Spiritual Life For the High Ground:

Rediscover God

To reclaim the High Ground means to stand once again on strong strategic ethical and intellectual ground. This cannot happen unless our relationships with God are kept at the center of all we do. Specifically in this day, we — yes, even we Christians, who already have a relationship with God — must gain a fresher, fuller, more all-encompassing awareness of God. My friends and colleagues at Bright Media are working on helping the church rediscover who God really is. They also have one of the more helpful perspectives I’ve seen on strategizing for the High Ground: Making God the Issue. I highly recommend all of their resources to you.

For knowing God better, other than the clearly obvious source, His Word, the two top resources in my view are:

Call On God Through Extraordinary Prayer

With God firmly at the center of all we do, we must commit to extraordinary prayer, or we will never regain the High Ground in any sense. What is “extraordinary prayer?” The simple answer is that it is extra-ordinary, or more than ordinary. It means a commitment to increase our dependence on God and our calling on Him. How much of an increase? I suggest you start with whatever you can, on an individual basis, and uniting with others for more prayer together as well.

Realistically, I know that whatever guidance I might offer on how much to pray, two things above all will determine the depth of our prayer lives:

  • How urgently do we recognize the need for God to act?
  • How confident are we that God is waiting to meet us in prayer, to love us, and to answer?

For the first, I urge you to read the provided High Ground resources (moral and intellectual), and to be genuinely involved in the needs of your community. For the second, I recommend you expose yourself to encouraging reading. My favorite sources on prayer, besides the Psalms, are two classics:

Follow God In Deep Discipleship

Much has been written on discipleship, just as there has been on knowing God and on prayer (which are themselves aspects of discipleship). I encourage you to pursue any biblical form of discipleship you can! Here, however, I want to focus on two crucial, specific areas of discipleship required to reclaim the High Ground. They are of course the two strategic hills the church needs to capture: the ethical and the intellectual. Resources for these aspects of following God are listed oin their respective pages: Moral and Intellectual.