Spiritual disciplines/ formation Pt. 2

May be you are a lot like me, in that I struggle at giving Jesus the time I need to become more like him? I mean real, devoted, honest, unobstructed time for me to pray, listen, read and meditate/ think on scripture? How do I make the most of this time? When I only give him part of my attention, or part of my focus, then I rarely get that much out of it. Do you struggle with getting everything you can out of scripture when you read it? Do you struggle with prayer time? May be you are asking yourself if this is really helping?

Yesterday was a really good day for me. I spent a ton of time in the morning praying through and meditating on Galatians 5:16- 26.

I want to take you through the different portions of this scripture... to show you how I used this passage of scripture as part of my spiritual disciplines to help mold me and make me more like Jesus. Here is the first part of the scripture: Galatians 5:16- 18.

"So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law."

As you I read through the scripture, it got me to thinking about the ways that I try to gratify my own sinful nature... my sinful desires. It forced me to think and reflect on any sin that may be in my life. It helped me to realize that my own personal desires wants what is contrary to the Spirit. When doing this time of scripture meditation, we have to realize, understand and deal with the fact that we do have a sinful nature. Anytime that we want what is different than scripture... this is our sinful nature. Our sinful nature wants what is different than the Holy Spirit desires for us and it is a conflict that is inside all Christ followers. The battle between us doing right and the conflict between us doing wrong. I don't know about you, but I know the battle that I have at times whether it be as a husband, as a dad, as a pastor, as a human being been caught in this war between my own desires and the desires of the Holy Spirit living in me.

This type of internalized thinking about our sinful nature and desires shows how we are to take scripture and apply it to our own lives. If we try to get ourselves to think and believe that we do not have a sinful nature, then we are fooling and lying to ourselves. This excercise, forces us to filter our own lives through scripture and it may be hard... but we need to look at our own lives through the lens of a microscope [aka scripture] for us to see where we need to grow.

You see, by taking a scripture and unpacking it like this, this forces us to pray to God for revelation, it forces us to listen to God for Him to speak to us [whether through scripture or that small still voice]... it forces us to meditate and think about the scripture in the light [or darkness] of our own lives. Through these spiritual disciplines, it forms us and pushes us closer to Christ. It pushes us closer to understand that we need grace. It pushes us to become more like Jesus.

In my next part of this blog post, I am going to breakdown Galatians 5:19- 21.

Spiritual disciplines/ formation

Ok... I know this is later than I wanted, sorry.

I wanted to think this whole thing more. The idea of how we as Christ followers become more like Jesus. Typically this is called some thing like discipleship, spiritual formation, mentoring, etc. There are tons of different ways to become more like Jesus. I have had to learn how to become a self feeder. I personally had to find ways to feed myself spiritually and not depend or rely on a Sunday school class, a small group, a cell group or some other group to provide for me pathways to spiritual growth. Now don't get me wrong, I love these things... but I personally love them more from the fellowship aspect than I do the spiritual formation aspect. I do like taking say a topic like the fruits of the spirit and discussing it in the group setting... but personally I have gotten more from my own personal quiet time from my own personal study of the scripture, from my own personal time of meditation on God's Word.

If you have not read Richard Foster's book... Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth then you need to. He takes the time and unpacks the whole idea of and why spiritual disciplines are so important to all of us. This book has quickly become for me a staple in my own personally relationship with Jesus Christ. As being in full time ministry, my schedule at times can become crazy, way too fast. This book, has helped to show me new and exciting ways to spiritually feed myself... especially during times when I need it the most.

I personally find the use of spiritual disciplines, much more effective in my personal discipleship/ spiritual formation than any other small group or Sunday school class. But here is the kicker that I struggle with and may be you do as well... it takes time! I am not talking about some 5 minute prayer time that we just unload all of our daily burdens on God. I am talking about taking some serious time and intentionally spending that time focusing on God. It is time, where focusing on prayer... silence, listening for that small, still voice from God... and scripture meditation.

This has been a key reason why, I have become what some would call a heretic. I have come to realize through these avenues... that Jesus was a heretic of his time. He was revolutionary. He was different than the rest of the world.

I would challenge all of us to spend more time with God during the first 30 days of the new year. I would challenge all of us to get out bed early or to take some thing out of our schedule [i.e. TV, video games or dare I say Internet!] and spend at least an hour with a combination of prayer, silence before God, reading & meditating on scripture. In my next blog post today, I am going to go through Galatians 5:16- 26 for an example of how to do this.

Re-Connecting with God

This morning I was really needing some connection time with just me and God. It has been a crazy busy weekend... stressful... a ton of reconnecting with friends that we have not seen in some time. I am an introvert and I need to get my quiet, alone time with God. I need to have time where I can reconnect with my Heavenly Father... with our Creator... with Abba... with Jehovah. Today was a good first step of reconnecting, not just going through my prayer & study time... but a real, honest time of reconnecting with God.

This got me to thinking about all the time we spend celebrating Christmas, I think some times are so busy celebrating Jesus' birth that we forget or neglect to connect, intimately with God during this time.

