In this episode of Walking in the Spirit, we begin the final section of Chapter 10 of The Normal Christian Life by Watchman Nee and spend some time looking at a word that Paul uses repeatedly in Romans 8: walk. Nee draws attention to the fact that Paul tells us to walk after the Spirit, and that immediately raises a question. Why walk? Why not work, strive, achieve, accomplish, or produce?

As we work through the passage, we look at the difference between a walk and a work, between trying to do something for God and learning to live in dependence upon Holy Spirit. Romans 8 presents the Christian life as something very different from self-improvement, religious effort, or personal determination. The life of a son begins with dependence and continues in dependence. The Father never intended us to produce the Christian life for Him. He gave us Christ as our life, and Holy Spirit is committed to bringing that life into expression as we learn to walk with Him.

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

What does Watchman Nee mean by hypocrisy and playacting?

In this episode of Walking in the Spirit, Alex continues through Chapter 10 of The Normal Christian Life and opens up a conversation around two words that have stayed with him since first reading this section: hypocrisy and playacting. They are words we usually associate with religion, pretence, and putting on a show for others, but Nee uses them in a way that reaches much deeper than that.

As the conversation unfolds, Alex reflects on the difference between trying to live the Christian life and allowing the life of Christ to be expressed through us. Drawing from Colossians 3, personal experience, and Nee's teaching on the law of life, he explores why so much of Christian living can become an effort to maintain an appearance, and why the Father's intention has always been something far greater than behaviour management. The issue is never whether we can imitate Christ well enough, but whether we are trusting the life that He has already placed within us.

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

What does it mean to be harnessed by Holy Spirit?

In this episode of Walking in the Spirit, Alex opens up a conversation around a picture that has become increasingly real in his own life over recent months. Drawing from Watchman Nee, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and personal experience, he reflects on the tendency to become involved in situations simply because we care about people, have an opinion, or believe we can help. Yet Holy Spirit is already at work, already dealing with hearts, already arranging circumstances, and already accomplishing what He intends to accomplish.

As the conversation unfolds, Alex considers Bonhoeffer's observation that Christ stands between every believer, and why there are places in another person's walk with the Father that do not belong to us. The challenge is learning to recognise what Holy Spirit is doing, identify with Him, and remain within the measure He has given, rather than stepping beyond it with the very best of intentions.

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

Habakkuk declared that the earth would be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Here's my question: what if much of our talk about the glory of God, and much of our pursuit of the glory of God, has never been preceded by a clear understanding of what, or rather who, the glory of God actually is?"

There is certainly no shortage of teaching on glory. There is no shortage of pursuit of glory. We sing about it, pray for it, preach about it, and long to see it. Yet over the last few years, as the Father has been teaching me to live as a son, He has also been showing me Who His glory is.

In this Feature Episode, I want to challenge some deeply held assumptions and ask whether we have built our understanding from the substance, or from the shadows that pointed towards it. When Paul talks about the glory of God, who is he talking about? When John talks about the glory of God, who is he talking about? When the writer of Hebrews talks about the glory of God, who is he talking about?

And if the New Testament writers are all pointing to the same answer, what does that do to our understanding of Habakkuk's prophecy that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea?

Download the 'Companion Workbook' here

Part One: Who Is The Glory Of God? (00:28)

Part Two: How Is That Glory Revealed Throughout The Scriptures? (13:54)

Part Three: Where Is The Glory Now? (29:06)

Part Four: How Does The Knowledge Of His Glory Fill The Earth? (41:18)

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

In this more conversational and slightly messy episode of Walking in the Spirit, Alex shares some personal reflections after reading another section from Chapter 10 of Watchman Nee's The Normal Christian Life. What begins with Nee's comments about Bible reading soon opens up a much bigger conversation about consistency, why so many of us start things and never finish them, and why determination always seems to run out eventually.

Using his own experiences with Bible reading plans, unfinished projects, and the constant cycle of enthusiasm followed by exhaustion, Alex reflects on a simple but challenging question: if there is no consistency in the self life, where does true consistency come from? This episode is an honest and unscripted conversation about spiritual hunger, the life of Christ within us, and learning to trust the One who remains consistent when we are not.

