Book Review: Simple Spirituality

If you ever have a chance to meet someone who used to take out the trash at Mother Teresa's House for the Dying in India, you should stop and learn from them. Christopher Heuertz, the author and International Director of Word Made Flesh ministries, showed up in India one day looking for a place to serve with the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize winner. His journey there, as well as his other adventures around the world, give him the life lessons that he shares in Simple Spirituality.

In a similar vein as the previously reviewed book, Radical, Heuertz approaches Biblical living from a more personal point of view. Unlike Radical, Simple Spirituality is directed specifically at the walk of individual Christ-followers and not the Church as a whole. He focuses on 5 core values to combat the giants that tend to block our view of God:

Humility to slay the giant of pride and arrogance.
Community to slay the giant of individualism and independence.
Simplicity to slay the giant of intemperance and excess.
Submission to slay the giant of power and control.
Brokenness to slay the giant of triumphalism, defiance, and resistance.

Heuertz believes that any true path to spiritual sight ought to be simple. While he's not a contemplative or a mystic, he has found, in the Bible and in his work with impoverished people, evidence of a simple spirituality. This way of humility, community, simplicity, submission, and brokenness will help you see - no matter how dark things get.

Here are some quotes from Simple Spirituality:

It's humility that opens our eyes to the discovery of God. The self-righteous seem to have the hardest time recognizing God. Story after story in the Gospels illustrates this.

If we are unable to give something away, then we do not possess it, rather it possesses us.

Non-poor Christians mistakenly come to view God's financial and material provision as individual blessing rather than kingdom resources.

For many of us, the things we fill our time with become not so much expressions of who we are but rather distractions from whom we need to become.

We want to make room for Christ to reign on the thrones of our hearts, but only a clean Christ who doesn't make a mess of our lives.

Mother Teresa said, "If the poor die of hunger, it is not because God does not care for them. Rather, it is because neither you nor I are generous enough."

Simplicity is best understood in evaluating how we hold things, not just what we do or don't hold.

We want to make the issue about what we give, but in truth the issue is about what we keep.

We are broken when we recognize our utmost need for God and leave everything behind to have our needs met in God.