The 5 Steps to Spiritual Nourishment

3) Study

A lot of people get to step two. But few of those make the giant leap to step three.

The third step is personal study. What every leader and religious organize ought to dream of is getting their people to a place where they can feed themselves. This is the essence of the Christian religion: a personal relationship with God. Ultimately, churches and other humans are great tools to spiritual nourishment, but they are not adequate on their own.

Each of us must wrestle with our failures, our fears, our own thoughts, beliefs, and actions. Ownership is the key to lasting spiritual nourishment.

If I can learn how to pick up a tool and feed myself, I will be able to eat forever, even if the church or my small group or my mentor prove to be fallible. These tools include scripture, prayer, fasting, etc.

This deep choice about the nature of our sustenance, what am I going to lean on to ‘keep me alive’, is the transformation of discipleship. If leaders aren’t doing enough to usher us there, that (rather than poor programming or bad advice) is their mistake. If we are not doing enough to make the courageous choice of dependency on God alone, we will always find our soul a little bit malnourished.