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

We genuinely want to please God, and because we genuinely want to please Him, we have spent years believing that the answer must somehow be found in becoming a better version of ourselves. So we watch our behaviour, analyse our failures, measure our progress, make fresh commitments when we fall short, and then wonder why the Christian life feels exhausting. In this episode, we continue through Chapter 10 of The Normal Christian Life as Watchman Nee exposes the role of will-power in the Christian life and shows why so many sincere believers remain trapped in repeated failure, discouragement and self-condemnation.

Nee reminds us that the law of the Spirit of life is not something new that God is waiting to give us. It is a fresh unveiling of what has already been given through Christ. Together we explore why self-management interferes with the law of life, why so much of church culture keeps turning our attention back onto ourselves, and why the Father's answer is remarkably simple: let go of confidence in self and trust the life that already dwells within through our oneness with Holy Spirit.

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

In this episode, we continue through Watchman Nee's teaching on the law of the Spirit of life and begin looking more closely at the law of sin and death. Nee shows that our problem reaches much deeper than individual failures. The law of sin and death continually finds expression through the flesh, through all those familiar patterns by which we learned to meet our own needs independently from the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Nee then brings us to the Father's answer. One law is overcome by another law. Just as the life within a tree can lift paving stones that seem immovable, Holy Spirit brings the life of Christ into expression within us through the law of the Spirit of life. At the same time, Holy Spirit applies the reality of the Cross to the flesh, separating the son from the flesh by the law of the Spirit of life. The death side and the life side of the Cross work simultaneously together as Christ Himself becomes the source of our living.

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

In this episode, we begin exploring Watchman Nee's teaching on “The Law of the Spirit of Life” from Chapter 10 of The Normal Christian Life. Nee shows that the Christian life is governed by spiritual laws just as surely as the natural world is. The law of sin and death continually draws us back into self-reliance, while the law of the Spirit of life works through Holy Spirit to bring the life of Christ into expression within us.

We also spend time looking at the mind of the flesh and the mind of Christ. Drawing from Romans 8, 1 Corinthians 2, and Hebrews 12, we consider where weariness, discouragement, condemnation, and burnout really begin. The writer of Hebrews says, “Just think of Him,” because the mind of Christ never loses confidence in the Father. As we learn to turn our attention away from ourselves and toward Christ, we begin discovering the liberty Nee is describing throughout this chapter.

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

As we continue through Chapter 10 of The Normal Christian Life, we begin uncovering one of the biggest shifts in the Christian life: Christ Himself is the answer to every human need. Holy Spirit has not been given to help self improve itself, but to bring into expression the life of Christ within us. “He is our patience... He is our purity... He is the answer to every need.”

This episode also explores Nee’s line, “Christ my life is the secret of enlargement,” and what it means for Holy Spirit to enlarge the inward life of the believer so that Christ can increasingly be expressed through them. Drawing from Isaiah 54 and the enlarging of the tent, we look at how the Father widens our inward capacity before He entrusts greater territory outwardly.

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk

In this opening episode of Walking in the Spirit, we begin working through Chapter 10 of The Normal Christian Life and move from the frustration of Romans 7 into the liberty of Romans 8. Many of us understood what it meant to be “in Christ,” while still trying to live the Christian life through self effort, natural strength, and the self life with its fierce independence. But this chapter begins unveiling another way altogether, walking in the Spirit.

In this episode we unpack the difference between being “in Christ” and actually walking “in the Spirit,” and begin looking at Galatians 5:17 in a completely different light. This is not a war between Holy Spirit and the new man. We are not our flesh. Holy Spirit has been given to deal with the flesh, while we learn what it means to remain hidden in Christ and depend upon the One who we are joined to in spirit.

Definition of the flesh: “Flesh is all of the ways, both good and evil, that I met my own needs, from my own resources, independently from Them (Father, Son and Holy Spirit).”

About Alex

Alex is from the UK and he teaches and disciples across nations after years serving in Poland. His heart is the maturing of sons, believers growing into the fullness of Christ and revealing His life on earth. He serves within Firm Foundation, a work the Father is unfolding, joining partners who carry the same call. Through the Firm Foundation Focus podcast, Alex helps sons mature in Christ, discover the Father’s eternal purpose, and live Their way of life.

Check out the Firm Foundation website for more information ffdiscipleship.co.uk