What a conference!!!! I had so much fun teaching, interacting with others, and praying for people. Dennis Duncan was fantastic in the telling of his story. God has done so much in Dennis’ life and this was the event for him to lift up our Lord Jesus Christ. The conference was attended well beyond my expectations. 77 people attended the conference and an additional dozen came to our 10 year anniversary celebration. 

The response to the teaching during times of small group discussion was great. It was hard to get everybody’s attention to move on to the next point! The Question and Answer time was also great with the many people participating. The size of a group can sometimes hold back the dialogue but it didn’t seem to be the case this time. I would love to hear your thoughts and reactions from the conference. Please use the contact page to get me a message. I would love to post some of your reactions. 

It is hard to believe PHM has been around for 10 years. I am grateful to God for these 10yrs and I am looking forward to the years to come. The future of PHM is in the Lord’s hands. Thank you again for all of your prayers and support. I will be spending ample time seeking the Lord for his direction, so keep in touch for announcements. 

Mike Eddins



Conference Notes: 

Spiritual Transformation toward Christlikeness 


Spiritual Formation 

“While the many Christian traditions have differed over the details of spiritual formation, they all come out at the same place: the transformation of the person into Christlikeness. “Spiritual formation” is the process of transforming the inner reality of the self (the inward being of the psalmist) in such a way that the overall life with God seen in the Bible naturally and freely comes to pass in us. Our inner world (the secret heart) becomes the home of Jesus, by his initiative and our response. As a result, our interior world becomes increasingly like the inner self of Jesus, and, therefore, the natural source of the words and deeds that are characteristics of him. By his enabling presence we come to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil.2:5) 

Richard Foster, Life with God: Reading the Bible for Spiritual Transformation p. 10 


Realization of God 

God is always at work 

John 5:17-20 

Jesus said to them, “My father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working. 

Revelation 3:19-20 

Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me. 


Dealing with God 

Conversion 

But when deep reflection had dredged out of the secret recesses of my soul all my misery and heaped it up in full view of my heart, there arose a mighty storm, bringing with it a mighty downpour of tears. That I might pour it forth with its own proper sounds. I flung myself down, how I do not know, under a certain fig tree, and gave free rein to my tears. The floods burst from my eyes, an acceptable sacrifice to you. Not indeed these very words but to this effects I spoke many things to you: “And you, Oh Lord, how long? How long, O lord, will you be angry forever? Remember not our past iniquities.” For I felt that I was held by them, and I grasped forth these mournful words, “How long, how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why not in this very hour an end to my uncleanness?” Such words I spoke, and with most bitter contrition I wept within my heart. And lo, I heard from a nearby house, a voice like that of a boy or a girl, I know not which, chanting and repeating over and over, “ Take up and read. Take up and read.” Instantly, with altered countenance, I began to think most intently whether children made use of any such chant in some kin of game, but I could not recall it anywhere. I checked the flow of my tears and got up, For I interpreted this solely as a command given by God to open the book and read the first chapter I should come upon. I snatched it up, opened it, and read in silence the chapter on which my eyes first fell: “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in strife and envy; but put you on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh in its concupiscence.” No further wished I to read, nor was there need to do so. Instantly, in truth, at the end of this sentence, as if before a peaceful light streaming into my heart, all the dark shadows of doubt fled away. 

Saint Augustine, Confessions of St. Augustine p. 202. 

The Grace of God is the power of God 

I Corinthians 1:18 

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God. 

Romans 1:16: 

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jews, then for the gentile. 

Getting honest with ourselves does not make us unacceptable to God. It does not distance us from God, but draws us to Him as nothing else can and opens us anew to the flow of grace. While Jesus calls each of us to a more perfect life, we cannot achieve it on our own. To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace. It is only through grace that any of us could dare to hope that we could become more like Christ.” 


Brennan Manning The Ragamuffin Gospel p.85 

The call asks do you really accept the message that God is head over heels in love with you? I believe that this question is at the core of our ability to mature and grow spiritually. If in our hearts we really don’t believe that God loves us as we are, if we are still tainted by the lie that we can do something to make God love us more, we are rejecting the message of the Cross. 

Brennan Manning The Ragamuffin Gospel p.159 

The Call to discipleship 

A disciple, or apprentice, is simply someone who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is. 

As a disciple of Jesus I am with him, by choice and by grace, learning from him how to live in the Kingdom of God. 

I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I. I am not necessarily learning to do everything he did, but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner that he did all that he did. 

Dallas Willard The Divine Conspiracy p. 282ff. 

Special experience, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation. The two primary objectives of the Course of training are: The first objective is to bring apprentices to the point where they dearly love and constantly delight in that “heavenly Father” made real to earth in Jesus and are quite certain that there is no “catch,” no limit, to the goodness of his intentions or to his power to carry them out. The second primary objective of a curriculum for Christlikeness is to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom of God, to free the apprentices of domination, of “enslavement” (John 8:34; Rom. 6:6), to their old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action. These two “primary objectives” of the curriculum are not to be pursued separately but interactively. 

