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
Advent is the time when God breaks in on us with new surprises and touches us with a renewing and restoring power. . . . We should use the Advent season as a period to identify the matters from which we need to be redeemed. Identify whatever it is that seems to be holding you...Read More
God has taken the initiate to unite us and the world to himself and calls on us to see and live our life out of this vision of reality. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 45.Read More
The spiritual life is lived in the passionate choice to will God’s will in all our living. The exercise of Jesus’s will to always do the will of the Father is the key to our participation in God. Like Jesus, we participate in God by submitting our will to do the purposes of God perfectly...Read More
In the incarnation God lifted humanity into union with himself in Jesus. The union humanity once had with God, lost in Adam, is now restored. God has restored union with humanity through his own two hands. God, the incarnate Word, united with our humanity by the Spirit, reverses the human condition through his death and...Read More
In Jesus Christ all God’s purposes for humanity and creation are fulfilled. Therefore God, being made man, not only unites us to God but reveals how humans are to live in this world. In this way God both gifts us in spiritual union with himself (spirituality) and models how we are to live (the spiritual...Read More
The spiritual conflict of this world is not between the spirit and physical flesh. Instead, this world’s spiritual conflict is a life lived under God’s reign versus life lived in rebellion against God’s purposes for creation. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 34.Read More
