Discipleship Unveiled

Have you ever started a conversation about life and philosophy and it becomes apparent the other person is not listening? They seem to "talk through" or "talk around" your ideas, rather than thoughtfully considering them? I'm sure you have. The good news is, there are fantastic ways to steer a conversation back to the original topic. Stimulating The Thought Process We have described techniques such as staying on topic , setting the premise , asking questions , and others that are available for review at  ITCZ 101 . We use these techniques for clarity and to keep ourselves thinking through a complex conversion. Equally important, we are helping others to engage their thinking and remain thoughtful as well. Another technique to add to our arsenal is to take away their argument . So, what does that mean? The idea is to grant the other person a point that is true, yet it is irrelevant to the point you are making. In philosophical discussions we ca...

Let's rethink repentance. Clarifying terms is a great tool for improving communication. It allows us to not only look closely at a word or phrase but also let's us come at it from many angles. Let's define and simplify the word, repent/repentance . Repentance can be mistaken for sorrow or penance but that's not what it is. Repentance is not sorrow. Will sorrow lead you to repent? Sure it does. Yet it is a separate process. Repenting is commonly understood, as to turn away from sin. When we dig a little deeper we find that repentance is specifically to change your mind . It's that easy. When we fall into sin our Father tells us to change our mind about the sin we commited. Sin produces death and due to our new nature, we have a way to recover from it. We have the superpower to change our mind about following our old nature and set our thought process to think like the new person we are. We choose to think like Jesus thinks. Our thinking process is where Go...