Today's devotional message (see below) brings one full year of devotionals for the Westview team to completion. Not all of the first month made it onto the blog, but on May 13, 2008, this practice of the community began.
My hope and prayer is that God will take this practice and use it to help form us more perfectly into the image of Jesus Christ, virtue by virtue.
May God make it so.
Blessings,
Ron
Showing posts with label devotional. Show all posts
Showing posts with label devotional. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Ordinary human beings ...
“We must not be led to believe that the Disciplines are only for spiritual giants and hence beyond our reach, or only for contemplatives who devote all their time to prayer and meditation. Far from it. God intends the Disciplines of the spiritual life to be for ordinary human beings: people who have jobs, who care for children, who wash dishes and mow lawns. In fact, the Disciplines are best exercised in the midst of our relationships with our husband or wife, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbors.”
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
This is how Foster introduces his book about the disciplines. So many times in my own life I have wanted someone to come along and help me grow in my faith and give me the tools to help me on this journey. Through many years in college, mission trips, youth rallies, retreats, weekly devotionals, and just wonderful times out in God’s creation, I have been inspired in so many different ways to spend time with God. You may think that since I have been the one writing these devotionals, that this has been an easy task for me. It has been hard. It can be difficult to work through some of these disciplines. We are in such a fast paced society, even in such a small little town like Hollis. We are constantly feeling the pull to go, go, go. God wants us to be, be, be in His presence and let his love, grace, peace, hope, and encouragement flow over us.
There are so many other disciplines we could have looked at, but we just had the time to focus on these few. Just because our class times are done, it doesn’t mean we need to stop working on these disciplines. In fact, we should all feel a challenge to take it a step further by working on these disciplines and helping someone else develop their own. Wherever we are, at the end of this class, my hope is that it is closer to God than when we began.
When we began, we started out by focusing on Zephaniah 3:17. Do you remember this time together? Do you remember taking the time to be alone and quiet yourself down and recite this over and over again? Let’s look at it one more time.
“The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”
Zephaniah 3:17
Our God wants all of this for us. He actually longs for us to quiet down and rest in his arms of love. I know that many of you felt that as we participated in some of these exercises. God is with you and He is daily waiting for you to spend that time with Him. Over the next few days we will be looking back at some of the disciplines we have worked through. I am going to ask a huge favor of you all. Since we will not have another time to get together and discuss our feelings on this experience before I have to turn my final project in, I would like you all to consider at least one devotional or experience that we worked on together and share that with me. You can email it to me directly at theroarks4jesus@aol.com. I will then take your thoughts and use that as one of our devotional thoughts for the following week. That way we can all take a part in closing down this “overflow” of our hearts. “Closing down” is hopefully the wrong way to say this, because one of the goals of this project is to allow this experience to overflow into the lives of those around us. Are you experiencing any overflow?
Thanks!
Jason
Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
This is how Foster introduces his book about the disciplines. So many times in my own life I have wanted someone to come along and help me grow in my faith and give me the tools to help me on this journey. Through many years in college, mission trips, youth rallies, retreats, weekly devotionals, and just wonderful times out in God’s creation, I have been inspired in so many different ways to spend time with God. You may think that since I have been the one writing these devotionals, that this has been an easy task for me. It has been hard. It can be difficult to work through some of these disciplines. We are in such a fast paced society, even in such a small little town like Hollis. We are constantly feeling the pull to go, go, go. God wants us to be, be, be in His presence and let his love, grace, peace, hope, and encouragement flow over us.
There are so many other disciplines we could have looked at, but we just had the time to focus on these few. Just because our class times are done, it doesn’t mean we need to stop working on these disciplines. In fact, we should all feel a challenge to take it a step further by working on these disciplines and helping someone else develop their own. Wherever we are, at the end of this class, my hope is that it is closer to God than when we began.
When we began, we started out by focusing on Zephaniah 3:17. Do you remember this time together? Do you remember taking the time to be alone and quiet yourself down and recite this over and over again? Let’s look at it one more time.
“The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”
Zephaniah 3:17
Our God wants all of this for us. He actually longs for us to quiet down and rest in his arms of love. I know that many of you felt that as we participated in some of these exercises. God is with you and He is daily waiting for you to spend that time with Him. Over the next few days we will be looking back at some of the disciplines we have worked through. I am going to ask a huge favor of you all. Since we will not have another time to get together and discuss our feelings on this experience before I have to turn my final project in, I would like you all to consider at least one devotional or experience that we worked on together and share that with me. You can email it to me directly at theroarks4jesus@aol.com. I will then take your thoughts and use that as one of our devotional thoughts for the following week. That way we can all take a part in closing down this “overflow” of our hearts. “Closing down” is hopefully the wrong way to say this, because one of the goals of this project is to allow this experience to overflow into the lives of those around us. Are you experiencing any overflow?
Thanks!
Jason
Friday, September 19, 2008
The urgent and important
What has to be missing from our lives to create issues for us? What, if taken without notice, might even create crisis? If you take away my blood pressure medicine (my issues are mild and age related), then after a couple of days I start to feel the effects. If you take away my Diet Dr. Pepper, well, “Houston, we have a problem.” What, if it were missing from your life, would create issues for you? What, if it were to stop, would create problems for your children or your family?
