personal development on The Christian Life

The Christian life is not a constant high. I have my moments of deep discouragement. I have to go to God in prayer with tears in my eyes, and say, 'O God, forgive me,' or 'Help me.'

The life of Christian faith is the practice of many practices

For over the margins of life comes a whisper, a faint call, a premonition of richer living. . . . Strained by the very mad pace of our daily outer burdens, we are further strained by an inward uneasin...

Is life not full of opportunities for learning love? Every man and woman every day has a thousand of them. The world is not a playground; it is a schoolroom. Life is not a holiday, but an education. A...

Do you want your life to count? Do you want to look back and say that you made the biggest difference possible? Most Christians want to devote their lives to something significant. Deep inside they wa...

There are two great days in a person’s life … the day we are born and the day we discover why.

Building an antifragile faith takes time. It can’t be rushed. Consider this: It takes (on average) around twelve to eighteen months ​to construct a new single-family home in America. This process incl...

At the heart of the city of London is Charing Cross. All distances across the city are measured from its central point. Locals refer to it simply as “the cross.” One day a child became lost in the bus...

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

Our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out. The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself....

Blog post adapted from Necessary Christianity by Claude Alexander, Jr. Adapted from Chapter 5, "I Must Be Diligent" The life of Jesus reveals that God’s call and God’s claim on the belie...

The scholastics used to say: Homo non proprie humanus sed superhumanus est —which means that to be properly human, you must go beyond the merely human.

I often found myself preferring the company of people outside my congregation, men and women who did not follow Jesus. Or worse, preferring the company of my sovereign self. But soon I found that my p...

Knowledge is indispensable to Christian life and service. If we do not use the mind that God has given us, we condemn ourselves to spiritual superficiality and cut ourselves off from many of the riche...

We do not segment our lives, giving some time to God, some to our business or schooling, while keeping parts to ourselves. The idea is to live all of our lives in the presence of God, under the author...

My father was an artist. He had a black leather sketchbook filled with cartoons and doodles. As a boy I was enthralled by his drawings and wondered how I could learn to draw like him. I began by traci...

You can only build an effective Christian life when you have a “settled core”: an inner self “hidden with Christ” (Colossians 3:3). When you go to the gym or a Pilates class, your instructor might enc...

The life of a Christian is wondrously ruled in this world, by the consideration and meditation of the life of another world.

Triune and Loving God: on this Pentecost Sunday, we ask for the gift of Your Holy Spirit to help us pray as we ought today and always. Come, Holy Spirit: Help Us. We ask for Your Spirit’s energy an...

Over the years, I have led hundreds of retreats that have at their center a few hours to be alone and quiet in listening prayer. At one such retreat, one participant shared a conversation she had wit...

Biblical rest does not make us passive or unproductive. It is the secret to all productivity in the Christian life.

Erik Thoennes, professor at Biola University and elder at Grace Evangelical Free Church in La Mirada, California, sees the authenticity trend in the undergrads he teaches. At the beginning of each cla...

In her excellent book Liturgy of the Ordinary, pastor and author Tish Harrison Warren describes an encoutner her husband experienced while working on his PhD. While my husband, Jonathan, was getting...

The key to maturity is time and community. Discernment and godly wisdom develop in a community that spans generations. The church is called to be this place where the [God's] Spirit uses normal pa...

It ought to be placed in the forefront of all Christian teaching that Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am come," He said, "that ye might have Life, and that ye mig...

Thus a Christian finds himself called to drab and lowly tasks, which seem less remarkable than monastic life, mortifications, and other distractions from our vocations. For him who heeds his vocation,...

Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...

There are few Christian authors more respected than C. S. Lewis. After his conversion to Christ at age 33, he would spend the rest of his life writing iconic Christian works. However, his relationship...

The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this ca...

As a newborn baby breathes and cries, so the signs of life in a newborn Christian are faith and repentance, inhaling the love of God and exhaling an initial cry of distress. And at that point what God...