A Perceived Need Archives

Welcome to Ezra Reflections

By Andrew YoungAugust 17, 2011A Perceived Need

Ezra Reflections are thoughts that have come to mind in the course of reading the Bible and other books over many years. They are shared to help you deepen your relationship with God by taking things you know about him into the way you live. That’s the step we find hardest in the Christian life – translating knowledge into experience. The link between the two is most often the exercise of prayerful, reflective thinking. These Reflections are intended to help you do that. Reflecting is an act of thinking. Several words and images come to mind when I think of the term. One […]

#1 Thirsting for God

By Andrew YoungAugust 17, 2011A Perceived Need

In 2003 prolific author and teacher R.C. Sproul published a book called The Soul’s Quest for God – Satisfying the Hunger for Spiritual Communion with God. It begins with these words: Something is missing. It is missing from the life of the church. It is absent from the normal Christian life. What is missing is a depth of spiritual communion with God. Worship is unsatisfying to multitudes, and the Christian life is often marked more by a sense of the absence of God than a vital sense of his presence… There is a spot deep within our souls that is hungry […]

#2 Communion With God

By Andrew YoungSeptember 23, 2011A Perceived Need

Before looking further at why so many Christians are dissatisfied with their relationship with God, it may be helpful to pause and think further about what we mean when we talk about “communion with God.” That, after all, is the expression R.C. Sproul uses when he comments on the current Christian dissatisfaction; it is dissatisfaction with the “depth of spiritual communion with God.”[1] What does Sproul mean by that? Failing to be sure of what familiar terms mean can rob us of spiritual benefit and slow down spiritual progress. That is particularly true in this case. “Communion with God”, whatever it means, […]

1. A Perceived Need

By Andrew YoungSeptember 30, 2015A Perceived Need

A Perceived Problem In the recent Ezra Update I included a “perceived problem statement” and promised to elaborate on it. This is what I want to do in this article. Here, once more, is the problem – at least as I perceive it – that the Ezra Ministry seeks to address: Many Christians lack confidence in living in Christ and being led by his Spirit and consequently miss out on the richly interactive relationship with God that he desires and on which ministry effectiveness in his kingdom and in the world depends Let me explain and try to justify this statement. The first thing […]

2. Finding a Solution

By Andrew YoungSeptember 30, 2015A Perceived Need

It is one thing to identify a problem and another to come up with a solution that is biblical and practical. That is the challenge that faces us in the Ezra Ministry as we attempt to address the problem of a “lack of competence and confidence in living in Christ and in the hand-in-hand conversational walk with God that we were created for.”[1] Thankfully, devising a solution for this is not something that is left up to us – who would be presumptuous enough to attempt this anyway? The reason we don’t need to try to do so is because the heart […]

3. A Different Kind of Knowledge

By Andrew YoungSeptember 30, 2015A Perceived Need

I am well aware that my emphasis in the last article on the role of instruction in fostering a richer life in Christ could be viewed as advocating a heady or rationalistic kind of Christianity. That might be so if the instruction I had in mind was aimed solely at getting more information about Jesus into people’s minds. But I was most definitely not thinking that way. Rather, I was thinking of “proclaiming” Christ and “admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom” (Colossians 1:28) with the goal of people actually coming to know him in an interactive and personal way. In a […]

4. A Demanding Yet Simple Rule

By Andrew YoungSeptember 30, 2015A Perceived Need

You may recall from an earlier article I wrote that J.I. Packer refers to knowing Christ experientially in terms of “realized communion” with God. It is Packer who has helped me as much as anyone to understand what this communion involves and how we can have it. In his classic book Knowing God, Packer has a chapter entitled “Knowing and Being Known.”[1] In it he repeatedly makes the distinction between knowing about God and actually knowing him personally. The former belongs to the notional or intellectual knowledge that I wrote about last time; the latter is equivalent to an experienced knowledge of God – a knowledge […]

5. The Touch of God

By Andrew YoungSeptember 30, 2015A Perceived Need

There is another aspect to knowing God experientially beyond the personal dealings we have with him mentioned in the last article. It is the actual “touch of God” upon our souls that takes place through his Spirit as he first awakens and regenerates us, and then indwells, sanctifies, leads and empowers us. I have always been (and still am) hesitant to use language like “the secret touch of God” in our lives. It sounds awfully subjective and mystical. However, I have been emboldened to do so by a recent re-reading of parts of Abraham Kuyper’s book, The Work of the Holy […]

6. A Special Work of the Spirit

By Andrew YoungSeptember 30, 2015A Perceived Need

The idea that we cannot understand “rightly” what God is saying in his Word without a special work of the Holy Spirit on our minds, as the Puritan theologian John Owen claims, is something you may find hard to accept. On the surface, it seems overly spiritual and subjective. Added to that it doesn’t appear to fit with experience. There is much in the Bible that you – and for that matter, anyone – can understand without outside help. Take, for example, the story of the prophet Jonah in the Old Testament. Even a child, you say, can follow (and […]

7. Discerning the Spirit (1)

By Andrew YoungSeptember 30, 2015A Perceived Need

In the last two articles we have looked at the idea that God still “touches” lives today through his Spirit and Word. We have seen how the Puritan theologian John Owen believed (as did many of the Puritans) that we can only understand the spiritual sense of the Bible and its relevance to our faith and obedience as the Holy Spirit imparts spiritual wisdom, light and understanding to our minds. The question I want to explore in this article and the one that follows is, “What does that look (or feel) like?” Does John Owen offer us any help here? Indeed he does. He […]