Spice and your devotional time

As I see it…
How would like to spice up your devotional life? I know, it doesn’t sound very spiritual to speak about our time with the Lord as “spicy.” However, my intent isn’t to cheapen, it’s to enliven. I try to read a mixture of godly sources with my Bible reading each day. Nothing, and I mean nothing, exceeds or replaces my Bible reading; but it’s good to hear other voices speak of our mutual journey with the Lord. I have read men like Tozer, O. Chambers, Vance Havner, DA Carson, CS Lewis, Chuck Swindoll and others down through the years. I have even waded into the sometimes unusual waters of those who have been called church mystics. But recently, I’ve expanded devotional borders even further. It’s at this point that I would like to encourage my fundamentalist friends to take a deep breath, elevate your feet higher than your head and then continue. Recently I’ve explored the writings of men (and a few women) who have established their Christian renown in Roman Catholic (and other denominational) circles. There are those, for example, who have argued that CS Lewis was a little too “catholic” for their liking. Wherever you land on that argument, you cannot deny his Christian apologetic genius. In turn, his heritage included men like GK Chesterton, Augustine, Athanasius, Ambrose and the like. You can get a taste of these contributors and many others in the book, From the Library of C. S. Lewis. Some of the content is philosophical drivel, but just some. Much of the content exposes the fountains from which Lewis drank. Interestingly enough, the title of Lewis’s own spiritual journal is derived from his reading of Richard Baxter (a Puritan giant of letters in his own right), Mere Christianity. I have found that many of these writers/authors have contributed much to my Christian and apologetic thinking. But then, discernment is always the key when reading anyone. (By contrast, I have a few fundamentalist-authored books whose content hasn’t really done all that much to raise my spiritual thermometer. This is said not to pronounce judgment, just an opinion from a country preacher.) The proof, they say, is in the pudding. In this case, looking beyond the labels and into a person’s soul certainly will affect the impact of their contribution to your life. So, are you ready for a little spice?