The Imitation of Christ: Living on Earth with the Full Power and Authority Christ Has Given You

The Imitation of Christ is one of the most copied manuscripts in Christian history. For six centuries it has shaped believers in interior devotion, humility, and surrender. But the Christ whom Thomas a Kempis admired is the same Christ who healed the sick, cast out demons, raised the dead, and commissioned his followers to do likewise. This title asks a direct question: what would Christian living look like if we recovered that complete picture?

The Imitation of Christ: Living on Earth with the Full Power and Authority Christ Has Given You begins with the person of Jesus himself. Drawing on the Gospel of John, the letters of Paul, and the witness of the global church, it unfolds eleven principles for living out the full commission that Christ places in the hands of every believer.

The eleven principles move through the terrain every serious disciple must cross: a new identity in Christ as the source of all other authority; prayer understood as partnership with the Father, not petition to a distant God; the Holy Spirit as resident teacher and indwelling presence; dominion over the circumstances that fear otherwise controls; the love of God as the force that holds the entire framework together; healing prayer and the biblical theology behind it; spiritual warfare as engagement with principalities and powers in the cosmic order; the greater works that Jesus promised his followers; the contemplative practice of beholding that transforms the one who beholds; and the daily disciplines that translate all eleven principles from insight into embodied life.

Each chapter is grounded in careful exegesis of the original Greek and Hebrew, in the history of the global church, and in the lived experience of believers across traditions who have found the full commission not merely credible but livable.

Written for the committed believer who wants more than passive faith, and for the thoughtful skeptic who is examining the evidence carefully, this is a work about the Christ who is actually in the New Testament: King, Healer, Teacher, Friend, Intercessor, and indwelling Spirit.