The Fourth Core Spiritual Habit: Kindnesses Done in Jesus’ Name
With the fourth core spiritual habit, we’ve reached a significant shift. Up until now the spiritual habits have focused either on our relationship with God or our relationship with the church. In other words, the first three core spiritual habits are inward focused. The fourth habit, though, takes Jesus’ command to love our neighbors seriously. […]
I Have a Problem
The following video was sent to me by a friend. It’s an attempt to explain the missional church in two minutes and it does a good job explaining the church, missional or not. http://jrwoodward.net/2010/03/the-missional-church-simple/ However, I have a problem with all the words being battered around today to describe the church – organic, emergent, missional, incarnational […]
The Third Core Spiritual Habit: Intentionally Encouraging Other Christians
I’m a big advocate of “one-anothering”, perhaps because it was practiced so effectively in the early church. One-anothering is how Christians are called (and expected) to treat each another – at least from a New Testament perspective. In the Gospels, Jesus gave us five love directives: (1) love God; (2) love our neighbors; (3) love […]
We’re Living in Strange Times
If you’ve lived through 9/11 and 2008 you know what I mean about strange times. If you don’t know, no need to read any further. You’ve got too much sand in your ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to us. We’re living in a time of exaggerated contradictions. At the very time many […]
The Second Core Spiritual Habit: Listening Prayer
Those who read my previous post may have been surprised that I suggested scripture reading may be the most transformative spiritual habit. I’m sure there are those who would argue that prayer offers more opportunities for the Spirit’s injection into our lives. However, so long as the average prayer is a monologue, it’s unlikely to […]
The First Core Spiritual Habit: Pick up and Read
The first and typically most transformative spiritual habit is, surprisingly, scripture reading. I’m fond of saying “I’m a scientist’s son and a mainliner at heart,” so when I tell church leaders that if they’ll just start reading scripture regularly their lives will be transformed, they sometimes look at me as if I was from a […]