring light and grace to future gatherings at home and wherever we find ourselves. Along the line of family tensions, My lifelong buddy and I, both followers of Jesus, have talked and fretted over wayward children, now grown. Now we’ve discovered a book, shedding light on God’s Word and God’s Word shedding light on this book. The book is called Renovation of the Heart, Putting On the Character of Christ by Dallas Willard. The author talks about our messed up hearts or souls that need godly formation or transformation. What contributes to messing up our soul or heart or spirit: Rejection – in my own life: favoritism shown to my siblings, translating into rebellion and reinforced by lack of self-esteem and rejection by dates and unfaithful wives. Assault – we ...

Second, announce that you teach people to do the things that Jesus said to do. Put it out in front of your meeting place on a sign, declare it in local print media and on your Web page. Publicize and run training programs designed to develop specific points of the character of Christ as given in the New Testament. Put the whole weight of the staff and the congregation back of this. Let that be our only aim, and the triumph of God in our individual lives and our times is ensured. The renovation of the heart, putting on the character of Christ, is the unfailing key. It will provide for human life all the blessing that money, talent, education, and good fortune in this world cannot begin to supply, and will strongly anticipate, within this present life, a glorious entry in the full presence of God. pp. 250-251 SOURCE  

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 ...

OUR BELIEFS AND FEELINGS cannot be changed by choice. We cannot just choose to have different beliefs and feelings. But we do have some liberty to take in different ideas and information and to think about things in different ways. We can choose to take in the Word of God, and when we do that, beliefs and feelings will be steadily pulled in a godly direction. One of the worst mistakes that can be made in practical ministry is to think that people can choose to believe and feel differently. Following that, we will mistakenly try to generate faith by going through the will—possibly trying to move the will by playing on emotion. Rather, the will must be moved by insight into truth and reality. Such insight will evoke emotion appropriate to a new set of the will. That is the order of real inward change. My father was a two-pack-a-day smoker until he was in his seventies. Then one day, in the Veterans’ Hospital where he went for health care, he saw a man smoking with the aid of a special ma...

It is, I gently suggest, a serious error to make “outreach” a primary goal of the local congregation, and especially so when those who are already “with us” have not become clear-headed and devoted apprentices of Jesus, and are not, for the most part, solidly progressing along the path. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. But the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened world. The presence of God in the midst is the only sure mark of the true ecclesia. Of course there are conditions under which God will not be present in a group, and biblical and church history painfully illustrate this over and over. But every condition that omits his presence as the essential redeeming factor is just another effort at substituting a vessel for the treasure. Spiritual transformation will not occur, in that case, for it is a ...

Most professing Christians today have “prayed to receive Christ” because they felt a need and would like him to help them deal with it. Now, one cannot lay a satisfactory foundation for spiritual formation or growth in grace by approaching people in terms of “the trouble they are in.” I do not say that “felt needs” are to be disregarded, but in human affairs the “presenting problem”—the thing that needs to be fixed now—is rarely the real problem. One should of course be sympathetic with people who are lonely, guilt-ridden, and incapable of dealing with life, and so on, but these are not their problem. Their problem is that they have rejected God, for whatever reason, and have chosen to live life on their own. They have not surrendered their will to him. They do not want to do what God says to do, but what they think is best. And they are lost because of that, in the sense explained in an earlier chapter. They do not know what their real needs are and do not think of themselves as rebel...

Now I must say something you can be mad at me about. A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the Western church, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to heaven. It aims to get people into heaven rather than to get heaven into people. This of course requires that these people, who are going to be “in,” must be right on what is basic. You can’t really quarrel with that. But it turns out that to be right on “what is basic” is to be right in terms of the particular church vessel or tradition in question, not in terms of Christlikeness. Now, the project thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with one another, much less those “outside.” Often their most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness, and resentment. They have ...