As far back as you can recall, you’ve started or ended the day with a
time of personal meditation on God’s Word and prayer. Only this time,
you try something different. You want to hear Jesus speak to you
personally. So you take out pen and paper and record the results. As
she tells us in her introduction, this is what happened when Sarah Young
sought a deeper sense of the presence of Jesus. The result is the
daily devotional, Jesus Calling: Enjoying Peace in His Presence
(Thomas Nelson, 2004). The book has taken off since it was first
published. It now includes a variety of supplements and has even been
turned into a NKJV study Bible.
The author states up front that, unlike Scripture, the words she
reports from Jesus are not inerrant. Nevertheless, she presents them as
first-person speech from Jesus himself. “I knew that God communicated
with me through the Bible,” she says, “but I yearned for more.”
“Increasingly, I wanted to hear what God had to say to me personally on a
given day.” That “more” was “the Presence of Jesus,” something beyond
the ordinary means of grace. “So I was ready to begin a new spiritual
quest,” beginning with Andrew Murray’s The Secret of the Abiding Presence. After reading God Calling, she relates, “I began to wonder if I, too, could receive messages during my times of communing with God.”
Preparing for an interview today on the topic, I read through Jesus Calling. A few reflections: first touching on the method and then on the message. Continue at Michael Horton
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