The biblical metaphor for Easter spirituality is found in baptism. The baptized life is a life that is lived in the pattern of death and resurrection. . . . This is a daily, existential, moment-by-moment experience as we choose in this or that situation to die to the sins for which Christ died and choose...Read More
The spiritual life is a calling to become fully human after the likeness of Christ, who, being united with God, has shown us what humanity, united to God, was intended to be. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 103.Read More
Spirituality is our union with God through our union with Jesus Christ accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit. The symbol of this union for the Christian is baptism. The spiritual life that results from this union is dying to sin and rising to the new life in Christ by the Spirit. The means...Read More
Worshipers are not a cheering section for God. The problem with this kind of worship is not only that it is an accommodation to culture but that it is also a severe example of self-situated spirituality. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 95.Read More
Experience in worship is not my immediate pleasure or even my immediate response. The focus of experience is not on my experience of God but on how God as the subject of worship forms me through word and sacrament and thereby changes my life. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life...Read More
Lent is the time to identify a power working against us and crucify it with Christ and bury it in the tomb, never to be raised again. . . . [Fasting] controls the passion for food in order to deal with a passion of another sort that holds us in its grip. The purpose of...Read More
Lent . . . calls us back to God, back to basics, back to the spiritual realities of life. It calls on us to put to death the sin and the indifference we have in our hearts toward God and our fellow persons. And it beckons us to enter once again into the joy of...Read More
When someone asks me the question, “Do you have a personal relationship with God?” I always answer, “You’re asking the wrong question. What is important here is not that I in and of myself achieve or create a personal relationship with God, but that God has a personal relationship with me through Jesus Christ, which...Read More
The confidence in spirituality is not my experience but my baptism into Christ, with the focus on Christ embracing me in his death and resurrection. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 74.Read More
We are the disciples whom Jesus has called . . . to turn away from self-love and self-service, to abandon a life lived for self-gratification or self-glory, and to serve God as an epiphany of the self-giving service of Jesus. True spirituality longs for, seeks for, and wills this abandonment of self so that Christ...Read More
Bob recounts attending his first Epiphany service: “I realized that an epiphany was occurring for me right there in the service of worship. I was seeing the glory of God in Christ face-to-face. This manifestation, this epiphany, was not to be a thing of the past, something that happened two thousand years ago, but was...Read More
What humans could not attain because they could not raise themselves to God, God attained by descending to humans. . . . There can be no such thing as spirituality without God initiating relationship with human persons, a relationship that is traced back to the momentous event we celebrate as Christmas—God with us. But there...Read More
