- Spiritual Disciplines: Spiritual disciplines are those actions we consciously do in order to draw near to God; and they are the primary means by which we are sanctified by the Holy Spirit (John 17:17). In other words, they bring us closer to God, and are used by God to make our desires and nature more like His.
- Prayer Journal:
Don't forget be keeping a prayer journal. This is to be a recording of your prayers to God, and any answers received. Try to make it more then simply a list. Include your thoughts. Give context to what your write, and comment about what God seems to be doing or saying. Other then this format can vary greatly, and I'm not going to prescribe any specific way to do this. Some ideas for praying: Pray through a palm. Write out a prayer! This last idea might sound funny in our culture, but it can be a great way to meditate and pray to God. Piper makes the point that we tend to wrongly equate spontaneity with sincerity and true heart-feltness (is that a word?) This is not the case, and he points out that poetry, for example, is intended to cut right to the heart, yet, it is on of the most regimented and thought through forms of writing we have. A poet works VERY hard to put his or her thoughts into a specific pattern. Being thoughtful and working hard are good things. - Reading the word
We need to be spending time reading and meditating on the word of God, the Bible. This is how God communicates His will and mind to us. Being in the word of God and prayer go hand in hand. My only further comment on this right know is to remind you to think about what you read. Meditate on it, chew it. As we saw in Deuteronomy 6 last weekend, God wants His words to be part of us all throughout the day. For this to happen, we must be spending time putting His words IN our hearts. This requires effort and attention to what we are doing. This requires us to consider who to apply His word to every aspects of our lives. We will not do this if we do not spend time to put it into our hearts and minds.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Some things to Consider
I have a couple of things that I wanted you to think about/remember as we seek to proclaim God's goodness in this process.
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3 comments:
Please pray for me to be in the Word. By the time I finish my schoolwork every day, I have so many things I want to do with the little time I have left that its so easy to neglect reading the Bible. One idea I would add for the prayer journal is writing down one of Paul's prayers for the churches and personalizing it: inserting your name where Paul says we or you, and addressing it directly to God. I did this last week with Ephesians 1:3-14 and I was blown away by the depth and power of it.
Great suggestion Elizabeth! You can also pray for me in this matter. Also, I really want to memorize more and just have a hard time jump-starting myself to memorize!
I must digg your post therefore more folks can see it, very helpful, I had a hard time finding the results searching on the web, thanks.
- Thomas
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