• Featured,  Spiritual Growth,  Spiritual Maturity

    How to Be Spiritually Minded

    To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Romans 8:6 When I read this verse in my daily devotional time, the words spiritually minded popped out at me. I instinctively knew what it meant to carnally minded since I have so much practice at it. But I couldn’t pin down what it meant to be spiritually minded nearly as easily. One of my goals in my blog is to make spiritual concepts more concrete. I do this not for my readers but for myself. How easy it is to sound high minded and cerebral without saying anything coherent, particularly when it comes to…

  • salvation
    Featured,  Salvation,  Spiritual Formation

    How to Practice Your Salvation

    For most of my life as a Christian, salvation was a one-time event. You went to the altar call or got yourself baptized and the deal was sealed. I learned in Sunday school and from countless sermons that salvation was through grace or sometimes through faith, depending on the denomination. The primary reason I could be saved was that Jesus died for my sins. I have since discovered that these are half-truths, really. Before you decide that I am a heretic for questioning the time-honored formulas for salvation, I have to first clarify that I firmly believe in all of the statements of the Nicene Creed. My issue is not…

  • spirit
    soul,  Spirit,  Spiritual Maturity

    The Care and Feeding of the Human Spirit

    For most of us, the line between soul and spirit is an amorphous one. In fact, many use the terms interchangeably. However, I believe they are two separate, though not unrelated, parts of our identity. Just as God exists in a trinity, so do we, being made up of body, soul, and spirit. Because of this, I think a quick definition of the soul and the spirit is in order. The soul is the seat of your thoughts and emotions. The soul often receives a bad rap. To behave in a soulish way is Christianspeak for acting poorly. But the soul is an important part of our makeup. We spend…