The prayer for the week last week out of the Divine Hours is:
O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The Wesleyan movement focused on holiness in a way that really connected and affected people in their day. Holiness in the Wesleyan sense, is the idea that God’s sanctifying grace will work in the life and heart of the believer and continue to perfect them. In other words, God loves you as you are, but God loves you too much to leave you there. Holiness – the Wesleyan perspective is that we ought to expect something to happen in us, by the Holy Spirit, because of Christ, to the glory of God the Father.
There are a couple of articles that I have been meaning to link for a bit that have to do with discipleship. I’ve been thinking about what it means to make disciples in the church and what that implies in regards to our leadership (or more specifically my leadership). Are we focused on the depth of people’s relationships with Christ? What does that look like? How do we lead in that? The first article is in regards to leadership and it is titled “An Unspoiled View.” The second article is a brief interview on the blog “Church Marketing Sucks,” and I linked it specifically because it mentions counting “life change” in coming up with measurements by which to judge the effectiveness of the church. They are interesting reading.
One of my biggest desires is to be in the midst of something exciting that God is doing – and God’s restoration of the human dignity that He created is an exciting thing to see, every time I catch a glimpse of it.