Finding the Simplicity in Christ your heart yearns for
Have you ever felt like following Jesus can get really complicated? There are so many things to remember. So many things to say and do. Remembering to put into practice everything Jesus taught us? Where’s the simplicity in Christ the Bible talks about?
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Wouldn’t it be great if there was a more simple approach?
That’s what we’re talking about in this week’s episode. My guest is Allen Ratta, who has distilled Jesus’s message and teachings into a simple pathway destination based on the Lord’s Prayer and the 2 Great Commandments.
Here’s a transcript of our conversation (please pardon any transcription errors) —
Simplicity in Christ
James: [00:00:00] Hey there, and welcome again to The Bible Speaks to You Podcast. I’m so grateful you’ve tuned in today to listen, and as you’re listening, please think of someone that might enjoy this episode and share it with them. I’ve got a question for you. Have you ever felt your faith has gotten too complicated? Always another book to read, another conference to go to, another new approach to the Bible study, another new prayer journal you have to keep, and it keeps going on and on. We get so busy doing all these things, we forget the simplicity of what it means just to follow Jesus. My guest today is Allen Radda, a pastor for more than 20 years who has rediscovered for himself the simplicity in Christ, and in that process, has been able to let go of a lot of that busyness of what we sometimes think we are supposed to and have to do as a good Christian. And he’s helping others do the same. The [00:01:00] focus of our conversation is going to be on spiritual simplicity in Christ. Allen, welcome to The Bible Speaks to You Podcast.
Allen Ratta: Oh, thank you. I appreciate being here. When I read what your podcast was about and the invitation, I thought, “Wow, what a direct match,” if you will, between what you’re trying to do on your podcast and my life story
James: I absolutely agree, and that’s why I’m so excited to have you here today because we overlap on so many things, and it’s really wonderful to find another voice that’s saying let’s get back to what Jesus said. It’s not It shouldn’t be rocket science.
Allen Ratta: Yes!
James: I’m so grateful to have you here. And know my listeners are really gonna resonate with you because as you said, I’ve talked about a lot of the same stuff here.
What got Allen focused on simplicity in Christ?
Really, my main focus is how to think, pray, and love like Jesus instead of all the stuff we’ve added in the last 2,000 years. And guys, I’m gonna share more of Allen’s bio in the show notes ’cause I wanna [00:02:00] jump right into our conversation. So if you wanna learn more about Allen, there’ll be some resources on the show notes page [down below]. Allen you’ve been a pastor and in ministry and a leader for over 20 years. in thinking about this whole idea of spiritual simplicity in Christ, was there a particular moment when you realized hey, we’ve made this spiritual growth, following Jesus more complicated than he intended it to be?
Allen Ratta: Boy, was there. Yeah, and actually I’ve been in ministry 50 years.
James: Oh, wow.
Allen Ratta: So it’s been a long journey, although God took me on some detours along the way as a pastor. I was pastoring a very fast-growing church as a denominational leader. I was training pastors in seminars and materials I developed, mentoring materials across the country, and came home.
The irony of this has never escaped me, but came [00:03:00] home after doing a, a pastors conference on the East Coast, flew home to Seattle and faced a crisis of unimaginable proportions. I could have never guessed. I ended up from that becoming a single dad with four children, ages two to 15, and I can’t go into the particulars of that out of confidentiality and the love of God, but what a season for me.
And I knew ministry. I knew ministry systems. I wrote a book on how to have effective processes in a church, The Optimized Church*. I developed a software company that became a market leader, and we sold it to a NASDAQ company in 2011 because of some of our technology and processes. And so I know ministry, but I wanna say this.
Discovering the simplicity i n Christ
We can know a lot about God, and we can know a lot about how to pastor. We can know a lot about ministry, but that doesn’t necessarily [00:04:00] translate into intimacy with God. Now, I wanna make it clear, all of the years that I pastored, I never stopped praying. I always prayed, and I love the Lord. When Jesus , taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”- what I discovered, you can know so much about church and be so busy in ministry, raising millions of dollars for a building program, we went through three of them.
You could know so much about ministry, but in your heart you can so easily drift. And when you face a crisis of earth-shattering proportions, all of your knowledge about God and all of your knowledge about ministry really doesn’t help you a lot.
In my own crisis, I actually had a little stretch, I was mad at God.
How could this happen? And how am I gonna provide for my children? It was amazing how the Lord just opened doors [00:05:00] and ended up expanding and restoring my ministry to a greater level, because I really thought I resigned my church, go heal with my kids, all the incredibly painful things that, that we can hardly imagine in ministry.
And the Lord began to show me, it was a long journey, but He began to show me that I really didn’t have that same simple, fervent love for Jesus that I did when I found the Lord as a teenager in Southern California.
My pastor was a Godsend
I’ll never forget my pastor, I was just one of those on-fire young Christians.
He had me get up, I think I might’ve been 18, and share in front of the church, and I was so on fire for the Lord. And after I had shared, I walked towards the back of the church at the end of the service, and this old saint says to me, “Don’t worry, Allen, you’ll calm down after a while.” Oh, man.[00:06:00]
I wish she hadn’t have said that. I really wish somebody had gotten ahold of me when I was just a brand-new believer and said, “Allen, you’re gonna learn a lot of things. You’re gonna go off to seminary, you’re gonna learn a lot of Bible knowledge, you’re gonna learn a lot of theology, you’re gonna pastor churches, and you’re gonna learn a lot about how to minister to people and how to grow churches. But never forget the one thing, the do all thing, the most important thing, the only thing that is absolutely important. Never let it get a step away from your heart. You shall love the Lord your God.”
Jesus made it so simple. You shall love the Lord your God, didn’t he? With all of your heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.
Finding simplicity in Christ
So absolutely simple, and that’s the destination. [00:07:00] What I discovered in my journey was not just the coming back to the destination, the Lord restored me to my first love, to the place of where I was as a young believer and has kept me there. But he showed me not just the destination, but the pathway.
Jesus didn’t give us a lot of religious, shall we say, trimmings or procedures. When it came to communion, “Do it in remembrance of me.” Do you use grape juice? Do you use wine? He might have stopped a few arguments. Baptism? He just , commanded us to do it. Immersion, sprinkling. He might have stopped a few arguments.
He didn’t give us any religious details. Why? Because, when you think of how complicated spirituality got for the Jews by the time Jesus came along. In fact, when he gave us the Great Commandment, he said, “Look, all of the laws…” 600 and some laws the Jews had accumulated out of the Torah, that they were trying to be a good Jew, like we try to be good Christians.
