With my highly prized cup of coffee, I sit and think about the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. Its good, but it doesn't really challenge me, and I am trying to figure out why. It talks about some intense stuff like, "It is vanity to wish for a long life, an to be careless about living a good and useful life." Book One 1:4. Another one, " A humble knowledge of yourself is a surer way to God than in involved intellectual search after learning." Book One 3:4b.
I guess I am not that into the style of the book. At least in the first book, it is broken down into small exerts, but they are ramdom, on various subjects. Its good, so I am determined to get through it, but I am having a difficult time making it apply to me. Or maybe a Kempis has not convinced me that it should apply to me.
I really enjoyed reading Real Christianity by William Wilberforce and Absolute Surrender by Andrew Murray. It challenged me so much, "devotional reading has more of the character of a spiritual awakening out of cultural sleep than it has the idea of improving existing attitudes... We readily "sleep" within our culture until we travel abroad and are surprised by how differently other societies live and behave...Often this requires a renewed brokenness of spirit, a new or deepened sense of sin, or a profound reevaluation of our priorities...We may need then to "travel abroad" as the Desert Fathers did when they left the cities of men. We may need to explore as the medival mystics explored, or suffer as the Puritans suffered, in order to learn how secular their contemporary species of Christianity really was, and ours is today."
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