Christian Spiritual Life Archives

Our Most Urgent Need

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

Over the summer months, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking in preparation for a new course at Grace Theological College (GTC). It’s a course on spiritual development – essentially an introduction to Christian spirituality. It’s been intriguing to note how many writers, both modern and ancient, have agreed on the need that most urgently faces Christians and the Christian church. The one thing we need above all others, they say, is a deeper knowledge of God. Take well-known theologian and author R.C. Sproul, for example. He begins his book The Soul’s Quest for God with these words: […]

What is the Problem?

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

Last week we began this new series of insights by noting that one of the greatest needs of the church – indeed, some consider it to be the greatest need of the church – is for people to know God better. By that, it is not meant that we need more information about God or better theology for that matter. Information about God abounds to the point where it threatens to smother us. No one is saying we need more books on the Bible, nor more books about God or journal and magazine articles based on the Bible. What they […]

The Gospel of Sin Management

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

There is another possible explanation for our failure to know God as deeply as we should. It was brought to my attention recently reading popular contemporary writer Dallas Willard. Willard makes the point that many people fail to give Jesus the attention they should because they’ve been sold a distorted picture of the gospel. The “gospel” as it is presented to many people, Willard says, is little more than a gospel of “sin management.” It’s about what Jesus did to deal with our sin problem. From that point of view, he has more relevance to our death and our subsequent […]

Knowing God – What it Means

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

Where do we begin our journey toward knowing God better? I suggest that we start by clarifying exactly what it is we want to do. Do we mean, for example, that we want to learn more about God – about his existence, attributes, character, purposes and ways? There is nothing wrong with doing that, but is this all that there is to “knowing” him? Isn’t this the kind of knowledge that devils have (James 2:19), and that academics who study theology have? Yes, it is! Or again, do we simply want to experience the immediate presence of God? Mystics over […]

More on what it Means

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

Since writing the last Insight, I’ve looked through my notes again and found a magnificent description of what it means to know God. It appears in J.I. Packer’s classic book Knowing God and captures perfectly the relational character of this activity. Packer begins by raising a number of possibilities as to what knowing God might mean. “What are we talking about when we use the phrase, ‘knowing God’?” he asks. A special sort of emotion? Shivers down the back? A dreamy, off-the-ground, floating feeling? Tingling thrills and exhilaration, such as drug takers seek? Or is knowing God a special sort […]

Nearness to God

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

The moment we speak of knowing God in terms of an intimate personal relationship with him we raise the possibility of actually meeting God. It is hard to think of having intimate fellowship with anyone from a distance or through an extended series of intermediaries. Intimacy requires close personal contact. But is it possible for us to have that kind of access to God? One thing we can say with confidence is that the Bible portrays God as One who wants to be near his people. That was true at creation – when God walked in the Garden of Eden […]

Communion with God

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

God draws near to us to relate personally and intimately with us. He delights in us as a Father does his children. The thought of him being with us simply as a spectator is inconceivable. He wants, as Arthur Pink puts it, to have “plain, practical, personal dealings” with us, and us with him (Spiritual Union and Communion, p. 103). This is what the Puritans spoke of as communion with God. One of them, John Owen, describes such fellowship in this way: Our communion with God consisteth of his communication of himself unto us, and our returnal unto him of […]

The Importance of Faith

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

The communion with God that we considered last week is something we experience through the activity of faith. By believing what God has revealed about himself – especially in Christ – and acting upon it, we participate in a personal, practical, spiritual fellowship with him. Faith in this sense is not a matter of forcing ourselves to believe something that we know is not really true. Rather, it is embracing and actualizing for ourselves something we are certain of but cannot see (Heb. 11:1). Jesus told us, for example, that he would always be with us (Matt. 28:20). While that […]

Experiencing God

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

Faith-based communion with God, while something we cannot see, is nevertheless real. And because it is real, there is at least a possibility that it can be consciously experienced. In fact, we can go further and say that if there is some way in which we can interact personally and spiritually with God, ordinarily we will be conscious of that happening. That is because there is such a close union between our body and spirit that what happens to the one usually affects the other. We see this illustrated in the case of Jesus. When the seventy-two disciples returned from […]

Mysticism

By Andrew YoungDecember 31, 2012Christian Spiritual Life

Discussions on Christian experience almost always provoke warnings against mysticism. And it is right that they should. For mysticism – or at least a mystical tendency – has been an unhealthy element of the church’s life through the centuries. The term “mysticism,” however, isn’t easy to define. Generally, it is associated with the quest for or claims of immediate encounters with God. Some go so far as to say that it is possible to meet God so directly that you lose all self-consciousness and become swallowed up, as it were, in his essence. That seems to have been the goal […]