James: [00:08:00] Right
Allen Ratta: much complexity. And Jesus said, “All of the law,” not just that, and the prophets, the moral imperatives of all the prophets hinge… It’s an interesting word. Everything, it’s like a hook in the hallway. You can only put so many hoodies on it and shirts before they start falling off, right?
Don’t make things so complicated
James: Yeah I think this is so important because we’ve made things so complicated, and when you start to have all those rules and laws, you get legalistic about it, and people go in different directions. And what I say to people all the time is, “I am so tired of all these theological debates.” We’re never going to agree on that stuff.
The only thing we can really unite on as Christians is love for Jesus and following him, actually doing what he says to do.
You can argue about what it means, but okay, do you love your neighbor as yourself? Are you praying for your enemies and the people that [00:09:00] persecute you? That’s… I think that’s a better test of our faith than reciting some creed or some doctrine and all that stuff.
What does simplicity in Christ mean?
What does that word simplicity mean to you? It’s such an ordinary word, and I grew up, reading the King James Bible, and there are a few times when that word is used. It’s not translated like the simplicity in Christ. It’s not translated that in more modern translations.
It’s more like integrity. Can you give us a biblical basis for… and maybe give some ideas in the Bible about that, that help us get back to that simplicity that you’re talking about?
Allen Ratta: Amen. The second big discovery for my comeback, if you will, my first one was just being fervently in love with Jesus every day.
James: I’m gonna stop you there for a second, Allen.
Allen Ratta: Okay
James: The everyday part is so important, and you mentioned early in the Lord’s Prayer, it says, “Give us this day our daily bread.” What would we do with a year’s supply of bread?
Allen Ratta: Exactly[00:10:00]
James: a year’s supply of spiritual growth, I don’t know that we’d be able to handle it
Following Jesus every day
Allen Ratta: Yeah. For me, what I discovered is I loved the Lord and prayed as a pastor before my crisis hit every day. But I discovered that I got up from the table a little too quick, meetings to go to, ministry to attend to, money to raise, people to minister to, and I call that, when you get up before you have your full portion, give us this day our daily bread.
There’s a portion for us every day, and when we get up from the table a little too quick, I call it long-term slow spiritual malnutrition
James: Oh, wow. That is so powerful, that imagery that, that concept. Yeah, because if we’re not feeding ourselves, if we’re not replenishing our own hearts, how can we help others at some point?
If you always use more gasoline in your car than you’re putting in, eventually [00:11:00] it’s gonna catch up with you.
Allen Ratta: Yeah. Over time.. Over time. So the second thing that the Lord brought to my understanding and I’ve lived this for years now, it transformed my life, and it led to really the birth of this… I thought I was done writing when I wrote Making Spiritual Progress*, published by InterVarsity Press. I thought, that’s my penultimate work, if you will, and I’m retired and…
Life story comes together
But a, a little over a year ago, the Holy Spirit came upon me with putting my whole life story together and pouring it out in a very practical book, Spiritual Simplicity*. Not just a book, because there’s a lot of books out there. We read books, and we have a lot of aha moments, but a journal that gives the truths of the book the ability to breathe in our soul.
And the journal breaks the book into a 70-day period. That’s 10 weeks, and the normal small group curriculum kind of a span. What I’ve discovered is the patterns and rhythms that God has for us, [00:12:00] they need to be reestablished because we’re out of rhythm with God. So the second discovery for me was this, and I learned it from my own searching and even research into church history.
But the Lord’s Prayer, think of the backstory. When somebody said, “Teach us how to pray” stop, stop the engines: 55 words, depending on the translation, every word the Word of God, because Jesus was the Word incarnate. 55 words that I discovered were a treasure of the church through history.
They recovered the oldest Christian document outside scripture, a first-century document called the Didache, which was essentially a manual on how to do church for the early fervent first-century Christians. Even John the Apostle was alive still when this was floating around the church.
And in it they said, “Pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a [00:13:00] day.” And as spirit-filled believers, we say, “I’m not into routines and I’m not into rhythms.” Jesus dove deep, 55 words, I break it into five mini prayers within a prayer. It’s been called the School of the Heart by Luther.
From Augustine, the early church fathers, through the Reformations, through modern writers, the Lord’s Prayer has been the key to making disciples throughout the history of the church. Why? It’s a prayer… Every prayer we pray is trying to bring God into our world. The Lord’s Prayer brings us into His world
James: Oh, that is so good. Yes, absolutely
Simplicity in Christ in the Lord’s Prayer
Allen Ratta: Those five movements in the Lord’s Prayer reorder the heart. And I tell people all the time when I’m teaching on this, “Look, if you’re praying the Lord’s Prayer, maybe it’s Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name.” It’s that worship it starts with adoration.
I [00:14:00] have a acrostic, H-E-A-R-T. H is for – honoring. It starts out with honoring Him. Or maybe we go from there to say, “Your kingdom come, your will be done,” which is a prayer of surrender. Or maybe it goes from there to, “Give us this day our daily bread,” which is a prayer of God dependence. Or maybe it goes from there to say, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” which is a prayer of brokenness or a prayer of trust.
H-E-A-R-T, honoring, expecting, asking, repenting, and trusting. Lead us. He is the Good Shepherd. If you find a little hiccup in your heart when you’re praying, maybe you can’t pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done,” ‘ with fullheartedness because we’re a little too busy building our own kingdom right now, and we don’t wanna, we don’t wanna hear that maybe His kingdom isn’t in sync with our kingdom, right?
Or, maybe we’re struggling with somebody’s behavior towards us, and we struggle with, “Forgive us our sins.” We got that part down, [00:15:00] but, “As we forgive those who sin against us.” Wherever you find resistance in your spirit when you’re praying the Lord’s Prayer, those five movements of the heart that reorder the heart daily.
Simplicity in Christ includes daily prayer
Why do we need our hearts reordered daily? Because the heart requires daily work. It’s the pathway that keeps us in the love of God. Jesus didn’t just give us a commandment. He gave us the means, the method, the pathway of how to stay in love with God, and that was a discovery that transformed my life. This isn’t just something that I teach, James.
This is very personal to me because this really brought me back and has made my latter years in ministry the joy of my life. And we have this tendency to wanna resist, and I’ve had people say, “Why do I have to pray a prayer every day?” I don’t know. Do you eat every day?
