If you have a group of people come together around a vision for real discipleship, people who are committed to grow, committed to change, committed to learn, then a spiritual assessment tool can work.
Interpretation
Real discipleship requires a collective commitment to growth and learning.
Dallas Willard emphasizes that genuine spiritual growth occurs within a community that shares a common vision. When individuals are dedicated to evolving, changing, and learning together, tools for spiritual assessment become effective in guiding their development.
In practice
In a church group meeting to foster deeper spiritual connections.
The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.
The first act of love is always the giving of attention.
So many people would like to have guidance from God because obviously, if you have a word from God, it's the best possible thing. But they don't relate that to life as a whole. Often they want guidance as a way of opting out of the responsibility of making decisions.
What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.
The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
Strangely enough, they have a mind to till the soil, and the love of possessions is a disease in them.
Puddleglum's my name. But it doesn't matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again.
Life is bigger than processes and overflows and dwarfs them.
Since Satan can't destroy the gospel, he has too often neutralized its usefulness by addition, subtraction or substitution.
Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.
A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department... they don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.
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