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Tag: discipline

Tending Your Spiritual Garden

Tending Your Spiritual Garden

Life is like cultivating a garden. A beautiful and balanced life or garden does not happen without effort. An important step in garden maintenance is to cultivate the soil. He [Jesus] said many things to them in parables: “A farmer went out to scatter seed.  As he was scattering seed, some fell on the path, and birds came and ate it.  Other seed fell on rocky ground where the soil was shallow. They sprouted immediately because the soil wasn’t deep. …

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Is Holiness Old-Fashioned?

Is Holiness Old-Fashioned?

What do you think? Is holiness old-fashioned? Fasting during the Lent is (for most Christians) a voluntary thing. But too often we think all the discipline and growing in grace is optional, too. Even if you are not interested in hidden blessings hidden through discipline, you are called to be holy like God is holy. Holiness is not voluntary. It is the new normal for children of God. Don’t be conformed to your former desires, those that shaped you when…

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Be Different for Christ

Be Different for Christ

Being different is not a goal itself but a co-product of being a faithful servant of God. When we do God’s will, we will stand out from the crowd. We will be different but God has a way to bring the best out of us. We will be blessed beyond measure. God wants us to become more and more Christ-like. We are not holy by nature. And we don’t become holy by accident either. We need God’s grace to both…

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How 2 Avoid Spiritual Amnesia

How 2 Avoid Spiritual Amnesia

Spiritual amnesia is one of the great dangers on our faith journeys. Forgetfulness of God’s goodness pushes us easily into a downward spiral towards spiritual emptiness. This happened time and time again for the Israelites on the wilderness. And it happens to us if we forget God’s graceful ways, either in biblical history or in our personal history. How could we avoid this spiritual amnesia? Spiritual disciplines have always been ways of keeping spiritual amnesia away. The most common ones…

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How to Keep Legalism Out of Christianity, part 3

How to Keep Legalism Out of Christianity, part 3

How do you know whether you are a legalistic or not? Mike Taylor provides us a simple test to check whether you are prone to a legalistic thinking: “ask yourself, “How does God feel about me today?” If the answer is anything other than, “He is passionately in love with me,” then you are falling into the trap of thinking that God’s attitude towards us is determined by our performance rather than by his essential loving character. In other words,…

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How to Keep Legalism Out of Christianity, part 2

How to Keep Legalism Out of Christianity, part 2

We all know it would be good to read the Word of God (or….add any spiritual discipline here). But how come so many Christians go by weeks, month, even years without reading it? The enemy is good in making us believe his lies “you already know all the stories”, “you don’t have time”, it’s boring” etc. But also anything we “ought to do” gets us to rebel. We might even say “I am not legalistic” as an excuse to not…

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Practicing Surrender in Slippers

Practicing Surrender in Slippers

The secret of starting your day right is not about getting the right hot drink just as you prefer it. The secret of starting your day right is in practicing surrender in slippers. What? The most important act in the morning is to surrender your whole life to God. If we try to carry all the burdens on our own shoulders, the day will not get the right start and will not get any better either. But if we lay…

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Pick up Your Cross Daily!

Pick up Your Cross Daily!

Picking up your cross is not popular. This world talks about everything but the cross of Christ. Even Christians would like to take the good and easy parts of the gospel and leave the tough ones out. We all would just like to hear about God’s love and leave the carrying your cross part for others. Francois Fenelon asks us a hard question: “He asks nothing but death, and you desire nothing but life. How can you put up to…

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