James: Exactly
Allen Ratta: . . “blessed are those who hunger and thirst for [00:16:00] righteousness.” When you develop a routine and a rhythm of daily really partaking of the Lord, it’s like an anticipation comes. Not every time. Sometimes the heavens can feel like brass, but so often it’s like you’re entering a favorite restaurant, you know what’s on the menu.
You can’t wait to get inside and get that plate in front of you. There is an anticipation of hungering for the Lord, and so the Lord’s Prayer is God looking us in the eye and say, “Look, I haven’t given you any other details. I didn’t want to turn you into a bunch of Pharisees and get into legalism, but if you wanna learn how to talk to me, here’s how you do it.”
James: I love that idea of prayer to me is talking to God, not just telling your problems. One of the things I love about the Lord’s Prayer is, all too often people start their prayers telling God their problems, [00:17:00] and
Allen Ratta: Yeah
James: the way Jesus told us to pray. He said, “This is the way to do it.”
Allen Ratta: Right
James: It’s more like a template. And he starts with, as you said, acknowledging your relationship with God, all those wonderful terms you said, surrendering.
Allen Ratta: Dependence, yeah.
God’s glory
James: Yeah, it’s about God’s glory. Once you establish that full relationship with God, then you say, ” I know You’re gonna give us what we need.” I love the way you talk about the five movements of the heart. I never thought of it that way. I’ve seen that there’s such a progression in there of where it leads us, and then at the very end, you’re reaffirming and re-acknowledging God’s and love and supremacy in everything, and it’s just… so here’s my question. Sometimes, you’ve probably been in these experiences where somebody’s racing through the prayer. It’s like a race to see who can get there done. Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Amen.
Allen Ratta: Yeah.
James: That’s not a prayer. That’s not a prayer.
Allen Ratta: [00:18:00] That is one of the powers of the Lord’s Prayer. I call it like an emergency reset button. You can pray it under your breath in about one minute if you’re under fire in a difficult situation. And if you’ve learned how to pray it meditatively, it creates such a connection between you and the Father, you and the Lord, that it provides such an armor for your soul in the heat of the moment even.
James: Yeah
Fresh ideas in the Bible
Allen Ratta: Now reflectively, we have on our website spiritualsimplicity.com an entire page visited by hundreds of people every day. I took the Lord’s Prayer because it’s God’s Word, I call it a fresh prayer every day because the Holy Spirit makes God’s Word fresh every day. You know how you read the Bible and one word leaps off a page and you go, “Wow, was that even in the Bible before?”
And the Holy Spirit makes it real to us, and it’s an expanding prayer. I’ve got some 30 expanded versions. They run from 11 minutes to 15 minutes [00:19:00] on spiritualsimplicity.com under the prayer link that nature, video, music, and then the Lord’s Prayer is expanded because it expands depending on…
it’s a prayer for every season of life. And so I’ve got expanded Lord’s Prayers for anger, recovery fear, anxiety and you can expand. It’s so easy. Here’s an example. Our Father who art in heaven, oh, thank you, Lord, that as the Holy Spirit makes a part of it clear to our hearts, thank you that I can come as I am.
I’m not coming as a stranger. I belong here. You’re my Father. I’m your child. I love you, Lord. Thank you that You who know me best still love me the most. It’s amazing Your grace. And you can expand… and so the Lord’s Prayer, those expanded versions of the Lord’s Prayer people have found it to be, and it has been through church history, a treasure of the heart.
I think it [00:20:00] was Luther who said that if you’re praying a prayer that’s not in the Lord’s Prayer, maybe you should stop praying it because it may be a carnal prayer because every prayer needed for the spiritual life is included in the Lord’s Prayer.
Anyway
Eagerness to taste simplicity in Christ
James: Yeah I love that. I wanna come back to something you said earlier about there should be an eagerness, like going back to your favorite restaurant. “Oh, I can’t wait to have that dish again.” I think sometimes Christians feel like, “Okay, I’ve gotta say my prayers and everything.”
What if we had that, that, spirit of, “Oh my gosh, I can’t wait to say my prayers. I can’t wait to discover something new.” that eagerness, that expectation, that’s what we need to bring to our prayers. Now, my question is what if we don’t feel that? What if we feel like our prayers are just words?
How do…
Allen Ratta: Amen
James: regain that? Because you’re supposed to love God with all your heart and soul and mind, and maybe you don’t feel like you do. Can you make yourself love God? How do we… let’s go deeper on this.
Allen Ratta: [00:21:00] Yeah. And I’ve got a great answer for that, and that’s a great question because that’s where the rubber meets the road.
James: Right
Finding God’s rhythms
Allen Ratta: You know, we read a lot of books and we get great aha moments, and then it’s every other aha moment in our life. But how do we really experience… And let me just go to the concept of rhythms.
God embedded rhythms in creation. He made a day and He called it good. He spun the earth at a precise speed, so every 12 hours the sun comes up, the sun goes down, a rhythm. We forget that God created us to be garden dwellers, not living in concrete jungles with cell phones buzzing in our pockets and racing across town trying to make an appointment and maybe even having a little sanctified speeding along the way that God understands ’cause we’re in a hurry.
But the, the bottom line is that God created rhythm, not just the day. He created the week, the Sabbath. He created a month. The [00:22:00] Jewish worship pattern was based on the… they blew a trumpet every every new moon. All the harvests were based on moons. God reset the Jewish calendar to the month of Nisan, the month they came out of Egypt.
Even the year, and you look at the period of the year of Jubilee when God sets everything free. These are patterns that God embedded in nature. Now what has mankind done? We’ve come along and it’s a, I believe, a demonic conspiracy against humanity. We’ve redefined time in terms of frantic hours, desperate minutes, hectic seconds, running around with time clocks, running around driven by this modern concept of productivity.
We have in our generation a man who’s probably squeezed as much juice out of the orange as you could. He’s become the wealthiest man, and people say, “I wanna be like him.”
The cost of not finding the simplicity in Christ
But at what cost? Because this is the problem we have We’re out of sync [00:23:00] with God. And, the invitation, Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who labor and, and were heavy laden.” The invitation isn’t to try harder, it’s to come closer. We don’t need another Bible study often. Those aren’t the things that are gonna unlock…
You know what’s gonna unlock our lives? Getting rhythms established in our lives where we meet with God. That’s why the book, Spiritual Simplicity, The Great Commandment, The Lord’s Prayer, The Way Home, and the journal* that goes with it, over 70 days, what we’ve seen is it reestablishes… We don’t need just another book nor truths.
