I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish. (Galatians 5:16-17) This is a very personal story, about a very sensitive topic in Christian (and non-Christian) environments: intimacy and sexuality. It...Continue reading
Christians often speak about the existence of a God-shaped hole in our heart. A place that can only be filled with God Himself. Over the past year I came to understand how this God-shaped hole had given direction to my life and my actions. For all of my life I desired love, wisdom and truth. I also felt this strange longing for being obedient to a teacher. I now can...Continue reading
Counseling is designed to minister to our souls. It is a conversation where one party with questions, problems and trouble seeks assistance from someone they believe has answers, solutions and help. Counseling requires some vision of life. The way the counselor looks at life, the creation, the purpose of mankind, the existence of the soul and morality determines the way he or she counsels. The way you look at the...Continue reading
There are a few questions in life that I have asked myself more than all other questions: Who am I? Why do I feel so different from others? Where do I belong? Where is my home? When I was thinking about these questions it brought to mind a specific period in my life. My kind of people As a young, divorced mother of 2 girls I stood at the schoolyard...Continue reading
‘In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God’. (John 1: 1) It’s strange how God lets you remember conversations that in hindsight point you to Him. To see that He was there and then already at work in and for you! I vividly remember a situation, many years ago, when I was working in a team of 3 consultants, one of...
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. .. Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth (1 John 3:16, 18) For as long as I can remember I have been struggling with love. Understanding the ‘concept of love’. What it should look and feel like. In the community I grew...Continue reading
I often get questions about how my life was before I came to Christ. And about the difference between now and then. After I became a Christian, my whole life changed. Literally everything! I started to see my life in a different light. The light of a Holy God. It is important to understand that, while I was living from a New Age perspective, in my mind I wasn’t a...Continue reading
It took a while for me to figure out how to relate with God, to be connected with God. ‘A while’ is an understatement. To be honest, it took me 52 years I was born into a Christian community, or at least I thought it was Christian. Looking back I now see it was a humanistic community with a touch of Christianity. We sometimes read the bible, we spoke about...Continue reading
The New Age movement brought a tremendous amount of spiritual ideas and spirituality practices to our society. A lot of these practices became mainstream over the past decades. Have a look at the list of practices at the end of the article. How many of them have you read about? How many have you seen in friend’s houses? How many of them have used or practiced yourself or are used...Continue reading
In my previous article I wrote about the reasons why it is important for a church to get to know more about New-Age, Post-Modern beliefs and ‘modern spirituality’. Different surveys show that no less than 30% of the American population hold (one or more) New Age beliefs. There are good reasons to believe that the numbers in Europe are more or less the same. In this article I will tell...Continue reading
We are living in a society where Christian beliefs are rapidly declining. Our society is heavily influenced by the New Age movement and the post-modernist movement, both blooming in the second half of the 20th century. Followers of the New Age movement looked forward to a “New Age” of love and light, through personal transformation and healing. Followers of the Post-Modernist worldview were characterized by tendencies to self-referentiality, moral relativism...Continue reading