“Somewhere deep down within you, everything that Christ has ever gone through is already deposited in you. Some of that which is His experience He desires that you also experience. He has a yoke to place around your neck. It is an easy yoke; that is a guarantee, for He has already gained the strength to bear that yoke.”
Gene Edwards, The Inward Journey, p. 68
This book goes deep fast, and it taking me on a pretty good path. It is out of print, so I’m including a link to Amazon.
Yesterday I got to talk to a guy that had spent the summer in jail. At one point in his time there, he got in a fight and spent 12 days in the "jail within the jail." – no windows, a shower every 3 days, and they passed his food to him through a slot in the door. He said it was really miserable but he wouldn’t deny that he deserved it.
In his summer in jail, he read through the Bible three times, in three different translations. He said the NLT was easy to read, but he wanted to aquaint himself with the older language of the KJV, so he read it once through too.
He said he is now closer to God than ever before. He read through the 5 books of Moses, got out of jail and went back to his dad and said, "Why didn’t you ever read this and tell me that God was always with me?! Why didn’t you tell me that God went along with me through every one of my trials in life?!"
Pretty awesome. He is now in his late 30s and is eager to learn more about, and draw closer to Jesus.
A couple years ago I was reading “The Forgotten Ways” by Alan Hirsch. At some point I stopped. I’m not sure why. I remember around that time I was getting really frustrated with the way church was and I was reading a lot of books about the problems with church but I couldn’t find much support to fix those problems. I think that might be why I stopped reading books about church for a while.
I was cleaning up my office yesterday and I came across this book again. I opened it to the page AFTER my bookmark and read this.

You may or may not already know where I’m going with this. I have seen 2 local churches self destruct due to this very thing over the last two years. That’s right, I said two. Both churches saw compelling opportunity to reach out to more people than ever. Both churches got eaten alive in the rapid, discontinuous change happening around them. The result: in one case a new church was formed, making the changes that the old church couldn’t make, and becoming it’s own entity. In the second case, a new church is now in the process of forming, but it is too soon to tell how things will go (they are still in their first 3-4 months of formation).
One problem, of course, is that neither of the old churches could handle the change, and so the group that could see that they did need to change left. The new parts are now actively growing like the old churches would have been, and the old churches are growing the way they have in the past.
Here is a backyard video I made with some thoughts on John 15:2.
John 15:2
He takes away every branch that does not bear fruit in me. He prunes every branch that bears fruit so that it will bear more fruit.