We need to reestablish a rhythm. And when you begin, you go through 70 days, because the lifting is every day. In 15 to 20 minutes, you can transform your life over a 70-day period where those rhythms are yours for life. And as a pastor I know all the effort. And [00:24:00] in fact, as, pastoring we always need more help, and we’re always appealing to people in our church to serve more because we’re in need.
And it’s not that we quit. In fact, people think spiritual simplicity, that sounds shallow.” Oh, man, it is anything but shallow.
James: It’s really taking away everything that’s not needed.
Keeping things simple
Allen Ratta: It is. And yeah and having a center. We’ve released now a, a whole thing just last week, a whole curriculum for children, where parents can do it with their kids or children’s pastors can do it with their children’s church, of spiritual simplicity because kids get this stuff.
It’s not complicated. But I have an image of a bicycle tire, and at the center is the hub, and we see all the spokes going in, and it needs a hub to be able to hold up the weight. And then I have another image where every spoke goes off, twists off in a different direction. One’s pointed towards school, another’s pointed towards chores and work and this and that.
And who wants to get on a bike like [00:25:00] that and trust it to hold your weight, we need a center.
James: Right
Allen Ratta: Jesus needs to become… We need to become centered in His presence, and that means we’ve gotta get back to rhythms. It’s interesting that the secularists say “The reason the Earth spins at a certain speed is because that was just the speed of primordial planetary mass when the sun was rotating around the Sun.”
Oh, yeah? What about Venus? It spins in the opposite direction. Yeah that’s called retrograde. They’ve got a name for, an excuse for, everything that God embedded into creation. And in fact, if you wanna be a workaholic, look at Venus. 354 Earth days from dawn to dusk. That’s a workaholic’s paradise.
But but God didn’t put you on Venus He put us on Earth and he made the day
Embracing God’s rhythms
James: I love this whole idea of finding the spiritual rhythms of God in your life, reestablishing those. I know a lot of people who, and I [00:26:00] certainly, it’s not perfect every day, but, I have a rhythm in the morning. I get up and I do my Bible study, and little daily rituals like when you eat and, when you brush your teeth.
How much of that can we give to God? I like that idea of saying the Lord’s Prayer three times a day. I know I say it once or twice at least. And, Oh, and there’s something else I wanna mention. I love this idea of your expanded versions of the Lord’s Prayer. I think that’s really important.
I have a Bible ministry, a prison ministry in a local federal prison near me.
Been doing it for 18 years,
Allen Ratta: Wow
James: One of the classes I do is on how to pray like Jesus. How did Jesus approach prayer? And so we’d spend a lot of time on the Lord’s Prayer.
One thing I have them do is I give them a sheet with each line with a lot of blank space between them, and I say, “I want you to rewrite this in your words.” And that’s really powerful because then
Allen Ratta: absolutely
James: you see what it means to them. They see what it [00:27:00] means to them ’cause it makes it come alive.
So I love what you’ve done.
Mary found simplicity in Christ
Allen Ratta: It’s really expounding on scripture and the truth that the truth of scripture, because one verse can unleash a world of thought in our hearts, with the Holy Spirit working. And, I think of the imagery of Mary and Martha. Here you’ve got Mary, lazy Mary, sitting at the feet of Jesus…
And then you’ve got Martha busy hustling around the kitchen, getting more and more frustrated. Somehow she gets ahold of Jesus in some sidebar conversation and says, “Don’t you care that my sister’s left me in here to do all the work?” And I think the text doesn’t say so, but I think Jesus said, “Yeah, I do care.”
Misunderstanding his care, she says then tell her to help me.” And he says Martha, you are worried.” Now we understand the word worried, but then he says a word, it’s the only place it’s used in the New Testament. It’s not a, a religious [00:28:00] word. It came out of secular Greek. Jesus grabs a word it’s a very rare Greek verb, “You are worried and bothered.”
Great thing to do an etymology of the word study on. And that Greek verb, it really means inner chaos or inner commotion. You are worried and have an inner commotion going on about so much. And that’s what I see. I call it, when I see people hustling about trying to be a good Christian, like their heart is out of breath.
The inner commotion of all that we try to do to please Him. And Jesus said, “Look, one thing is necessary.” He brought it back to the great commandment. “One thing is necessary. Mary’s chosen the better part. It will not be taken away from her.” And then I look at our workaholic, productive-based Christianity [00:29:00] today and I think of Jesus.
Things to ponder deeply
After he gave us the Lord’s Prayer, he shared a story that is a heartbreaking, probably the scariest story I know of in the New Testament, when some people came up to him and said, “Lord, we’ve done this in your name and we’ve done that in your name.” And Jesus said, “In that day,” “many will come to me.”
I wish he said, “There’s gonna be a few oddball people that didn’t get it, that are gonna come up to me and say, ‘Lord, we did this in your name.'” But he uses the word many. And I hear the, the, the sadness in his voice. “Many will come to me in that day and say, ‘Lord, we did this in your name and we did that in your name.’
And Jesus will say to them, ‘But I never knew you. depart from me.” And why do we drift? Because productivity complexity, first of all, feels productive. It just does. We feel, man, I’m just doing [00:30:00] this and it’s measurable. Love is hard to measure. People think simplicity is shallow.
But loving God and loving people deeply is harder than staying religiously busy.
James: Amen to that, brother. I wanna push back on one tiny little thing. I know you said it tongue in cheek. Mary was obviously not lazy.
Allen Ratta: Amen
James: That was Martha’s perspective.
Allen Ratta: Yes
James: She’s checking out on me here. From Jesus’ perspective, she was, as you said, she was doing the right thing, and I think that’s important for us.
That’s a really good example of what we’re talking about here, of keeping the focus on the most important things,
Allen Ratta: Amen
Another definition of simplicity in Christ
James: Maybe that’s another definition of simplicity in Christ. And sometimes we wanna be seen by others. Look, oh, he’s doing so and he’s doing all this stuff for the church, or he’s doing all this stuff for the, the charities or whatever.
Allen Ratta: What a great Christian.
James: Yeah. And [00:31:00] I think this is one of the flaws of Christianity as a whole, and you may or may not agree with me. This is what I’ve come to the conclusion of all the way back to the Council of Nicaea when they came up with the creed. It’s all “I believe…”
There’s nothing in the Nicene Creed that says about how we’re supposed to practice our faith. There’s nothing about loving God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength and loving your neighbors yourself. There’s nothing about repentance. There’s nothing about taking care of those in need.
There’s nothing about the kinds of things Jesus wanted us to do, and I think we’ve been defining Christianity for 1,700 years by our words instead of our deeds. Our words are important. Don’t get me wrong. We need to know what we believe,
Allen Ratta: Sure.
James: but Jesus said, back to that verse you’re quoting from the Sermon on the Mountain, chapter seven of Matthew, the thing he said just before that, “I never knew you,” he said “Just calling me Lord is not gonna cut it.”
Allen Ratta: Yep
James: “Do the will of my Father.” He’s talking about action, putting your [00:32:00] faith into practice,
Allen Ratta: Yes.
How to follow Jesus better
James: That’s the bee in my bonnet these days. Like, how can I be better following Jesus. We love to argue theology. I don’t argue. I don’t like to argue anymore. It’s interesting conversations I enjoy.
Some people just like to debate it and prove they’re right, they think. But at the end of the day, we might all be wrong on some of this stuff. I really don’t focus on that so much anymore. It’s like, how can I love my neighbor better? How can I love God more? How can I feel His presence with me?
That’s what I hear you saying.
So I wanna ask you this, Allen. Let’s say somebody does not feelGod’s presence. They do not feel the presence of Christ in their life, or the Holy Spirit. How would you encourage them kinda get back in the groove? Or maybe they’ve never really been in the groove.
Maybe they were just always sorta doing the outward motions and never really had that relationship.
Joy in following Jesus
Allen Ratta: [00:33:00] Yeah. And, that really is where the rubber meets the road. One of the things I tell people is, “How’s your joy?”
The joy of the Lord is our strength. And that’s the greatest early red flag in our walk, is when we’ve lost the joy. We’re so busy, but we’re not– When we’re connected, when we abide in the vine, we bear fruit.
And it’s really a, a very simple thing. It comes back to simplicity, that we have this, this tendency to think if I can just do a little more. And we live in a productivity cult. It’s a cult. It’s a belief system that productivity is the answer. Prosperity is the [00:34:00] answer. Actually, presence [with God] is the answer.
Jesus came to remove the chasm between humanity and God, to get us back to the garden where we can walk with him and commune with him. And I would say this, we have on our website, spiritualsimplicity.com, a lot of free resources.
Free three-week spiritual journey. Go to our website at the top, start a free journey. And it’s three weeks. Now, let me give this warning. The first three weeks is not the same as getting the book and the journal where you go in and you do the deep dive, and you get those rhythms established for the rest of your life.
But it is a great introduction to the life of spiritual simplicity. It’s totally free, like the Lord’s Prayers are free. Every week, you’ll get a free spiritual simplicity email sent to you with a scripture, with a thought to just keep honing your attention.
But the point is that three-week spiritual journey, people– And I even [00:35:00] put some videos in there saying, “Now, look, if you think you’re about ready to rev the engine up, you’re on the wrong page.” These first three weeks are about learning how to be still.
God is not in a hurry
James: Let me jump in here. I love that idea. And I saw something on one of your websites. It said, “You have to slow down to catch up with God.”
Allen Ratta: That’s one of our slogans.
He’s not in a hurry. He made time. And, we’re the ones that are out of sync with him. It’s interesting, When I was at Regent Seminary I attended a Regent College. I attended a class taught by Eugene Peterson, author of The Message.
Great reflective thinker and writer. And he had a spiritual retreat with very limited enrollment. So man, I thought, “Here’s my chance to get in and, get close and get some great coaching.” And so I signed up, and when I go by the office to pick up the instructions and pay my fee, I find out that it’s a silent retreat.
I’m like, “What?” [00:36:00] What did I get myself in for? I can’t just ditch it, ’cause I took one of the few spots, and I’m gonna have to face my professor, Eugene, on next Monday and explain where I went. I’m on the hook. Then I find out it’s at an abbey, which is not in my whole experiential realm. And so I go up there, and as I’m sitting in the initial circle looking around this group, I realize, seeing all the Birkenstock-stock-clad feet, that this isn’t the normal crowd I run in.
I’ve got my laptop next to me, and we’re in a building program, and I’ve got so much to do. And then Eugene’s first words just floored me. He goes, “This weekend is entirely purposeless.” I’m like,
Learning to be still with simplicity in Christ
James: Wow
Allen Ratta: “What?” Thank God I have my laptop, and he might have seen me pat my laptop, because he says, “By the way, no opening computers, no other book than the [00:37:00] Bible.
I don’t even want you to open the Bible right now. I want you to go out somewhere, and we’ll meet back, and I will be giving you some coaching.” I’m thinking at least there’s some structure,” and I’m sitting under this big tree, and I write about this story in my book and the birds are twittering away overhead, and all of creation is in sync with God but me.
My mind’s racing, and a couple of hours later, I began to hear a still, small voice. By the end of that weekend, I had learned more than I ever imagined that I would learn about how to be still and know that He is God. And so when I start people on this free spiritual journey, they get an email twice a week with a little video from me, a beginning week to set the stage, a midweek kind of reinforcement, then the next week, and the midweek, and the third week, and a midweek, and a video each time coaching them.
At the end, in [00:38:00] the fourth week, I’ll send them an invitation to join a, a full-fledged 70-day, 10-week spiritual journey to establish rhythms. But it’s all free.
And so anyway, because my heart is investing in people’s lives,
James: yeah I love that. And I’ll have the links to all that in, in the show notes so people,
Allen Ratta: Sure.
James: can check it out, can do that.
Allen Ratta: Sure
Discover simplicity in Christ in nature
James: I just love everything you’re saying, Allen, because, I, did a recent podcast episode about the Sermon on the Mount, [Episode 389: Jesus’s Spiritual To-Do List] and also one recently on, when you’re struggling with something, what did Jesus say when you’re worried about what you’re gonna eat? [That’s also Episode 389]
Or He says, “Go look at nature. Go look at the flowers in the field. Go look at the birds, what God is doing out there, and see
Allen Ratta: Yes.
James: Him being in control.”
Allen Ratta: His love
James: I just put that on an episode recently, and it’s like it’s nice to hear you confirm that [00:39:00] you literally did that.
You went out, and all of a sudden you hear the birds chirping, and then you hear God talking to you in the process. Like surprise.
