God's Kingdom Within Me: the Heart of Gospel, Read Again with Holy Spirit

You have believed for a long time. So why does fear still get there first?Every Sunday you take your seat. You listen, you sing, you pray, and something in you loosens. Then the doors open and Monday is waiting. The same worry about your children. The same pressure at work. The same number at the bottom of the bank statement.Kyunam Yeom carried that question for years without saying it out loud. He had grown up in the church, kept his place in worship, served faithfully. He was also afraid of looking like a man whose faith was lacking, so he covered the question over. It stayed anyway.God's Kingdom Within Me is what came of finally asking it.His answer begins further back than most advice about prayer. What had to change first was the direction of his whole life. And the Holy Spirit, he came to believe, was given for far more than getting a person through the week.Yeom calls that road Spirit-conformation: laying down a stubborn self so that God can work within. It is the oldest kind of humility, and everything downstream of it changes.Across seven parts, the book works through what that looks like in practice: - Why comfort matters, and why a faith that stops there keeps breaking in the same place- How Scripture reached us through history, and why knowing that deepens your trust in it- What "pray without ceasing" asks of a person who has to work, sleep, and raise a family- Why the words you speak at home on a Tuesday belong to your prayer life- Money, handled honestly, as a resource God expects you to understand and manage well- How to live in the world with competence and character, and keep your footing thereThree appendices go further for readers who want them: the Ethiopian Orthodox canon and its eighty-one books, twenty-four questions drawn from the Gospel of Thomas, and a documented history of how the biblical canon was formed. Yeom handles this material carefully and states plainly where its authority ends. Scripture holds the center throughout.Near the end he offers an image readers tend to keep. A hard lump of salt stays hard. Drop it into the sea and it seems to vanish, while in truth it spreads through the whole of the water. Everything distinctly its own survives. It simply exists now within something far larger.That is what this book invites you into. A wider life.Written for the believer who has served for years, loves the church, and still wants an honest answer.Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible.