Loren Sandford: Yes, There’s More

Available from booksellers on April 7, 2015.

R. Loren Sandford, Yes, There’s More: A Return To Childlike Faith And A Deeper Experience of God (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2015), 240 pages. ISBN-10:1621369803 ISBN-13:978-1621369806

R. Loren Sandford is the senior pastor of New Song Church and Ministries located in Denver, Colorado. He has written other books, a few of which deal with the prophetic, these include: Purifying the Prophetic, Understanding Prophetic People, and, The Prophetic Church. In this current book he addresses a different subject: the disappointment that many Christians feel about their experience of God. Sandford writes about things that will not help lead us into a deeper experience of God and things that will.

The book has twelve chapters. In these chapters, Sandford covers a number of important topics. He writes about spiritual hunger, the reasons why people feel disappointment with their spiritual experience, the place of feelings in our faith, the importance of our spiritual identity in Christ, and worship. A major emphasis of the book is our relationship with one member of the Trinity who is often overlooked: God the Father. The author gives considerable space to writing about intimacy with the Father and having the Father’s heart, nature, and character (page 56).

Sandford is very straightforward in this book about things that hinder us from attaining the rich spiritual experience that we seek. For example, he writes about a shift that has taken place in the church. He says that we have moved away from a purity of devotion to God and moved towards the exalting of our spiritual heroes (page 3). These heroes, the experts, tell us how to achieve the spiritual experience that we are looking for. They tell us how to get God to move. Another shift that he mentions is the move away from being intimate with God to seeking to be supernatural (page 8). Sandford believes that this focus is wrong and that we need to make the move away from receiving and get back to becoming (14).

Charismatic readers may be surprised at the teachings and practices that the author takes issue with. The following quote is informative in this regard. “I call them ‘spiritual technologies’ because they have been presented as methods and procedures to produce a desired result—if we could just say the right words or pray the right things or confess certain truths or address the right demons in the right ways, we could eliminate suffering and produce the happiness that we desire” (page 8). Later in the book he writes “Satisfaction for the hunger we feel cannot be found in methods, confessions, ritual prayers, impartations, or any other form of purely human effort” (page 116).

Tags: loren, sandford

Category: Living the Faith, Spring 2015