Hearing the still, small voice
Think of Elijah in the Old Testament. He was running away from Jezebel, and so he’s out in the middle of nowhere in a cave. I guess you could say that’s out in nature. But when he was away from everything he settled down, that’s when he heard the still small voice.
Allen Ratta: Yeah, yeah.
James: it wasn’t in, in the wind, and the waves, and the fire, and the earthquake. It wasn’t at all those dramatic things.
Allen Ratta: Amen
James: it was a quiet thing coming directly from God. so I think that’s really, it’s go out in nature.
I actually, one time, this was years ago, I was living in Texas before I was married, and I called a lady up that was somebody I really trusted, and I asked her to pray for me about a pretty serious problem I thought at the time. And she said, “I want [00:40:00] you to go out in the country somewhere and just sit there and watch.
Just observe.” And
Allen Ratta: Mhm.
James: almost, like, six or eight hours. I took my journal with me. It’s like you. I just observed nature, and I thought, and I talked to God, and He talked to me, and it was just… like, “Why haven’t I done that again?” I’ve done little bits and pieces like that, but I’ve got my computer with me or my phone.
It’s like, okay I’m hearing what you’re saying, Allen, taking that to heart.
Simplicity of love
Allen Ratta: Yeah. You know This is affirmed over and over again, the simplicity of love. Paul starts out talking about love in 1 Corinthians 13. Used at a lot of weddings, and he basically says, “Look, if you haven’t got love, you’re nothing. You can give everything you have to the poor, give your body to be burned.”
I’ve discovered it’s easier to die for God than live for Him, by the [00:41:00] way. But anyway,
James: Ooh. Oh, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Say that again because a lot of people stumble on that part of 1 Corinthians 13.
Allen Ratta: Sure
James: I give my body to be burned. It’s like, it does sound like a little bit of a self-sacrifice, but
Allen Ratta: Yeah.
James: share your comment again because I think that’s really powerful.
Allen Ratta: It’s just easier to die for God in a moment of supreme self-sacrifice than to live for Him every day and surrender our hearts to Him daily. And so Paul starts out that way. If you don’t have love, then he says, “Okay, it’s important you do a little self check here.” You talk to people who are discouraged and they don’t have joy.
How patient are you?
So here’s a self-test. Love is patient. How you doing on your patience?
Allen Ratta: Yeah. Love is kind. It’s not jealous. And Paul goes on and on. Because I’ve discovered that my [00:42:00] heart is devious enough that I think I love God more than I do And, it’s like Jude says, “Keep yourself in the love of God.”
That’s how the New Testament wraps up before the Book of Revelation, where Jesus rebukes the church because they’d left their first love.
James: Right
Allen Ratta: This is just beginning to end. In fact, Hosea, where even in the Old Testament, this truth was hammered home when Hosea, the great prophet who had really been married to an unfaithful wife and by God’s command.
And he learned this through the lips of the prophet. God desires mercy, not sacrifice. That word mercy in the Hebrew is hesed, which means covenant love, like a marriage relationship. The Old Testament was the same way. That’s where the whole you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind came from, right at, [00:43:00] right there at the beginning of the Torah.
So this has always been God restoring the path to love. And if your joy meter is down, understandable. We’re out of sync. We’re out of rhythm with God. It makes total sense.
Simplicity in Christ keeps you in sync with God
James: So some of the questions I’ve asked and a couple of other things I was gonna ask are this very thing. It’s if you’re out of sync, or if you’re out of sync and you don’t realize it, that’s a different question than if you’re out of sync and you do realize it.
Allen Ratta: Right
James: Then what I hear you saying is you have to have some self-reflection. It’s kinda like the prodigal son came to himself. It’s like something, a light bulb went off somewhere when he was, in, in a miserable situation.
Allen Ratta: He was a harder case.
James: Yeah, he was.
Allen Ratta: Yeah
James: We don’t have to be so stubborn. What I hear you say is maybe if you’re not feeling that connection with God, [00:44:00] start the rhythms.
Allen Ratta: Yes.
James: Some of those rhythms you’re talking about. Start a daily practice,
Get on the path wherever you are, start on wherever you are, get on the pathway from there and go forward.
Allen Ratta: Yeah.
Keeping the simplicity in Christ at church
James: , I think that’s really important. I wanna take some of these ideas that you’ve been talking about, mostly about individuals, how we focus as individuals or
Allen Ratta: Sure
James: Christ. How can we take these same ideas and apply them to church? Because church as an institution can get very busy and distracted and all that stuff. You’re very well aware of that, I’m sure.
How do we get the church back to what you’re talking about, the simplicity in Christ and spirituality?
Allen Ratta: One of the things that we offer for churches is a spiritual simplicity in Christ journey. We’ve had… I just finished one with 100 people in a church, and it’s interesting. A, a retired neurologist, been a Christian for decades, he wrote a testimony, it’s on our website, that the spiritual journey [00:45:00] that we went through…
‘Cause they, really the heavy lifting is by the individual. It’s not like a normal small group, the big event is the one week, day of the week when you meet. No, you’re meeting with God every day and establishing rhythms, and the seventh day when you meet is a celebration of what you’re learning.
Now, you can do a journey alone, you can do it in a small group, or we have church-wide campaigns where people can sign up en masse. And this neurologist just made the comment that it was the most spiritual impact on his life in 40 years.
James: Wow
We are not alone
Allen Ratta: And I thought, that’s really what makes my heart leap, is because when I see the lights go on with people, and this is the thing that we need to understand. We’re not in this alone. Jesus himself made it clear. Look, Behold! That’s a commandment to look.
I stand at the door and [00:46:00] knock. If any man hear my voice and open the door, very relational language, I’ll come into him and turn him on fire to be an evangelist.
No. I will come into him and fellowship with him, and he with me. It’s about relationship. The Lord is already reaching out because his Word is true. His Spirit is faithful. He’s faithful and true. And if you’re struggling with lack of joy, it’s not because the Lord has abandoned you in any way. Rather, it’s the other way.
We have let distractions come in. One of the things that, that changes things, and I think it’s important for churches I see three legs of spiritual formation for a church.
Three fundamentals for church
Three fundamental things in discipleship for a church. One is small groups are invaluable. It teaches us how to do life together. Another one is ministry service. We have to be active in [00:47:00] ministry.
James: What do you mean by that, Allen?
