Month: June 2015

Walking through desolation.

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Most Christians will face seasons in our lives when we cannot sense God anymore. We’ll feel like He left us, or maybe doesn’t even exist. This usually happens after we have overcome most of our major external sins and then made considerable progress in loving God and others. But in spite of our progress, we still can’t connect with God. We think back to times when we felt God’s presence or could clearly see His activity in our lives. We remember the pleasure we had with God, especially during worship, or reading scripture, or prayer. But suddenly our spiritual life seems dry or even dark. We don’t feel the enthusiasm for God we had before. This stage of the Christian life has been experienced and written about by many of the great Christian teachers since the earliest centuries. Some have called it “desolation”; in the 16th century John of the Continue Reading →

Responding To Conviction Of Sin

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Conviction of sin can lead to destructive attitudes as well as constructive sorrow. Seeing our sin may lead us to self-condemnation or rejection, or to imagining that God condemns or rejects us. We may begin to hate ourselves or think we are hopeless. These are all strategies of Satan. He knows that if we reject ourselves (for any reason, not just sin) that it will create a wall between us and God. Self-rejection may be Satan’s number one strategy in every person’s life. It cuts us off from the grace and power we need for healing. Instead we should treat ourselves the way God does: with grace and forgiveness. We do not have permission from God to contradict what God thinks about us. We are His saints and His children. His Son died in our place so that nothing could ever separate us from His love and acceptance. If He Continue Reading →

Purging Deeper Sinfulness

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After turning away from the more obvious sins in our lives, we may begin to think that we are fairly godly. But now we face the real battle against sin. Sinful thoughts and attitudes remained buried deep within our hearts and control us in ways we don’t realize. If we saw all our sin at once, it would overwhelm us and drive some of us mad…which is a warning against over-examining ourselves. Yet we still desire to grow in godliness. We want to share His nature and reflect it to others, and to do that we must continually give Him permission to uncover deeper areas of our lives. Better yet, we should eagerly ask Him to do so. Then our hearts will have an attitude of continual openness to His promptings. We will be more willing to open the door when we begin to hear the faint knocking of His Continue Reading →

Forces That Ruin Fellowship – Lesson From Second Century

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Why did koinonia and dynamic church life fade in Christianity? Many of us sense that church should be more relational and that everyone should be able to develop and exercise their spiritual gifts. Without this church seems more like a spectator experience (or a “busy-ness” experience) than a participation experience. By the end of the 2nd century several forces began to combine to reduce koinonia, or fellowship, in the Christian church. Fellowship became less important in the Church’s spiritual theology (the theology of spiritual growth.) Understanding these forces will help us to avoid the same problems today and recommit ourselves to true koinonia. As you read this list you might ask yourself if there are similar forces today that interfere with koinonia. Here is a list of some of the forces: 1. The Church was focusing on teaching proper doctrine so believers would not be led astray. Christianity was experiencing Continue Reading →