background on Spiritual Attacks

Now I have to ask you: If Jesus Christ, the Son of God, did not presume to face the forces of evil in the world without a profound knowledge of the Bible in mind and heart, how could we try to face li...

Identifying the idols of the city takes place in the untamed context of spiritual warfare. Those who are engaged in mapping the idolatry of the city know that this process is not simply a rational, co...

The Western world has largely rejected this dimension of evil that the Bible gives us, and as a result, we, like Job’s friends, are always underestimating—and sometimes misdiagnosing—the power of evil...

Whenever you’re running your life on those fuels, Satan’s got you where he wants you. The one thing he does not want is that God’s words “You are my beloved child” become the fuel of your life and hea...

We Christians must be armed and expect every day to be under continuous attack. . . . At such times our only help and comfort is to run here and seize hold of the Lord’s Prayer and speak to God from o...

In the Old Testament, the book of Psalms is called, in Hebrew, “The Praises.” And yet the single largest category of “praises” within it consists of laments! That is, people were bringing before God t...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

Spiritual formation has become one of the major movements of the late twentieth century. Spiritualities of all varieties have emerged on the landscape of our culture—Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Zen, vari...

Many Christians . . . find themselves defeated by the most powerful psychological weapon that Satan uses against Christians. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-e...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton discuss the poignant insight that it is the Spirit that leads Jesus into the Wildnerness. What does this...

Too often people think about their “spiritual lives” as just one more aspect of their existence, alongside and largely separate from their “financial lives” or their “vocational lives.” Periodically t...

Scripture also speaks of “discernment of spirits” and encourages us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” This aspect of discernment helps us to distinguish the real from the phony, ...

What is spiritual formation? There is an outer you—your body—that is being shaped all the time by the way you eat, drink, sleep, exercise, and live. You may do this well or poorly, intentionally or no...

God’s primary assessment of our lives is not going to be measured by the number of journal entries…The real issue is what kind of people we are becoming. Practices such as reading Scripture and prayin...

The soul can also manifest physical symptoms of need. I like to think of it this way: Just like my stomach growls when I’m hungry for physical food, my spirit tends to growl when I’m in need of spirit...

Spiritual growth is, in large measure, patterned on the nature of physical growth. We do not expect to put an infant into its crib at night and in the morning find a child, an adolescent or yet an adu...

Today, a number of historical circumstances are blindly flowing together and accidentally conspiring to produce a climate within which it is difficult not just to think about God or to pray, but simpl...

One of the challenges, at least in the western church, is an inability to deal with our wounds in a healthy way. Our training as Christians has been focused on Bible studies, small groups, and Sunday ...

The journalist Andrew Sullivan has some strong words of advice for the modern church,  If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, p...

What is the greatest threat to the church of Jesus Christ today? There are so many threats to choose from. Some Christians would identify hazards like postmodern relativism working to unravel notions ...

One of the biggest challenges in the Christian journey is grasping the heart of grace. Oftentimes there is an internal battle between our theology and our lived experience. In this short excerpt, Fred...

The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life. Many people will pray when they are required by cultural or social expectations, or perhaps by the anxiety caused b...

One of my continual battles is the one that happens in my own heart and mind. I continue to discover and fight negative patterns of thought and emotion that are shaped less by Jesus and more by the wo...

Some years ago I was doing a seven-part series of talks on the Seven Deadly Sins at a men’s breakfast. My wife, Kathy, told me, “I’ll bet that the week you deal with greed you will have your lowest at...

Eventually, God sends all who truly seek to know him into a spiritual wilderness. That’s why St. John of the Cross calls this dark night, this desert of ours, a “happy night.” The night is happy becau...

In recent decades, many Christians have tried to make sense of the tension between our bodies and spirits by swinging to the opposite pole. Instead of saying, “The body doesn’t matter,” they have said...

As we begin to awaken fully to the spiritual, social and sexual dimensions of ourselves in God’s presence, we find that they are inseparably intertwined and not to be compartmentalized. In fact, many ...

As I have worked to clarify my calling, I have learned to pay attention to my energy levels in response to different activities. If I experience a particular activity as being inordinately draining, I...

My hunch is that most of you … have basic knowledge about the Holy Spirit; but when it comes to experiencing the Spirit in your life, it’s a different story. Take a moment and ask yourself this questi...

God is the author of the physical world, and in his wisdom, he designed physical realities to convey spiritual mysteries. “There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God,” as C. S. Lewis insist...