Welcome! If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via e-mail and stay up to date with new posts. Thanks for visiting!I am currently reading The Great Omission by Dallas Willard and I came across something that I thought could be very helpful. He calls it the [...]

On Jan. 1, Calvary Assembly of God began its annual church wide 40 day fast. With that in mind, here are some thoughts on the practice of fasting.
There are two main categories of spiritual disciplines - disciplines of engaging and disciplines of abstaining. The practice of fasting is a discipline of abstaining.
Fasting can [...]

Celebration
“We shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest…Joy is the serious business of heaven.” – C.S. Lewis
“Celebration is central to all the Spiritual Disciplines.” - Richard Foster
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” – Apostle [...]

Silence

“We are so afraid of silence that we chase ourselves from one event to the next in order to not have to spend a moment alone with ourselves, in order not to have to look at ourselves in the mirror.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“In a noise-polluted world, it is even difficult to hear ourselves think let [...]

Solitude
“There are two ways of striving to fill one’s place in the world: one
is by seeking to prove one’s self usefull; the other, by striving to
render one’s self useless. The first way is the commoner and the more
attractive; the second is the rarer and the more noble.” - Henry Clay
Trumball
“It was an important day in [...]

Slowing
Richard Foster writes that, “In contemporary society, our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry, and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in “muchness” and “manyness”, he will rest satisfied.”
Carl Jung says that “Hurry is not of the devil, hurry is the devil.”
Examples of Jesus “getting away” with God - Mk 1:35, 6:31, [...]

Meditation on Scripture – Continued
Recap:
5 Steps of Lectio Divina:
1. Silence
2. Read
3. Meditate
4. Respond
5. Contemplate
The difference between study & meditation:
Study is analytical; reading for information
Meditation is experiential; reading for transformation
The key to meditating on Scripture is to be open to what [...]

If you feel like you’re in a rut and that you’re prayer life could use a kick start or if you’d just like to expand your prayers to beyond the usual, check out these two resources:
Daily Prayers from KenBoa.org - this one is available either as a daily e-mail, rss feed, or simply by going [...]

Meditation on Scripture
“The nature of water is soft, that of stones is hard; but if a bottle is hung above the stone allowing the water to fall drop by drop, it wears away the stone. So it is with the Word of God; it is soft and our heart is hard, but the one who [...]

Prayer Continued
Recap from last week

Prayer is something that we learn – we start where we can and God will move us along
Prayer can change things
2 things are needed to begin: Time & Place
“Simple Prayer”
Turning our wandering mind into prayer

Intercessory Prayer

Ephesians 1:16-17, 6:18

Philippians 1:4

Colossians 1:3, 9-10

1 Thessalonians 5:25

1 Timothy 2:1

Intercessory prayer is prayer that is offered [...]