Leading people to a more intimate friendship with God
“A woman in her glory, a woman of beauty, is a woman who is not striving to become beautiful or worthy or enough. She knows in her quiet center where God dwells that He finds her beautiful, has deemed her worthy and in him, she is enough. In fact, the only thing getting in the …
“Why did God curse Eve with loneliness and heartache, an emptiness that nothing would be able to fill? Wasn’t her life going to be hard enough out there in the world, banished from the Garden that was her true home, her only home, never able to return? It seems unkind. Cruel, even.” “He did it …
“We are made for intimacy with God, not just knowledge about him. There comes a time in the life of every believer when propositional truth is no longer enough. It will always remain central, the foundation for our faith. And sometimes it is all we have, and we can run far and long on it. …
“When God created Eve, he calls her an ezer kenegdo… Robert Alter… says that this phrase is ‘notoriously difficult to translate.’ The various attempts we have in English are ‘helper’ or ‘companion’ or the notorious ‘help meet’…” “The word ezer is used only twenty other places in the entire Old Testament. And in every other …
“Unveiling beauty [glory] is our greatest expression of love, because it is what the world most needs from us. When we choose not to hide, when we choose to offer our hearts, we are choosing to love. Jesus offers, he invites, he is present. That is how he loves. That is how we love — …
“Unveiling our beauty [glory] is our greatest expression of hope. We hope it will matter, that our beauty [glory] really does make a difference. We hope there is a greater and higher Beauty [Glory], hope we are reflecting that Beauty [Glory], and hope it will triumph. Our hope is that all is well because of …
“Unveiling our beauty [glory] really just means unveiling our… hearts. It’s scary, for sure. That is why it is our greatest expression of faith, because we are going to have to trust Jesus — really trust him. We’ll have to trust him that we have a beauty [glory], that what he has said of us …
“God… wants to heal us through his love… He wants us to experience verses like, ‘Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her’ (Hosea 2:14). And ‘You have stolen my heart, my sister, my bride.’ (Song of Songs 4:9) Our hearts are desperate …
“You are loved. Deeply. Profoundly. Unimaginably loved. And you are a wondrous creature… You have never been a disappointment to him. You are not disappointing him now. You may be disappointed, but he is not. Jesus knew what he was in for when he came ‘to seek and to save what was lost’ (Luke 19:10). …
These are the 25 books that I would most recommend for growing in spiritual maturity. I tried to rank them in terms of priority for reading. It is genuinely hard to compare two excellent books that have different topics, so the positions could easily be moved around some. 1) The Bible. Regular reading of the …
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