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Spiritual Formation: Essential to Human Existence
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... -
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Spiritual Food Belongs in the Heart
Spiritual nourishment cannot be seen purely in our outward behavior. The process of sanctification is a deeply internal process. Outside growth is merely a symptom, and acting better does not mean our... -
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"The Batman Effect" The Power of Identity
A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how... -
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What this means is that prayer can be learned only in the vocabulary and grammar of personal relationship: Father! Friend! It can never be a matter of getting the right words in the right order. It ca... -
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Electrical Fires and Addressing Sin at the Source
One afternoon, I was playing with my son in our living room when I suddenly smelled something burning. I stood up and walked around, nose high in the air, sniffing furiously. My wife smelled it too, s... -
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"Look at Me!"
Children have a tendency to say, “Look at me!” On the tricycle: “Look at me go!” On the trampoline: “Look at me bounce!” On the swing set: “Look at me swing!” Such behavior is acceptable for children.... -
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Behaving in God's Family
When I was a child, my father brought home a twelve-year-old boy named Roger, whose parents had died from a drug overdose. There was no one to care for Roger, so my folks decided they would raise him ... -
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The noonday devil of the Christian life is the temptation to lose the inner self while preserving the shell of edifying behavior. -
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You ought to.” “You need to.” “You’ve got to.”
You ought to.” “You need to.” “You’ve got to.” “You’re supposed to.” “You better.” Do these sorts of exhortations sound familiar? Perhaps you have heard admonitions such as these from the pulpit, from... -
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We only learn to behave ourselves in the presence of God. -
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Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will. -
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Patience is not simply the ability to wait, it’s how we behave while we are waiting. -
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The Pride of the Titanic
I know most of us have probably heard enough stories about the Titanic, but it does stand as an amazing monument to the famous saying, slightly altered, “pride goes before the fall/destruction.” (Prov... -
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The Power of Four: Spiritual Transformation from Reading Scripture
Does reading the Bible really change us? Does it have the ability, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to shape and form our characters? That's what The Center for Bible Engagement wanted to fin... -
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Self-Discipline Transforms our Motivations
George Garrett, a novelist and amateur boxer wrote about a transformation that often takes place for fighters who stick with the sport. Throughout their journey to boxing excellence, in which they mus... -
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The Biblical Understanding of the Heart
When the Bible uses the term heart , it means the causal core of your personhood. The heart is your directional system. The heart is your steering wheel. Your behavior isn’t caused by the situati... -
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Since we have a great high priest who can sympathize
Leader: Since we have a great high priest who can sympathize with our weakness, let us boldly approach the throne of grace, confident that there we will receive God’s mercy and grace in our time of ne... -
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Jesus My Glory
O Lord God, You have commanded us to believe in Jesus; and I would flee to no other refuge, wash in no other fountain, build on no other foundation, receive from no other fullness, res... -
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The goal of our convictions is to guide our own conduct so that it is pleasing to Jesus, not to guide the conduct of others. -
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Which Comes First, Identity or Behavior?
I am not perfect, and I will struggle with the “old Jim,” who was and is influenced by American culture, narratives and values. But the key is that identity comes before behavior. We almost always do ... -
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Behavior vs. Identity
A number of years ago I was discipling a young man who had recently been released from the state’s juvenile detention center. As a teenager he had been hooked on drugs, and he had resorted to stealing... -
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Politics and the Resurrection
It seems that every four years, the American people come through another exhausting political season. No matter who “wins,” there are feelings of frustration and disgust on all sides as we observe the... -
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Change your Name or your Behavior
There is a story—likely apocryphal—of Alexander the Great discovering a soldier asleep at his post, a grave offense. When the guard was brought before him, the king asked his name. “Alexander,” the yo... -
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Defending the Truth
I once had the opportunity to speak briefly to a large Mormon audience at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. I told them that I feel badly about the fact that we evangelicals often tell Mormons what th... -
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Coming to Grips with the Reality of Sin
The psychotherapist M. Scott Peck spent many years of his practice as an agnostic. He, along with thousands upon thousands of his colleagues were taught that evil was a social construct, and therefore... -
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Culture shapes the way we order our life, interpret our experiences, and evaluate the behavior of other people. -
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Behavior modification that’s not empowered by God’s heart-changing grace is self-righteousness, as repugnant to God as the worst sins people gossip about. -
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Desire alone, divorced from the will, ruins peoples’ lives time after time. In our public life and even among leaders of our denominations or church organizations, time after time we see a desire that... -
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Death Valley, Denver, and Everest: The Pointless Comparison of Human Virtue
To see with God’s eyes, suppose we were to compare one person’s morals to being in Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level; another person’s morals to being in Denver, the mile-high city; and another p... -
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Addictions Attach Desire
For generations, psychologists thought that virtually all self-defeating behavior was caused by repression. I have now come to believe that addiction is a separate and even more self-defeating force t...
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