Rev. ed. of: Towards God. 1989. Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-180.).

Discover What It Really Means to Be Blessed In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus identified attitudes that bring God's favor: weeping over sin, demonstrating meekness, showing mercy, nurturing peace, and more. Some of these phrases have become so familiar that we've lost sight of their meaning. In this powerful study, you will gain a fresh understanding of what it looks like to align your life with God's priorities. Here you will discover anew why the word blessed mean walking the fulness and satisfaction of God, no matter your circumstances. As you look closely at the meaning behind each of the Beatitudes, you will see how these truths can shape your choices every day--and bring you closer to the heart of God. 40 Minutes a Week Could Change Your Life! The 40-Minute Bible Studies series from the teaching team at Precept Ministries International tackles the topics that matter to you. These inductive study guides, designed to be completed in just six 40-minute lessons with no homework required, help you discover for yourself what God says and how it applies to your life today. With the leader’s notes and Bible passages included right in the book, each self-contained study is a powerful resource for personal growth and small-group discussion.

Salvation is the first step in a person's spiritual journey, but it is just that, the first step. A person must not stop there. It is the intent of God to see all His children grow into spiritual maturity. The process of moving from spiritual infancy to maturity occurs by taking one step after another in the direction of God. This journey toward maturity is what the author means by the term "spiritual formation."It is important for Christians to have a guide to help them navigate the path leading to maturity. Dr. Hayes clears a path for spiritual sojourners to travel and provides assistance to those who are willing to take the journey. Not everyone is at the same place in this expedition. Some people who read this book will be at the very beginning of the journey. Some will be a little way down the path. Not everything in this book will be new to the more mature Christian, but they will make new discoveries if they pay attention to their guide.Jesus promised Christians can live in spiritual abundance. This can be achieved if the believer will put one foot in front of the other. Taking Steps Toward God will help readers to walk in the right direction.

This detailed discussion of Augustine's journey toward God, as it is described in the first six books of the Confessions, begins with infancy, moves through childhood and adolescence, and culminates in youthful maturity. In the first stage, Augustine deals with the problems of original innocence and sin; in the second, he addresses a pear-stealing episode that recapitulates the theft of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and confronts the problem of sexuality with which he wrestles until his conversion; and in the third, he turns toward philosophy, only to be captivated successively by dualism, skepticism, and Catholicism. Augustine's journey exhibits temporal, spatial, and eternal dimensions and combines his head and his heart in equal proportions. Vaught shows that the Confessions should be interpreted as an attempt to address the person as a whole rather than through our intellectual or volitional dimensions exclusively. The passion with which Augustine describes the end of his journey is reflected best in a sentence found in the opening chapter of the text—"You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." Interpreting this statement, Carl G. Vaught presents a more emphatically Christian Augustine than is usually found in contemporary scholarship. Refusing to view Augustine in an exclusively Neoplatonic framework, Vaught holds that Augustine baptizes Plotinus just as successfully as Aquinas baptizes Aristotle. It cannot be denied that Ancient philosophy influences Augustine decisively. Nevertheless, he holds the experiential and the theoretical dimensions of his journey toward God together as a distinctive expression of the Christian tradition.

What you believe about God sets the foundation of the person you will become. In God Has a Name, pastor and New York Times bestselling author John Mark Comer invites you to rethink many of the prevalent myths and misconceptions about God and weigh them against what God actually tells us about himself. After all, what you believe about God will ultimately shape the type of person you become. We all live at the mercy of our ideas, and nowhere is this more true than our ideas about God. The problem is many of our ideas about God are wrong. Not all wrong, but wrong enough to form our souls in detrimental and disheartening ways. God Has a Name is a simple yet profound guide to understanding God in a new light--focusing on what God says about himself in the Bible. This one shift has the potential to radically alter how you relate to God, not as a doctrine, but as a relational being who responds to you in an elastic, back-and-forth way. John Mark Comer takes you line by line through Exodus 34:6-8--Yahweh's self-revelation on Mount Sinai, one of the most quoted passages in the Bible. Along the way, Comer addresses some of the most profound questions he came across as he studied these noted lines in Exodus, including: Why do we feel this gap between us and God? Could it be that a lot of what we think about God is wrong? Not all wrong, but wrong enough to mess up how we relate to him? What if our "God" is really a projection of our own identity, ideas, and desires? What if the real God is different, but far better than we could ever imagine? No matter where you are in your spiritual journey, God Has a Name invites you to step into a fresh and biblically rooted vision of who God is that has the potential to alter your life with God and shape who you become.

According to Father Alexander Men (1935-1990), the Russian Orthodox priest and popular spiritual teacher who was publicly martyred in 1990 in the former USSR, prayer is “the flight of the heart toward God.” This work, available for the first time in English, is a collection of his writings, lectures, and sermons on prayer. You will discover both ancient and modern wisdom, and you will see how one Eastern Orthodox priest taught his parishioners to pray.