Allen Ratta: Making a difference, discovering God’s calling and purposes in our lives, but not going beyond that to where we become workaholics for God.
James: You’re talking about each individual member?
Allen Ratta: Yeah.
James: Yeah.
Allen Ratta: And I think that it’s important that pastors understand this, that our number one calling is to build up the body. And sometimes that’s a challenge. I know. I’ve lived it for years. We need volunteers. But the third leg of discipleship, is a spiritual journey where we take people through a rhythm-gaining journey, where they learn how to walk in sync and rhythm with God, and that’s why we’ve produced spiritual journeys for churches.
Children too
They’re for individuals, they’re for small groups. They work on any level. They scale upward to every level of a church. And it’s why we’ve even gone down and created [00:48:00] spiritual journeys for children, so the children,
James: Beautiful
Allen Ratta: bring home activity pages, coloring pages, scriptures, memorization, action cards that are convicting to the parents about spiritual simplicity principles that the children are learning.
And we’ve created animated I’m also a musician, animated music videos with these adorable duck characters and a duck choir, and Buddy the Duck and his family, who are all worshiping and teaching the kids how to sing, and then teaching videos with Buddy and his family, teaching invaluable lessons.
And one of the images is this. You’ve got Love Mountain on one side, and on the other side, you’ve got this highway, and there’s a blue bus on it heading up there. And on the back of the blue bus, it says The Lord’s Prayer. And in that video, that bus becomes animated, and you’ve got Buddy’s little son [00:49:00] sticking his head out the window, “Are we there yet?”
And, and jumps out the window, and there’s Jesus, and he gets in the bus with him and we help children to understand that bus, it’s the pathway. And when he says, “Are we there yet,” then Buddy comes in and teaches, it’s not that we ever arrive, it’s that we understand that this is the destination that God’s leading us in.
And so we got so many different visuals. One is a, a heart-shaped building with five windows in the front of it, H-E-A-R-T, honoring. Each one, you look through that window, and you see an image. How are you doing in your heart today in honoring God? And there’s Buddy’s little son just loving Jesus.
How are you honoring God today?
He’s doing pretty good today in honoring. But maybe in a couple of days, it might look radically different. And all of a [00:50:00] sudden, you look through the window, and there’s the little kid throwing a tantrum before Jesus, stamping his fists on the ground, and he’s angry and spitting and, and why? Because the heart changes from day to day.
It’s why we need daily rhythms, and we help children to begin to understand it’s okay. Jesus still loves you. Your heart changes from day to day. Sometimes somebody does something really bad to you and, and so we walk through all those five windows, and it’s a powerful visual teaching of animation.
But it works for adults.
James: I love the way you’re describing this series for children, because you can say things and kids get it, like Love Mountain. We adults think that we’re a little too sophisticated for that. But we read those books too and think, “Oh yeah, this is good.”
I love that. I wanna come back to something. We’ve gotta close up here in just a little bit. We could talk for a long time, but I…
Allen Ratta: No doubt.
James: [00:51:00] Yeah. I wanna be respectful of your time. You said something about when you first became a Christian, you were on fire for Jesus and all that stuff, and I think that’s a lot of people’s experience, and somewhere along the way got diluted or polluted or busy-fied, or whatever the right word is.
Allen Ratta: And we drift.
Looking back
James: Yeah. So, two-part question. One, would you say now to your 20-something self? And two, what would you say to someone else who does not realize that they’re in that drift.
They may not, because they’re starting to get involved and they wanna do everything they can and, what would you say to yourself, knowing who you are? And, retrospection is so wonderful, right?
Allen Ratta: Right
James: What could you say to encourage someone or all of us? How do we keep that drift, that continental shift we’ll call [00:52:00] it taking place?
Allen Ratta: And it’s exactly what my book and journal do. The book is filled with godly content, but the journal gives it room to breathe applicationally. You’re reading parts of the book, you’re reading scripture, you’re learning how to pray the Lord’s Prayer, you’re learning how to get in rhythm over 10 weeks, 70 days.
So I say it all the time to people, we’ve got to get in rhythm with God. He’s there knocking. If you just get ahold of this new truth, it’ll change your life. No, it really goes back to ancient ways. It’s interesting, Luther said that one of his missions was to take the most abused prayer in church history, Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, and bring it back to the center of fire and purpose of the Christian life.
Keeping simplicity in Christ every day
And I have found that really is part of my mission, so I would say to my young [00:53:00] self, I wish I could reach back in time and get ahold of Allen and shake myself by the shoulders and say, “Allen, never ever let the main thing not be the main thing. It’s the do-all thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the central thing.
It’s the most important thing. Stay in love with God every day of your life. Learn the rhythms of God and learn to walk in them.” It’s interesting, the last spiritual journey I did, the group one, the youngest was a kid 13 years old, the oldest was 90.
The 90-year-old We have an actual video testimonial posted of her and her husband.
“We never understood the personal relational aspect of the Lord’s Prayer. It’s changed our lives.” I thought, “I wanna be 90 years old and reaching for Jesus in intimacy ” And the 13-year-old, it transformed her life. [00:54:00] And why? Because it’s so simple. Anybody can get this.
You don’t have to pass a biblical knowledge test. You don’t have to have an IQ test Anybody can get this, right? And so I would say to myself what I’m saying now, hopefully to other 20-year-olds and 13-year-olds and 90-year-olds what I’m saying now. Get in sync. Get in sync with God. He created you to be a garden dweller.
Never forget that. Never forget that rhythm. And He’s there to walk with you.
Summing up simplicity in Christ
James: Wow. Wow, that is so powerful. Alan as I said, we could talk and talk. Is there anything that you would [00:55:00] like to kinda either sum up or maybe there’s something I didn’t ask you that you would wish that I had asked you, if there’s some kind of final thought you’d like to share , and then I’ve got a few final questions to ask
Allen Ratta: Sure. Let me just give you five spiritual simplicity in Christ precepts that I’ve boiled down to. Number one, you’re stronger than you think. Number two, you are less wise than you think.
James: Amen.
Allen Ratta: Number three, you are more loved than you can imagine.
Number four, God is nearer than you feel. And number five, the Christian life is simpler than you make it.
James: Wow, that is so powerful. you. That’s a great way to end. I wanna honor you, Allen, all your many years in ministry and as [00:56:00] a pastor and as a leader in churches and helping people rediscover this simplicity in Christ, the simplicity of getting back to basics and just following Jesus with all your heart, and I just, I really appreciate that, and I am so grateful that our paths have crossed. And as I said, I’ll have all your contact information and your websites in the show notes, so we won’t go over that here and about your book and everything. I have three final questions that I ask all my guests.
