Kindle Notes & Highlights
is Jeremiah 29:13: “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”
In a good relationship, we’re trying to stay in touch with each other, trying to keep close. This means we’re seeking to share our thoughts and experiences because in close relationships, we share our whole lives. This is true of a relationship with God. If you read the Bible, you’ll find this theme throughout—that God is love (1 John 4:8) and that He created human beings to live in full, life-giving relationship with Him.
He wants people who truly want to know Him in a deep and personal way.
He’s not looking for people to acknowledge Him. He’s looking for people to receive Him in a committed, “follow Me” relationship.
sin is anything in us that is not perfectly pure. C’mon,
To have a relationship with Him means that we too must become pure.
“God is light; in him there is no darkness at all”
this light without any darkness, is holiness.
This is my best understanding of God’s holiness. When we encounter a breathtaking view or a moment so beautiful that it makes time stop and our voices go quiet, we are getting close to God’s holiness.
His holiness is pure, and to come close to that holiness requires us to be pure as well.
So God—Creator of the Grand Canyon and Creator of us—wants this relationship with us.
But since sin keeps us from it—keeps us from being pure enough to
be near His holiness—this relationship requires a standard that’s impossible for us to meet.
In ourselves we cannot meet it; we “fall short,” just as the verse says. God alone is the one who can...
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Jesus—in His perfect life and His willing, sacrificial death—make...
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because dealing with even the “smallest” of sin is burdensome.
Jesus in His love, the sinless Son of God1 bore the costly weight of our wrongdoing,
If your soul is hungry, if you know what identity deficits feel like, understanding that God says these things about you, that He feels these things for you, is so satisfying.
As we grow into understanding the depth of God’s heart for us, these affirmations begin to slowly fill the identity-deficit places in our souls.
All those things we’ve been doing to look for affirmation, to try to be important, to feel important, to be admired, to be thought of highly—now we have an answer.
And not from people, not from material things that don’t fill our hearts, not from titles o...
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Once we begin to grasp this new identity and the value and affirmation we are receiving from God Himself, we begin to chang...
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Many people struggle with grace. Many have a hard time actually believing it, receiving it, making it their own reality. Because of this, many people decide they will somehow punish themselves or do something to “work this off.” They might do this by seeking forms of penance (practices to “work off” sin and show God they are taking it seriously), either self-created or presented by a church.
This idea of “paying for our sins” is a deeply ingrained belief that we can work off our own mistakes. In our inner lives, this might come through self-punitive, shaming talk in our heads, where we try to convince God and ourselves that we take our sin seriously.
We remind ourselves that we’re not good people. We beat ourselves up. We try to find som...
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This mind-set is similar to a bad diet mentality. We try really hard to eat healthy foods, but then the nachos or the g...
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us, and we indulge. We wake up the next morning, resolved that we are serious about our diet, and we “do penance” for our previous night’s sin by withholding food. And most of the time, this shame mentality about food just causes us to eat more and ...
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We are unable to save ourselves, but Jesus can save us.
Non-Christian religions teach that if we do the right things, practice the right religious practices, think the right things, etc., then perhaps we will be good enough.
God the Creator of all that exists, God the Father of Jesus Christ, has informed us that we cannot have a relationship with Him except by receiving His offer of forgiveness through Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:22).
God saved me and offers me life and forgiveness. This must mean that God wants my life to be happy and go the way I envision it. If hard things happen to me, this makes me question if God is reliable. If my life picture is not coming true, it must mean that either God is punishing me or He is not who I thought He was. If a tragedy happens in my life, it must mean that God is either incapable or unloving. Either He was not capable of stopping it—which means I now have a crisis of faith—or He doesn’t love me (or is punishing me or cursing
me), which gives me a crisis of heart.
If I am good, then God should reward me. If I do the right thing and make the choice of integrity, then God must make things go well. If I’m a good spouse, then God must make my marriage happy. If I do the right things as a parent, then God must give me happy, accomplished children.
“I love you; I died for you; I will be with you in every breath of your life, through the joys and the tragedies.”
so the point that we hope you’ve gotten loud and clear by now is that Christianity is not something to accomplish—it’s not a rule book, and it’s not a performance or formula. It’s an intimate and growing relationship with Jesus Christ. Christianity is a daily, interactive relationship with Jesus, where I am giving my life to Him and He is giving His life to me.
‘Ken, the secret is to let your spiritual life be natural and let your natural life be spiritual.’ And I’ve never forgotten it.”
Let your spiritual life be natural, and let your natural life be spiritual.
Having visible signs of invisible things is very helpful to us in life—and in Christian life in particular.
We see, touch, hear, and taste things that are physical and tangible.
Or again, saying to God, “I want to stop living my way for me; I want to start living Your way for You.”
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No
one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
Yes, the idea of coming to God “through” Jesus was very much like the covenant ceremony of walking “through” the two ...
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we are fully forgiven, • we are given new life, • we have really become children of God, and • we can live freely in this new life He’s given us.
Put most plainly, you begin a life of “abiding” in Him and “remaining” in Him.3 What does that mean? It means you seek to grow into your relationship with Him by bringing your heart, soul, mind, and strength (strength refers to your commitment and your will) fully into the relationship (Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27).
“I can remember being an anxious person about small details in my life, and someone told me to ‘rest and lay back in Jesus.’ I was a little frustrated at this response because it felt so powerless. I wanted a step-by-step instruction manual on the things I could do while laying back and resting in Jesus!”
To more fully illustrate the idea of remaining or “laying back in Jesus,” Jesus Himself said it this way: “Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:4–5).
Do you know that all living things live in something? Trees and bushes and flowers live and thrive in the ground. Fish live and thrive in the water. Beautifully, we see this order in Genesis 1 when God created. He said, “Let the land produce vegetation” (Genesis 1:11), and “Let the water teem with living creatures” (Genesis 1:20). Reading this,
begin to understand that the first element (land or water) is the source of life for its living things. The land is the source of life for the trees and vegetation. The water is the source of life for the fish. If you remove a fish from the water, it wi...
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being in Christ means we have come home where we belong.
