Tag Archives: Love

Love Isn’t Always Nice

Jesus gave two central commands on which to build the spiritual life. Love the Divine, pursue the Divine, prioritize the Divine with all your heart, and second, love people with the same passion you love yourself. In this lesson, we think together about what this means, and how we can do it. Since Jesus made it so central to the spiritual life, there’s a lot riding on us getting it right. Have a listen. Continue reading

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Friends for The Fray: The Lost Art of Confession (part 2)

After last week’s digression to reinforce the importance of making for ourselves a healthy spiritual community, today we resume looking at the practicality of this ancient spiritual spiritual practice, confession.

The themes of this lesson are very personal for me. The bulk of last week’s digression-lesson was a personal story, and this week is too. It was embarrassing 15 years ago, now it is one of my most cherished memories. Continue reading

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Friends For The Fray: A Digression to Reinforce

This digression will expand what I said last week, and I’ll spend the lion’s share of our time telling you a story from my own life. It’s a story of love for people, and how without it, we cannot give our gifts to one another, and consequently, we fall short of our destinies. Continue reading

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Friends for the Fray: An Imperative

As we’ve been talking about “The Big Three,” pride, lust, and greed, we’re seeing that we don’t turn away their destructive powers in our lives very well alone. Though we’ve been schooled in individualism, and independence, these thoroughly American traits don’t tend to serve us well on the spiritual journey. Today’s lesson focuses on the imperative of hammering out for ourselves, a community of spiritual friends. The next few lessons will focus on how to do that; what it will look like when we do. Continue reading

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Good Power vs. Bad: Insiders and Outsiders

Continuing our look at good and bad power, we turn to how one comes to be a user of the former. How do we become good-power people? Jesus had a lot to say about power, and critical to his teaching was an understanding that successful people, in-group people, tend to become so inwardly focused, they miss the big issues, and trip into the use of bad power. Continue reading

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Good Power vs. Bad: Humility

In this second installment of our lesson on Good Power, we look first at how necessary humility is to exercising good power, and second, how we develop humility in our souls. Continue reading

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Soul-Training: Making Peace

At first glance, making peace doesn’t appear to be a discipline for training one’s soul…

Have a listen! Continue reading

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A Talk With a Precious 12-Year Old Little Girl

This week I (Doug) had an appointment with one of the 12 year old girls in our community. Her mom brought her by to talk about question she has about God. She’d just been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and was asking a variation of an ancient trouble spot for Christians: How can God be completely good, and have created a world with such horrendous pain and evil? Continue reading

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Thinking About Thinking About Jesus (Appendix)

by Doug Hammack [Download MP3] In the lesson we did before the summer break, there were two Stories about how we think about Jesus “dying to save us,” that we couldn’t fit in.  I thouht they were beautiful enough stories … Continue reading

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The Third Way

Jesus’s admonition to love our enemies and turn the other cheek may be mis-interpreted due to the lack of cultural context he placed it in. Find out what Jesus may have intended it to mean by looking for a third way to react to an insult to you. Continue reading

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