Is my understanding of prayer similar to the “spiritual warfare” practiced by some evangelicals and charismatics? Yes, to the extent that I agree that prayer should be imperative and aggressive. We should be engaged to alter the spirituality of families, corporations,...
Paul actually expects Christ to be encountered as his people share with one another a whole range of verbal ministries in the congregational. For example, as they “sing psalms, hymns and spiritual song,” with gratitude in their hearts to God, they will fulfill the...
Music, of course, does not remake us; the Holy Spirit does. But it seems possible that music may be one means by which the Holy Spirit makes us people who feel and respond. We are brought to our senses. We are drawn out of the darkness of self-absorption and become...
The devil is most happy when he can snatch from a servant of God true joy of the Spirit. He carries dust with him to throw into the smallest chinks of conscience and thus soil one’s mental candor and purity of life. But if joy of the Spirit fills the heart, the...
Sometimes those who have been in the church for a long time can adopt a joyless spirit… These people…become blind to the good things around them. …Instead, they obsess over bad things and want everyone else to…obsess with them. This kind of complaining, joyless spirit...
Why is it so hard to believe Christ and trust him completely? Christ wants to give us his life and spirit, and if we look to him for only a moment, our hearts tell us: Here is one we can trust. Yet each of us knows feelings of fear and anxiety. Something in us seeks...
Being born-again is a new life, not of perfection but of striving, stretching, and searching—a life of intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit. There must first be an emptying and then refilling. To the extent that we want to know, understand and experience God, we...
Jesus was not interested in making people religious, but leading them to a loving relationship with himself, and therefore with God. He offered forgiveness and healing to sin-sick souls as the basis of new life, opening up a path of discipleship, compassion and...
Jesus returns again and again to his Church with his message and the power of his Spirit…to arouse a Church which, tired and listless, is always on the point of sleep; to light the way for a Church which is so often on the point of losing the path on its pilgrimage;...
If the people are not themselves seeking to determine the Word of God in the tangle of their individual and shared lives, how can they discern the accuracy and adequacy of the theologian’s interpretation of that Word for the group? The church as a group, as a...