Over the next few days, I am going to take some time unpacking connecting with God. I am going to unpack spiritual disciplines... discipleship... even some on prayer... talk about some resources [online and in print] that people can use to connect with God.

This morning, I started using the online prayer book called The Missio Dei Breviary. It was really good for me... I like these type of prayer books. It helps me to have different prayers, teaches me to pray through scripture and more. These prayer books, typically will have morning and evening prayers. Some, like Phyllis Tickle's Divine Hours series has morning, afternoon, evening, and bedtime prayers. The breivary has a month's worth of prayers and readings that you just repeat each month, whereas The Divine Hours is an entire series of books for the different seasons and holidays of the year. I have decided that I am going to purchase the The Missio Dei Breviary
for my entire family and that we as a family are going to start doing this each day. This will give my two middle school kids some focus in their personal quiet time and it will help them to incorporate prayers and scripture reading into their time with God.

In addition, the Vineyard Great Lakes website also has Phyllis Tickle's Divine Hours on their website and it updates itself with the time. Here is the link to where it is located on their website http://www.vineyardgreatlakes.com/tdh/tdh.cfm.

Both of these resources are very good resources to learn various spiritual disciplines, like prayer, listening for God, meditation, scripture meditation and more. I would challenge all of you that are looking for more in your walk with Christ to research spiritual disciplines and to find new and refreshing ways to connect with God and to let the Holy Spirit speak into, guide and refresh your lives.

At church yesterday, they talked about taking the next thirty days to create habits that will help us to grow in holiness and righteousness. Hopefully, in the next week, you can find some new ways to connect with God that will ignite your relationship with Jesus and it takes you places this year that you could never imagine.

My next blog post is going to be how I prayed through Galatians 5:16- 26 today... my hope is that through this time of blogging, you will find some new ways to reignite and reconnect with Jesus.

Sorry I haven't blogged lately

Sorry I haven't blogged lately. My family has moved back to central
Ohio from West Virginia, so needless to say I have been tired and busy.

I try to post tonight or certainly on Monday.

Thanks... Malcolm

Sent from my iPod Touch

The importance of BEING and DOING Jesus... with Penn Teller

The last few days, I have blogging about the fact that there has to be more to this Christian life... Christmas... the way that we celebrate Christmas.

I can tell you a story of about how our actions open and close doors for us to be able to tell about Jesus. But actually, I saw this video the other day... and I have thought about it off and on. But here is a video that magician/ comedian, Penn Teller made about somebody that gave him a Bible.

Look at his reactions... how deeply he was touched, just because a Christian was honest, open... and it even sounds like this guy was BEING and DOING what Jesus would have done. Even though he has deep disagreements with Penn, he was respectful, honest and you can tell by Penn's emotions and the way he talks about this guy... he was deeply impacted.

Watch...



Read through my blog from this week and think if we spend time BEING Jesus and DOING what Jesus did... then think about how it will open the doors for us to be able to share Jesus with those like Penn that are atheists and do believe in our wonderful Saviour, Jesus Christ.

I will write more later about this video. I believe that this is a very rich video that we in the church can learn from. You can tell from Penn that living out our values... our beliefs is more important than our actual words.

Merry Christmas!

New Christmas Traditions?

Here it is Christmas Eve... as I look through my Twitter and Facebook friends, I see many of them talking about traditions, doing stockings this evening, going to church, etc. Some times, I wish my family had more traditions like that. This year, has been kind of crazy for our family with the Christmas season. As we are moving to Central Ohio on 12/26 & 27. So we are living out of boxes right now.

Anyways... traditions are a good thing. I was a Navy brat growing up and I remember, even if Dad was out to sea for Christmas, my mom had certain traditions that we did as well. Things like on Christmas morning, before we would open Christmas presents mom would make a HUGE platter of sausage biscuits for us to eat while opening our presents. Or my brother and I would get to open our stockings and the presents that we got each other [this was just a formality, we had already told each other what we got one another :-)]. Even to this day, my mom makes sausage biscuits if we are at their house! I really miss some of the traditions.

As I am sitting here this morning, I am wondering what are some new Christmas traditions that we need to start? What are some new Christmas traditions, that are completely radical that people would call you and your family heretics? What are some traditions that our churches do that need to be replaced with new traditions?

What about some things like adopting under-resourced families for Christmas... that attend our churches... BUT also never go to churches? How about including some of them in our own family traditions? How about starting a new Christmas tradition for our youth groups to go and do something extravagant for the homeless, for the elderly, for the poor, for those that are working on Christmas morning?

There has got to be more to this Christian life during the Christmas season. I mean family is important... celebrating the life of Jesus Christ is the most important... but are we celebrating the way Jesus would have? What new traditions do we need to start?

Say a prayer...

Most of the United States is gripped in severe cold and the wind chills are well below zero. Here in Bramwell this morning, the temperature was 5 degrees... with a wind chill of -18 degrees.

All over the U.S. temperatures are like that or pretty close to that.

Each night, there is about 125,000 people that are homeless. Many of them are children, families that cannot get into shelters because they are overcrowded and full. Please pray for any that may be outside in this bitterly cold weather.

I would challenge churches to open their doors and do what you can to help the homeless during this time.