Prepare For Life

Weekly Devotional Jesus didn’t stop Mary; he stopped the biting criticism and shaming of Mary. “Leave her alone. She has done a good deed to Me. She has done what she could, she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. Wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done shall also be spoken of in memory of her.”

I found a treasure this week and I want to share it with you. A friend of mine sent me the questions that John Wesley and his band of fellow believers used for reflection. You may remember John Wesley. As a young man in 1738 Wesley had a radical encounter with Jesus Christ. He went on to form “classes and bands” for study and accountability and eventually founded what became the Methodist denomination. I am not a Methodist, but I think these questions are great! They get to the main point of our faith, where the rubber meets the road— how we live out our faith each day. These questions are simple and to the point. Your answers will help you evaluate how you are walking with the Lord and where you may need a course correction.

Genesis shines like a bright beacon showing us where we came from, where we are going, who it is who created us, who we are to honor and thank and worship. Genesis delineates what our problem is, how God deals with it and in the meantime how we are to live in a way that pleases God, how to walk with Him, how to trust Him.

There is a discipline of the heart that is missing from most of the lists found in books about spiritual disciplines. It is essential to the practice of our faith. It needs to be put into our lives every single day. It is a lifestyle of wholehearted obedience to the word of God.

Do you need some encouragement about now? Do you feel like you are in an undertow with all the bad reports in the news? Is there a situation in your personal life that has you down? I understand. Sometimes we get so discouraged we just want to crawl under a rock and give up on following Jesus. Recently a verse from Hebrews has been rolling through my mind, “Do not forsake assembling yourselves together, and all the more as you see the day appearing.” Hebrews 10:25. I think this verse is important for us at this point in time. “Do not forsake assembling yourselves together”…. Or put in a positive command, “Keep on getting together with other believers!” This literally means meeting face to face with fellow believers on a regular basis. Meeting in this way becomes part of our life-style as we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord.

If I could go back in time and do only one discipline of the heart differently it would be to practice meditating on the Scriptures earlier in my walk with the Lord. Meditation has been a game changer in my spiritual life. We are not talking about meditation in the sense of eastern religions or new age practices where we empty our minds and repeat a mantra. Meditating on the word of God is filling your mind with the Scripture, saturating yourself in a small portion of the Bible, savoring every word. It is listening to the Lord and then putting what He says into your life. The end result of Biblical meditation is not more information about God but communion with God through His living word.

Prayer makes a difference. Yes, God is sovereign. Yes, He can do whatever He wants to do. Yet somehow in His sovereignty He often limits Himself to acting in response to the prayers of His people. He is waiting for His people to pray. Our prayers move God’s heart to action. Our prayers carry great significance. In the words of James, “You have not because you ask not.” James was not promising that everything we can dream up to pray for will be glowingly answered, but that we will definitely not see answers to prayers if we never pray them!

Life can get mundane. We can work hard and get into ruts. We can take things, including ourselves, very seriously, maybe too seriously. Even in our pursuit of the Lord we can fast, pray, meditate, and work so hard that we miss the joy of knowing the Lord. At some point the Lord knows we need to lighten up. He wants to disrupt our calendars. He wants us to embrace and enjoy times of celebration.

Is the Lord tugging on your heart to intentionally set aside a day of the week for rest? Read these words of Isaiah as you consider this invitation, “If because of the Sabbath you turn your foot from doing your own pleasure on My holy day, and call the sabbath a delight, the holy day of the Lord honorable. And shall honor it desisting from your own pleasure, and speaking your own word. Then you will take delight in the Lord and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; and I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Isaiah 58:13-14.

Today I want to talk about the discipline of fasting, not because I love to fast but because of its value and importance. First of all I am not an expert on fasting. I have tried and failed so many times. I have also tried and by the grace of God been able to hold fast! I find it very humbling because when I fast from food, I realize how much of my life revolves around food and how often my flesh wants to eat! Fasting is essentially an exercise in dying to self. It is not my favorite discipline of the heart but I do appreciate its worth and I commend it to you.

Today I want to talk about worship. Taking the time to worship God each week is so important. You can worship in church, you can worship at home alone. Worship does not have to be reserved for one hour on Sunday morning, you can turn in your heart to God’s heart in worship when you wake up in the middle of the night. Worship can be part of your lifestyle.

