This week Pastor Helen Bates shared with life group leaders some excerpts from John Ortberg's writings on the subject of the Holy Spirit and our part in spiritual maturity. One particular part struck a chord. John stated that

"if you are struggling with impatience, training may mean rearranging life around opportunities for the Spirit to increase your patience. Deliberately drive in the slow lane on the freeway. Purposely get in the longer line at the grocery store. If the Holy Spirit is calling you to break patterns of sin, merely trying leads to frustration, but deliberately training leads to change."

It brought to mind the time, about three years ago, when I decided to resume riding a motorcyle to work after a twenty year break. From where I live, it's approximately a 90 kilometre round trip. It wasn't long before I realised that a lot of things had changed since I last rode. The bike I was riding was more powerful, there was a lot more traffic on the road and people seemed to be more impatient than ever to get where they were going. In the interests of self-preservation, I decided that I would have to build into my travelling certain practices. One of them was to deliberately head towards the slow lane on the freeway. Initially, I thought it would give me time to gain the equivalent of my sealegs.

It was strange at first because I found that I was the only motorcycle rider in that lane, at that speed. In time I realised that what had started as a concern for safety had become a lesson in humility. (I think it was John Eldridge who said that most sins fall under the categories of pride and idolatry. I have to tell you that pride is something that I battle with every day.) The truth is that there was a temptation to demonstrate the power of my bike and my riding ability - pride. Cars and bikes were zipping past me and people were cutting in front of me, forcing me to slow even more to allow a safety margin. I was constantly having to exercise humility. Over time, I discovered that I'd had a change of heart. I consciously prepared myself for these things to happen. I experienced a calmness and a lack of frustration. I also found that, as I gave way to people coming into my lane, they often responded with friendly waves. Drivers in general seemed to treat me with respect which was a pleasant surprise. Better still, I found this attitude of putting others first spilled over into other areas of my life. For me, the breakthrough in my sin has been as John Ortberg said, not trying to be humble, but choosing behaviours that require humility.

The doleful reality is that very few human beings really do concretely desire to hear what God has to say to them. This is shown by how rarely we listen for his voice when we are not in trouble or when we are not being faced with a decision that we do not know how to handle. People who understand and warmly desire to hear God's voice will, by contrast, want to hear it when life is uneventful just as much as they want to hear it when they are facing trouble or big decisions. This is a test that we should all apply to ourselves as we go in search of God's word: do we seek it only under uncomfortable circumstances? Our answer may reveal that our failure to hear God's voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.

- Dallas Willard, Hearing God

The World's Most Tragic Waste

The man who dies out of Christ is said to be lost, and hardly a word in the English tongue expresses his condition with greater accuracy. He has squandered a rare fortune and at the last he stands for a fleeting moment and looks around, a moral fool, a wastrel who has lost in one overwhelming and irrecoverable loss, his soul, his life, his peace, his total, mysterious personality, his dear and everlasting all.

- A. W. Tozer

Those who are the most inclined to trust God without any evidence except His Word always receive the greatest amount of visible evidence of His love.

- Charles Gallaudet Trumbull