The prayer that Jesus taught His disciples to pray is a beautiful model for us as we approach God. Using the short-hand ideas of pause, rejoice, ask, and yield, we learn to powerfully engage God in prayer.

Jesus declared the present reality of the Kingdom of God, and our hearts can become a place where God’s rule and reign is effective and complete. When we pray we increasingly become representatives of the Kingdom.

Prayer begins with the recognition of who God is: both the Almighty Creator and our Daddy. When we hold together the transcendence of God along with His eminence, we start to understand the mystery of prayer.

Healthy communities transform the surrounding community because of the presence of Jesus flowing through His people.

Guilt and duty cannot change us; only love can do that. When we truly encounter the love and grace of Jesus, we're transformed from the inside out. Spiritual formation requires effort on our part, but the real work of transformation is work done by the Spirit.

Grace is not opposed to effort, it's opposed to earning. Our relational and cultural contexts are shaping us in powerful ways, even without our knowledge and consent, so we must instead choose to be formed in the way of Jesus. The choice to be an apprentice of Jesus is a choice to change: to engage in spiritual formation that is intentional as we increasingly become like Jesus and begin to do the things that He did.

Our natural pathway to change is to perform or conform, but Jesus invites us to be transformed.

The difference between reading the Scriptures and any other book is the deep power to change us. As God reveals Himself to us, we begin to engage the wisdom of God and not our own earthly wisdom.

The beauty of Jesus is seen in the Scripture, so how do we engage the Word to see how the Good News of Jesus is good news for us?

The first step of reading the Scripture is recognizing who God is and who we are. He supplies everything we need and lack.