Status Updates From Hábitos espirituais: Prazer...

One of the most loving things we can do for each other in the church is tell each other when we’re wrong. Call it correction, reproof, or rebuke … but don’t miss what makes it distinctively Christian, and a gift to our souls: It is a great act of love. The kind of rebuke that the Scriptures commend is the kind intended to stop us from continuing on a destructive path.

The key principles of the means of grace are Jesus’s voice (word), his ear (prayer), and his body (church). The various disciplines and practices, then—our habits of grace—are ways of hearing him (his word), and responding (in prayer) to him, in the context of his people (the church).

[We] should not be self-consciously preoccupied with how we’re being strengthened or what grace we’re receiving. Rather, our focus together is the crucified and risen Christ and the incomparable excellencies of his person and work (which illumines all the means of grace and various spiritual disciplines, not only corporate worship—and is why the subtitle of this book begins with “enjoying Jesus”).

Getting away, quiet and alone, is no special grace on its own. But the goal is to create a context for enhancing our hearing from God in his word and responding back to him in prayer.