After Jesus rose from the grave, the Apostle John records four meetings Jesus has with people. The first of these is Jesus' appearance in the locked room to His disciples, and I want to bring attention to that today. It reads: On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were …
Choosing Wise Guides for the Spiritual Life
In The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we learn of a powerful enchanted ring threatening the collective peoples of Middle Earth. After the ring’s discovery, representatives of various peoples eventually agree it must be destroyed by traversing torturous difficulties to cast it into the fiery …
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Living for God in Our Bodies: notes on embodied discipleship
"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me." (Galatians 2:20) Discipleship is an interesting concept that at times has become abstracted into …
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Five Important Contemporary Books on Spiritual Formation and Discipleship
In my message this past weekend at Eastbrook, "The Fruitful Life," I explored what it means to lead a fruitful life with God based in what we encounter in Psalm 1 and John 15. Amidst that message, I shared a basic framework for spiritual formation, or discipleship, that came from Dallas Willard. Reflecting on that …
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Three Types of Pruning in the Spiritual Life
This past weekend at Eastbrook as part of our series, "The Tree and the Vine," I reflected on what it means to experience God's pruning in the spiritual life with a message entitled "The Pruned Life." I concluded that message with three types of pruning within the spiritual life. I'm sharing the basic notes on …
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Matthew Erickson 