Allen Ratta: Sure
Final three questions
James: The first one is, if you could talk to any Bible character other than Jesus, who would it be and what would you ask them?
Allen Ratta: I don’t know. There’s several I’d probably like to talk to, but I would probably like to say to Peter, you’ve gotten a bad rap for those three denials, but you showcased through your life [00:57:00] what we do every day. Thank you
James: Oh, that is… that’s a very thoughtful answer. I love that. Any questions for him? Would you ask him anything?
Allen Ratta: Yeah. Peter, if you had it to do over again…
James: What would, Peter, what would you say to your 20-year-old self?
Allen Ratta: Yes. Yeah, precisely.
Second question
James: Okay, the second question is there any Bible character that you especially identify with?
Allen Ratta: Yes.
James: Who is that?
Allen Ratta: Several, but the one that just pops into my mind right now is David.
James: Why?
Allen Ratta: A man after God’s own heart, but boy did he mess up.
He gives me such encouragement because the Bible says that a righteous man falls down seven [00:58:00] times. Difference between a righteous man and a wicked man is the righteous man gets up again.
And I had my crisis fall on my face flat moment in life. And I have come to realize, that his faithfulness that David discovered, his calling and his purposes, he didn’t stop him from being a king, and the Lord doesn’t stop us from being royalty.
James: And his love for God was stronger, and God was stronger than the mistakes he made.
Allen Ratta: Amen.
Third question
James: Yeah, absolutely. So here’s the third question. The Bible Speaks to You Podcast is about getting back to the original Christianity of Jesus. And we’ve really talked about this the whole time, but how would you sum up, you describe Jesus’ original message of how he wants [00:59:00] us to live our lives?
Allen Ratta: Yeah, I think from a very practical level, God’s very practical, Scripture’s very real, is when He summarized the entire Scripture down to loving God and others. And then He said, “Now here’s how you get there. It’s a daily thing. Here’s how you talk to Me.” And God looked us in the eye.
They looked in His eyes and He said, “This is how you talk to me.” And, and understand this. In the Greek, when Jesus says pray this way, it’s a double whammy because it’s not only active tense, it’s active voice, it’s imperative tense. It’s when you were a kid and your mom or dad yelled out the door, “Oh, it’s time for dinner. Get in the house. Stop playing.” You knew it wasn’t optional.
The [01:00:00] best way I can take that tense and drive it home is how I just did, is relate to our own lives. Our Heavenly Father is saying, “Allen,” whatever your name is, put your name in there, “quit messing around and get in the house for dinner.”
James: Exactly. I love that. That’s a wonderful place to end. Alan, thank you so much for taking some time to be with me and share these wonderful ideas, and I wanna encourage all of you listening to take to heart the things that Alan has shared and check out his website and stuff. Take some time to be with God, not just learn about Him.
Allen Ratta: Amen
Make room for simplicity in Christ in your life
James: Take some time to walk side by side with Christ and you don’t have to say anything. It can just be a silent presence. Alan, thanks again so much.
Allen Ratta: Hey, James, I appreciate you. It’s nice to find such a kindred spirit in Jesus, and I think we’re preaching to the choir to [01:01:00] each other.
James: The choir needs a little preaching once in a while.
Allen Ratta: Yeah.
James: We’re here to edify one another.
Allen Ratta: Amen. Amen, brother. Okay. God bless.
James: God bless you. Thank you so much.
Allen Ratta: Okay. Bye-bye
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Photo Credit:
Allen Ratta is a pastor, author, speaker, and pioneer in Christian discipleship and spiritual formation. For more than two decades he has served as a lead pastor and ministry leader, helping people deepen their relationship with God and experience authentic spiritual transformation.
He is the author of
- Spiritual Simplicity: The Great Commandment, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Way Home *
- The Way Home: A Daily Spiritual Simplicity Journal for Prayer and Intimacy *
- the Spiritual Simplicity Small Group Leader’s Guide*
- Making Spiritual Progress*
- The Optimized Church*
- The inspirational novel The Encouragers*
Allen’s current focus is helping Christians move beyond spiritual busyness into a life of intimacy with God through a simple, biblical pathway rooted in Jesus’ Great Commandment and the Lord’s Prayer. His Spiritual Simplicity message is helping individuals and churches rediscover the joy, freedom, and transforming power of loving God wholeheartedly, loving others deeply, and abiding daily in Christ.
Allen lives in Montana, where he continues to write, teach, speak, and equip believers to experience lasting spiritual renewal.
Step into the Journey: www.spiritualsimplicity.com www.spiritualprogress.com
* Affiliate links
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James Early, the Jesus Mindset Coach, is a Bible teacher, speaker, and church mentor. He conducts Bible workshops online and in person. His focus is on getting back to the original Christianity of Jesus by learning to think, pray, and love like Jesus. Contact him here.
Make a donation to support the show
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Bible References
Matthew 6:9-13 NKJV
9 “In this manner, therefore, pray:
Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
10 Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
As we forgive our debtors.
13 And do not lead us into temptation,
But deliver us from the evil one.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Mark 22:36-40 NIV
36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
37 Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
38 This is the first and greatest commandment.
39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.
40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Matthew 5:44 NIV
44 But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
2 Corinthians 11:3 KJV
3 But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.
Matthew 5:6 NIV
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Matthew 11:28 NIV
28 Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Luke 10:40-42 NIV
40 But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”
41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things,
42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Matthew 7:21-23 NIV
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’
23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’
Nehemiah 8:10 NIV
10 Nehemiah said, “Go and enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and send some to those who have nothing prepared. This day is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
John 15:4 KJV
4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
Psalm 46:10 KJV
10 Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.
1 Kings 19:11, 12 KJV
11 And he said, Go forth, and stand upon the mount before the LORD. And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake:
12 And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.
1 Corinthians 13:1-7 NIV
1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Jude 1:21 NIV
21 keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.
Revelation 2:4 NIV
4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken the love you had at first.
Hosea 1:2 NIV
2 When the LORD began to speak through Hosea, the LORD said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the LORD.”
Hosea 6:6 NIV
6 For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.
Luke 15:17 KJV
17 And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!
Revelation 3:30 NIV
30 Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
Proverbs 24:16 NIV
16 for though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.
