What is reality? The answer Jesus gives to this question is: God and his kingdom. That is what you can count on and what you have to come to terms with.
Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.
It’s just stunning to watch churches struggle to get mission statements when there it is, the Great Commission, and they should simply do what it says.
That’s the illusion – the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out – and it has affected us in many ways. That’s a part of the idea that professing is enough.
We cannot handle injustice by finding more ways to impose what is in fact “right” on people. It has to come from the inside. And that’s where the church should be working.
To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.
We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.
Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.
If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil.
