Sublime

Your desire for sexual relationships with other women needs to be transformed, so that nonsexual relationships with men and women in the body of Christ in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit become life-giving to you.”

I want to supplement Willard’s emphasis on the individual practice of the spiritual disciplines with what might be a counterintuitive thesis in our “millennial” moment: that the most potent, charged, transformative site of the Spirit’s work is found in the most unlikely of places—the church!

Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts.

You might think of Augustine as offering a hitchhiker’s guide to the cosmos for wandering hearts.

God has promised himself to you in Christ, and he will secure you to himself in Christ. To be hidden with Christ in God is to be as secure as Christ is.

Faith is convicted trust, not vague belief. Faith is a placing of hopes in such a way that hope gets redefined. In the Scriptures, hope does not have the connotation of “I hope such and such will happen,” as if there is some chance it may not. No, in the Scriptures, hope is an assured trust. Our hope is Christ, and this hope will prove true; it

1. Gather locally and regularly with the people of God.

God doesn’t want anyone to try to redirect their desire for community to himself. God is spirit. Instead, I think God wants people to experience his love through their experience of human community—specifically, the church. God created us physical-spiritual beings with deep longings for intimacy with other physical-spiritual beings. We’re not meant