Ezekiel = God Strengthens

Since I started this blog, I have been going through a valley in my
own spiritual and personal life.

There are some things that God has called me to do... and I need to
get them done over the next few days. They are not pretty and matter-
of-fact, it is confronting some people on sin and calling them to
repentance and go over a path to reconciliation & restoration
spiritually, emotionally, physically and relationally.

Over the next few days, I will detaching a bit from the world while I
do this... this is something that is new to me... but some thing that
I must do. Sometimes, following God... and His calling on your life
is not fun, pretty... etc.

In preparation for this, God has had me hanging out and studying
through Ezekiel. In many ways, Ezekiel was a heretic to many. He went against the flow of things and challenged the status-quo.

Which is quite adequate since Ezekiel actually does mean "God's
strength".

I just ask you if God puts me and my family on your heart over the
next couple days to say a prayer for us.

I look forward to being back and even blogging about some of this
after the weekend is over with.

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.

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.