Following on from my earlier blog, ‘The truth about me’, about how God has opened me up to learn from him again, I wanted to highlight some of the lessons that I have learned.
I have already shared about the roughly nine books I managed to get through last month and how I received learning on:
- faithfulness, spiritual warfare, prayer & fasting and watching, heaven, courtship, life dreams, being in the presence of the spirit and more. This was great because beforehand I was capable of reading books thinking “I’ve learned about this before”, but now I am reading with a mind-set of “what do I need to be reminded of, or what is my thinking wrong about, or what new things are there to pick up?”
This month I’ve also been getting my book head on:
- I’ve read through ‘Extravagant’ by Bryan Jarrett, a challenge to live in extravagantly in terms of faith, generosity and love (there were three books I considered must reads and bought copies of for my family before I left, this is now the fourth in the same vein as those books).
- ‘The Five Love Languages’, by Dr Gary Chapman, is a great read and another book I recommend to everyone. It’s about how we share love with each other through five ‘languages’ – Words of Affirmation, Acts of Service, Gifts, Physical Touch and Quality Time. Each of us has a primary love language and so we only really feel that people love us if they show us it through our main one of these. They too, will likewise only feel truly loved by us if we ‘speak’ to them in their primary love language. I recommend everyone should read and understand this through one of the books in the series (There’s ‘for married couples’, ‘for teenagers’, ‘for single people’, which is what I read, and so on).
- I’ve been re-reading two books – ‘Crazy Love’ by Francis Chan and ‘Radical’ by David Platt (they’re on that list I mentioned above). They both pose a challenge to live our lives fully surrendered to God, rather than just having a Christian spin on the materialism so rampant around us.
- I’m about to start reading ‘Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship’ by Jack Frost, about recognising that you are a child of God and the inheritance that comes with it, not needing to be insecure about anything because your hope for everything doesn’t rely on man but on God.
- And I’ve also dipped into a bit of fiction, reading a book called ‘Redeeming Love’ by Francine Rivers – a story set in Gold Rush America, based on the story of Hosea in the Bible. It’s nice to lose myself in some fiction since, as you may have noticed, it’s easy for me to read a lot of theoretical books.
Finally, let me outline some of the challenges I have written down in my journal or simply found myself thinking about over the last few weeks:
- I had felt that I had to try and come up with something “spiritual” in prayer sessions or feedback, rather than just being able to sit and listen for what God was saying.
- I am prone to image management – I want stories to make myself sound good, words/visions so that I can seem spiritually mature.
- I try to control myself – evaluating whether my thoughts and actions are ok, instead of letting the Holy Spirit transform me.
- I had believed that God didn’t want to use spiritual gifts in me, but He does.
- I desire to be more important in people’s lives than I really am or should be, but I shouldn’t be so self-centred.
- I always want people to think nicely of me and so only want to do things that will make people happy and therefore be associated with positive-ness. But instead I should be someone who is associated with goodness, even if that means saying things that are hard at times but are important.
- I speak more than I need to and should spend time in individual and in group situations listening more and giving more space for others to speak.
- When I read that “26,000 children will die today from preventable causes” I just let myself see it as a statistic, but that’s a TWENTY SIX THOUSAND CHILDREN! I need my heart broken again.
- To be truly teachable also requires that I don’t have to think “maybe they’re right because… [and then frame it in terms I already have an understanding of]”, but instead just be able to think “maybe they’re right, even though I don’t yet understand how”.
- My life should show that devotion and extravagance towards following God do not require me to have first seen a miracle or healing or otherwise, but just to know Him personally as I already do.
