Here’s the text of the sermon I gave yesterday, also posted on the Network Vineyard blog. You can also listen to it here.
Today I want to talk about discovering the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the weekly day of celebration and rest God commands his people to take in the ten commandments. Of course, for [...]
We had an interesting conversation at our house church last night about spiritual growth. Some of us have been Christians a long time and feel like we haven’t grown at all, that we still struggle with the same sins, that our inner selves have not been conformed to Christ.
Something one person said struck a chord [...]
In Christian Century magazine, I came across an extract from Kathleen Norris’s new book, Acedia and me : a marriage, monks and a writer’s life. I had to look up acedia. It means spiritual sloth.
Her take on acedia is that it is a failure to find meaning in the ordinary, repetitious daily tasks and experiences [...]
I like to think I have a good sense of right and wrong and when my conscience screams at me, I really am doing something wrong. But I have this fear – indeed, knowledge – that our consciences are conditioned by all sorts of things, not all of them God.
This week a colleague told the [...]
George Maloney writes in Inward Stillness p. 131:
Man’s instinct does not tell him, as animal’s instinct does, what he must do. Because he has to cut himself off from the roots of his past by throwing away traditions, he is at a loss as to what he ought to do. Usually he finds himself in [...]
This is a series of posts about my reactions to each of the disciplines in Richard Foster’s book.
I dread the idea of fasting. I don’t like denying myself. And I know, each time I read this chapter, I am going to be re-convinced of how important fasting is.
I am too dependent on my appetites, too [...]
I think what surprises me about this chapter is Foster’s expectancy that prayer will, basically, work. I realise I was expecting cautious explanations of how if we look for our prayers to come true, we’ll be sorely disappointed.Of course, the Bible doesn’t say this, and neither does Foster.
He doesn’t give a recipe for success, but [...]
A sermon I gave yesterday at Agape Chinese Baptist Church.
New Year’s resolutions
A New Year feels like a fresh start. We have a whole year ahead of us, not yet spoilt by mistakes or our old ways of doing things. Of course, Chinese New Year isn’t until February 7th, so you have a little longer to make up New [...]
At lunch time today I got to this line from Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline:
David’s desire for God broke the self-indulgent chains of sleep: ‘Early will I seek Thee’ (Ps 63:1). (p. 44)
While reading a book, when I agree with something already, I tend to tick it. If it challenges what I think, but it [...]
Starting with meditation has always been a stumbling block for me reading Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline. It’s a toss up between that and fasting for what’s more difficult for me. I guess these are two that require a lot of discipline.
The reason I find meditation so hard is that I don’t like silence much. [...]
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