In the staff meeting yesterday, I asked the team if anything in particular was missing. After a moment, one person piped up and observed that the daily devotionals had been missing for a couple of days. That was the answer for which I was looking. I might add that this particular absence was deliberate on my part. I know what I feel the importance of these devotionals to be, but I needed to see what the importance of these devotionals might be to those who receive them. I also was seeking to see how, as a team, we might handle issues of accountability; but that is a spiritual issue that we’ll discuss another day.
The question that I asked the team members present for the meeting (a lot of us are traveling now) was: “What ministry are you performing right now that would be missed if it were to stop?” It’s a thought-provoking and spiritual question, isn’t it? The gifts of our time, our skill, our education, our experience, and our energy have limits, after all, because of our humanity. We only have so much of any of those things. So we are forced by the inexorable ticking of the clock to make decisions, to prioritize.
Basing his work on biblical thought, Stephen Covey has proposed that we prioritize our time by the urgent/not urgent and important/not important categories.
Quadrant I - urgent and important
Quadrant II - not urgent, but important
Quadrant III - urgent, but not important
Quadrant IV - not urgent or important
Obviously, this is important for our lives. How we use time is a fundamentally spiritual issue. We decide which ministries (if we’re Christians, then what do we do that is not ministry?) are urgent or important, and put other work in other categories. This brings up a lot of questions:
How would God have us use the day that he has given us?
What ministries that we perform would those around us miss most quickly?
Where does our prayer life fit in the midst of this?
How much is prayer bound by time?
What work that we do is of the highest importance, whether or not anyone else thinks it is urgent or not?
For me, one of my answers to this last question has been this series of daily devotional messages. It is not that what I personally have to say is that important; I have shared this space with other voices that are equally valued and important. Even when I have spoken, I have often quoted scripture or the words of spiritual sages who have gone on before. The importance for me is that we spend spiritual time in quadrant II (Important, not urgent). As a consequence, in the course of our day we can use our properly spiritual focus to help us spend more time in quadrant II instead of quadrant III (urgent, but not important) . If our focus is off too much, then even little things can slip into quadrant I (urgent and important).
Jesus resisted quadrant III and IV (not urgent and not important). He spent time in ways that others did not always understand; for example, his withdrawing by himself to pray, even at times when other people had other things they wanted from him. We need to do this, too. The habits that Jesus modeled, we need to emulate. This is because younger or smaller eyes are watching us and deciding whether to mimic us, or to critique us with the particularly prophetic voice of a child. Please spend some of your God-given time today thinking about how you handle your time; it’s not merely a logistical issue – it’s a spiritual issue.
Blessings,
Ron
In the staff meeting yesterday, I asked the team if anything in particular was missing. After a moment, one person piped up and observed that the daily devotionals had been missing for a couple of days. That was the answer for which I was looking. I might add that this particular absence was deliberate on my part. I know what I feel the importance of these devotionals to be, but I needed to see what the importance of these devotionals might be to those who receive them. I also was seeking to see how, as a team, we might handle issues of accountability; but that is a spiritual issue that we’ll discuss another day.
The question that I asked the team members present for the meeting (a lot of us are traveling now) was: “What ministry are you performing right now that would be missed if it were to stop?” It’s a thought-provoking and spiritual question, isn’t it? The gifts of our time, our skill, our education, our experience, and our energy have limits, after all, because of our humanity. We only have so much of any of those things. So we are forced by the inexorable ticking of the clock to make decisions, to prioritize.
Basing his work on biblical thought, Stephen Covey has proposed that we prioritize our time by the urgent/not urgent and important/not important categories.
Quadrant I - urgent and important
Quadrant II - not urgent, but important
Quadrant III - urgent, but not important
Quadrant IV - not urgent or important
Obviously, this is important for our lives. How we use time is a fundamentally spiritual issue. We decide which ministries (if we’re Christians, then what do we do that is not ministry?) are urgent or important, and put other work in other categories. This brings up a lot of questions:
How would God have us use the day that he has given us?
What ministries that we perform would those around us miss most quickly?
Where does our prayer life fit in the midst of this?
How much is prayer bound by time?
What work that we do is of the highest importance, whether or not anyone else thinks it is urgent or not?
For me, one of my answers to this last question has been this series of daily devotional messages. It is not that what I personally have to say is that important; I have shared this space with other voices that are equally valued and important. Even when I have spoken, I have often quoted scripture or the words of spiritual sages who have gone on before. The importance for me is that we spend spiritual time in quadrant II (Important, not urgent). As a consequence, in the course of our day we can use our properly spiritual focus to help us spend more time in quadrant II instead of quadrant III (urgent, but not important) . If our focus is off too much, then even little things can slip into quadrant I (urgent and important).
Jesus resisted quadrant III and IV (not urgent and not important). He spent time in ways that others did not always understand; for example, his withdrawing by himself to pray, even at times when other people had other things they wanted from him. We need to do this, too. The habits that Jesus modeled, we need to emulate. This is because younger or smaller eyes are watching us and deciding whether to mimic us, or to critique us with the particularly prophetic voice of a child. Please spend some of your God-given time today thinking about how you handle your time; it’s not merely a logistical issue – it’s a spiritual issue.
Blessings,
Ron
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