Dallas Willard The Divine Conspiracy p. 320ff. 


Searches for Knowledge 

Understanding

2 Timothy 2:15 

Do you best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth. 

Psalm 1: 2 

But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. 

The disciplines 

Richard Foster divides the disciplines into three areas: inward, outward, and corporate. These disciplines truly build spiritual growth, but there is no prescribed order for the development of a person in the Christian Life. The inward disciplines are performed to allow the person to focus on the Lord and His holy word. These are the activities that involve the most self-motivation with the help of the Spirit. They are meditation, prayer, fasting, and study. The outward disciplines are attitudes that develop into actions. They are simplicity, solitude, submission, and service. These actions are manifested inside the heart of a Christian and then may be observed by others. The corporate disciplines are pending the cooperation of other believers. These disciplines can be performed alone, but the corporate disciplines were intended to happen within a group of believers. The corporate disciplines are confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. This set of disciplines will lead a person to derive the importance of interacting with other believers to grow and mature spiritually. 

Richard J Foster Celebration of Discipline p 1ff. 

Contemplation 

The writer will plot out the activities and process a person might go through in making God their single purpose or in the acquiring of intimacy with God. The five main concepts within this work include God, The cloud of unknowing; Mankind, The cloud of forgetting; and The things of this world. 

The Cloud of Unknowing p. 54. 

The essence of this exercise is nothing else but a simple and direct reaching out to god for himself. I call it a simple reaching out, because in this exercise the perfect apprentice does not ask to be released from pain or for his reward to be increased: in a word, he asks for nothing but God himself, so much so that he takes no account or regard of whether he is in pain or in joy, but only that the will of him whom he loves be fulfilled. 

The Cloud of Unknowing p. 60 

Intimacy with God 

My life is not my own 

Luke 14:25ff 

Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brother and sisters, yes and even life itself cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. 

Christ says, “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half measures are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desire which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked-the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours. 

C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity 

The lowest point possible. It’s where you come to the end of yourself. Where you die to your selfishness and surrender to God. 

Mark Steele Half-life/Die Already p. 203 

Hearing the voice of God 

John 10:4b 

His sheep follow him because they know his voice. 

Exodus 33:11 

Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend 

I have said this before and I would say it many, many times, for fear seriously constrains people who do not wholly understand God’s goodness by personal experience, although they know it by faith. It is truly a wonderful thing to know by experience the friendship and the tenderness with which he treats those who go by this road and to see how he defrays, as it were, all the expenses of the journey. 

Teresa of Avila The Way of Perfection 

Coming of Age 

Oneness 

Ephesians 4:13 

Until we reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. 

The result of this pain and effort is the introduction of the transmuted self into that state of union, or complete harmony with the divine, towards which it had tended from the first: a state of equilibrium, of enhanced vitality and freedom, in which the spirit is at last full grown and capable of performing the supreme function of maturity-giving birth to new spiritual life. Here man indeed receives his last and greatest “dower of vitality and momentum”; for he is now an inheritor of the Universal Life, a partaker of the Divine Nature.” 2Peter 1:4 “My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of thee.” 

Evelyn Underhill, The Mystic Way p. 54. 

Union 

The soul’s preparation for this union is not that it should understand or perceive or feel or imagine anything concerning either God or anything else, but that it should have Purity and Love – that is, perfect resignation and detachment from everything for God’s sake alone. 

St John of the Cross Ascent of Mount Carmel p. 51 

If you wish to be pure and free of heart, and to experience the sweetness of the Lord, then you must be naked and bring a pure heart to God. But you can only attain this if you are led by His Grace; so that setting aside all else, you may become one with Him alone. 

Thomas A Kempis The Imitations of Christ p. 44 

We should not love this or that good thing but rather goodness as such from which all things flow, for things are only desirable and delightful in so far as God is in them. Therefore we should not love any good thing more than the extent to which we love God in it, nor should we love God for the sake of his heavenly kingdom nor for the sake of anything else, but should love him for his goodness which he is in himself. For whoever loves him for anything else, does not dwell in him but dwells in that for the sake of which they love him. 

Meister Eckhart Eckhart, Selected Writings p.149. 


Conference info: 

Spiritual Transformation toward Christlikeness 

Presented by Potter’s Hand Ministries 

When: 
November 15th 2008 

9am to 4pm 

Lunch will be provided 

Where: 
Believers Church 
4705 S Memorial 
Tulsa Ok 74145 

Cost: 
$10 before 11/15/08 and $15 on 11/15/08 

Mail your payment to: 

Potter’s Hand Ministries 
2216 W Nashville St 
Broken Arrow, Ok 74012 

For Information contact Mike Eddins at sdeddins@pottershandministries.org or 918-899-9076