How do we develop strong vibrant spirits? Just as in the natural we need to exercise in order to to strengthen our bodes, so in the spiritual there are exercises we can do that will strengthen our spirits and deepen our relationship with the Lord. In the words of Galatians, we sow to the Spirit. These exercises are tiny daily seeds we sow as we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord. They are sometimes called spiritual disciplines. I like to think of them as Disciplines of the Heart.

We have spent the past several weeks getting to know the Holy Spirit, learning about who He is and what He does. But there is another spirit who often gets overlooked and ignored—your spirit, the human spirit. The Bible teaches we have a triune nature — spirit, soul and body. I Thessalonians 5:23 lays this out for us, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord we have a guide, the Holy Spirit. He leads us and helps us stay on the ancient paths. He knows about the twists and turns in the road ahead and He will be there to lead us through. His companionship is a treasure that means we will never be alone or forsaken by God. He teaches us and comforts us. We would be like an orphan if it weren’t for the Holy Spirit.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about whether we are always called to share the gospel. My first thought was, “Yes, of course we are.” Jesus left us with the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all the nations. I Peter 3:15 tells us to always be ready to give an account for the hope that is in us. Ephesians 6 explains that putting on the full armor of God includes having our feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. So it seems that we should always look for opportunities to speak to others about the Lord. But then I had a second thought. We are always to “walk in the Spirit” according to Galatians. This means we are to lean into the Spirit, pray for His direction, listen, yield to what He says. Wait on Him. Follow Him.

A normal man can walk or run 15 miles a day. What we see around us are not normal people but average people who think if they walk to the fridge they have gotten their daily exercise! Just because we all aren’t running great distances doesn’t mean that it is not normal to do so. We have learned to settle for average which is really subnormal. I think the book of Acts depicts the normal Christian life. Just because we don’t see healings and miracles, signs and wonders in our daily lives doesn’t mean that it is not normal to do so. We have just settled. So today I want to look at an obscure man in the book of Acts and see what we can learn from his life about normal Christianity. His name is Ananias. You may not remember Ananias because he is not a lead character in the Acts narrative, he is only mentioned in a few verses in two chapters. You might easily overlook him. He was not an apostle or an elder of the early church. If he were alive today he would not be a blue check. He was just a regular guy. We ma

Many of you may be waiting on the Lord right now… waiting to hear a doctor’s report, waiting for a wayward child turn back from walking away, waiting for some answered prayer. Waiting can be so hard! There is a great example of waiting on the Lord given to us in the book of Acts. We can learn a lot from the example of the first disciples. Forty days earlier Jesus had been crucified, died, buried and was resurrected. As the book of Acts opens the last thing He told His disciples before He ascended into heaven was not to leave Jerusalem, “but wait for what the Father has promised, for John baptized with water but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses…” Acts 1:4,8. The disciples were instructed to wait until they were fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Lamps, Wine and Fire - As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord through our lives we are discovering how important it is to stay close to the Holy Spirit. Initially we might have a hard time relating to Him because He is a spirit, He is mysterious; but the Bible helps us to understand Him by giving us metaphors that tell us what He is like. We learn how to relate to Him. Today I want to help you get to know the Holy Spirit better by looking into three more of the metaphors that describe Him.

As I continue to introduce the Holy Spirit to you I want to tell you more about Him. I want all of us to have a deeper understanding of who He is and what He is like. The Bible helps us in this endeavor by giving us many different metaphors that explain a different aspect of the Holy Spirit. Let’s explore some of these today

If I wanted to introduce a friend to you, how would I do that? My friend is someone I have gotten to know and I think you will want to know him too. We usually begin introductions with the person’s name and then we might tell something about what they do and what they are like. Today I have the joy of beginning to introduce the Holy Spirit to you. I feel inadequate for this task because He is mysterious. He is God, we cannot reduce him down to our size. We will never fully understand Him. He has such depth and fulness that our finite minds cannot grasp who He is. A.W. Tozer in his book, The Mystery of the Holy Spirit, said you can discover more about the Holy Spirit in five minutes on your knees adoring him than in five years in a seminary. So we must approach this topic of the Holy Spirit prayerfully.