personal development on Depth

The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.

In a November 1882 sermon on 1 John 2, the renowned pastor and preacher C. H. Spurgeon offers a profound insight into the nature of Christian maturity. His remarks come as part of his exposition on th...

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

A. Parnell Bailey visited an orange grove where an irrigation pump had broken down. The season was unusually dry and some of the trees were beginning to die for lack of water. The man giving the tour ...

What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spiri...

Desires are best understood as our most honest experiences of ourselves, in all our complexity and depth, as we relate to people and things around us

“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart,” said the apostle Paul, “as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” (Colossians 3:23) ...[H]ow you do anything is how you’ll do everything. Dr. ...

I remember growing up in the ’80s (yes, that dates me) when all kinds of fears and phobias seemed to be in the air—fear of the dark, snakes, scorpions, spiders. Someone in my own close circle was afra...

The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...

The Lord calls us to examine the wounds of the Risen One and to see there the depth of his love for us. Let us therefore approach the throne of God in confidence as we pray for the people of God in Ch...

Leisure . . . is an essential part of Benedictine spirituality. It is not laziness and it is not selfishness. It has something to do with depth and breadth, length and quality of life.

God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the tec...

Everyone knows that during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis we were perilously close to WWIII and nuclear Armageddon. Most people don’t know HOW close we were. Or how much we owe to Vasili Arkhipov. Ark...

First, we get our calling wrong when we imagine that God needs us, to be the hero of our own story, rather than Christ. Second, we routinely misdiagnose the problem of our world, underestimating estim...

We get our calling wrong when we imagine that God needs us, to be the hero of our own story, rather than Christ. Second, we routinely misdiagnose the problem of our world, underestimating the brokenne...

Out of the depths of darkness and despair we have cried out for your mercy, O God. Instead of marking our iniquities with the just weight of our condemnation, you have forgiven us, breathed new life i...

If you yourself do not cut the lines that tie you to the dock, God will have to use a storm to sever them and to send you out to sea. You have to get out past the harbor into the great depths of God, ...

The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few of the paradoxes we ...

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer summarizes the late 19th century book Flatland as an analogy for the often-one-dimensional faith that exists our time: tIn 1884, an English sc...

"Not Against Flesh and Blood..." There is an unspoken battle that every pastor faces—a battle not against flesh and blood , nor merely against the seen forces of ministry challenges, but...

If I asked you the same question I asked my patient Aaron—“What do you want?”—and you could for a moment put aside the predictable anxiety that comes with it, I’m confident that at some point in your ...

The Puritans in American Literature “Welcome to Honors American Literature!” You probably haven’t heard that line since high school, right? After his first couple of weeks of school, my boy came home...

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? Autobiographies Have you ever thought about writing your autobiography? It would be a little like reliving your life, at least in miniscule. As a write...

We pause this morning to confess our sin to You. We enter into confession with both gratitude and reluctance. We’re grateful we have a gracious God to whom we can confess, but we’re reluctant that a d...

Pastor: Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! All: If you, O LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could s...

Out of the depths I have cried to you, oh Lord. Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my petitions. If you, oh Lord, kept a record of sins, Lord, who could stand? But there i...

The God who breathed this world alive And sustains it day by day, Whose hands flung stars into space And controls our destiny, Says, “Do not be afraid, for I am with you.” The God who filled the ocean...

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity     and passing over transgression     for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever,     because he delights in steadfast love. He...

Materialism is not fundamentally an economic problem, but a cultural one... a spiritual issue. It runs to the depths of our souls, and, for this reason, needs to be understood less in terms of budgets...

Reaching back to the tradition of virtues and vices can also give us fresh eyes and expose new layers of meaning in our reading of scripture. Before I read Aquinas on sloth, I would have associated it...