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Archive for the ‘Spiritual Disciplines’ Category

Fixed on Beauty

Posted in Devotional Prayer, General Discipleship, Spiritual Disciplines, tagged , on January 26, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Last week while I was at the House of Prayer Edmonton prayer room there was a specific phrase that I sensed the Holy Spirit highlighting to me. It was a spontaneous worship chorus that was being sung at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City (via webstream)

I don’t want to be entertained by the things of the world; I want to be fixed on beauty

This was in the midst of a week when we were focusing on Psalm 27. In Ps. 27:4 King David writes:

One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple. (italics added)

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for entertainment; and no, I do NOT think God exists for my entertainment; far from it! However, here’s the point I’d like to make: We often use entertainment as a means to relax and to renew us. Especially here in western society it is a high value to spend as much time as possible ‘relaxing’ or to use a more common phrase, ‘to chill out’. When we have had a hard, busy week what do we like to do? We want to ‘chill out’ and that almost always involves various forms of entertainment.

What if God was to give us a new paradigm of what it means to ‘chill out’? For most people, to ‘chill out’ almost always means to disengage and mentally check out from everything. But what if we were renewed and restored by being spiritually and mentally engaged with God? What would it look like to be renewed by being fixed on beauty?

I want to suggest that this is exactly how King David lived and what he described in Psalm 27:4. The context of Psalm 27 is during a very  stressful time in David’s life. His anxiety levels were high and he was surely very preoccupied with what was happening around him. Yet his response was to take extended time to ‘gaze upon the beauty of the Lord’. David lived his life being inwardly renewed by fixing his gaze on the beauty of God.

Think about your week. What will you do on the weekend, or whenever you have time for a break? What role does entertainment have in your life? Does it renew you?

Now I would like to be clear about this: I’m not speaking against good, legitimate forms of entertainment. The problem is that very often we settle for spending so much time on lesser things in the hope that they will renew and restore us that we have little time and patience for what promises to renew us: God himself. The apostle Paul writes that we are designed in such a way that we are renewed according to the true knowledge of God our Creator (Col. 3:10).

I want to encourage you to take time to think about this. The implications are significant. The Scriptures make a bold promise: that you and I will find our greatest fulfillment and inward renewal when we gaze (meaning contemplate or meditate) on God himself!

We need to become more and more like King David, as people who are fixed on beauty!

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The Chariot of the Holy Spirit

Posted in Devotional Prayer, quotes, Spiritual Disciplines on June 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Paul Cain once said that “the chariot the Holy Spirit enjoys most is the Scriptures.”

Many people approach the Bible in a couple of different ways: the Bible can be studied in an academic way where the emphasis is primarily analytical or it can become essentially God’s manual for life; a book that shows us how God wants us to live our lives. Both approaches are valid and have their benefits.

One of the most powerful ways to read the Scriptures is more a ‘devotional’ approach and this is an approach that is often neglected by many Christians. What we need most is not more information about God; what we need is a revelation at a heart level about the character and nature of God. Knowing God on a heart level is where intimacy with God is developed.

Jesus once spoke of this to the religious leaders of his day:

You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.  -Jn. 5:39-40

Certainly Jesus was speaking to the Jews about the understanding that the Old Testament prophesied about him as the coming Messiah of Israel. However these verses also speak to us as Christians and the way that we approach the Scriptures.

There are also growing numbers of Christians that are experiencing a deep inward groaning to know God more deeply and pray diligently that they would know God more. I believe that Jesus would call us to a greater reading and meditation on the Scriptures that testify and give us the revelation of what God is like. That is what Paul Cain meant when he said that “the chariot the Holy Spirit enjoys most is the Scriptures”

A ‘devotional approach’ to reading the Scriptures is essentially about turning the Bible into an ongoing prayer dialogue with God. It involves less analysis and more personal reflection, regularly pausing to meditate on what it is saying and to pray and listen to the Lord.

Let’s look at a famous passage from Exodus 34:

And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, ‘The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation’.  -Exodus 34:6-7

Here are a few steps you can use to allow the Holy Spirit to breath greater revelation into your spirit:

  1. Read over these verses a couple of times. Take your time. Don’t rush through.
  2. Pray in agreement with what God has said about himself. Thank God that he is slow to anger, abounding in love, etc.
  3. If one part or phrase stands out to you, stay with that phrase and use your own words to express how you feel about it.
  4. If a part of phrase doesn’t make sense to you, ask God to speak to you about it. Often the Holy Spirit will bring another passage of Scripture to your mind to help fill in the picture of God that is being revealed. When that happens, look it up, write down the reference and bring those verses into your dialogue with the Lord.
  5. Pray and ask God to soften your heart to know who he is and then to become more like him. We are made in the image of God and are designed to reflect the glory and character of God in our lives.
  6. Finally, make a point to spend several days in the same passage of Scripture. Our tendency is to move on too quickly. When you choose a passage like Exodus 34, stay there for 2-3 days or a week. Dialogue and meditate and allow God time to work in your heart.

I hope that this will aid in your times of devotional prayer and in growing in the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Jesus!

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Entering God’s Spacious Place

Posted in Devotional Prayer, Spiritual Disciplines, tagged , , , , on February 18, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

One of the things that becomes clear when we read through the Psalms is that God is repeatedly trying to reinforce his truth into our hearts. Very often we know truth in our minds but struggle to believe in our hearts. Take Psalm 31:8 for example:

You have not handed me over to the enemy but have set my feet in a spacious place.

For most people this is a nice verse to have on the fridge or on a book mark, but it is more difficult to internalize it in our hearts

When David wrote this he was likely being pursued by Saul and his men, so in the context of the Psalm we know that David had literal enemies. The majority of us do not really have many true enemies. Perhaps there are a few people who don’t like us very much but not people who actually want to harm us. (hopefully!!)

The Scriptures make it clear that the devil is our true enemy. It is not only legitimate but important for us to read Ps. 31:8 with that in mind. We have NOT been handed over to the enemy; quite the contrary: God is leading us to a spacious place. This is a place of safety and rest. This is obviously a spiritual place and it is independent of our natural circumstances. We find this confirmed in Psalm 23 where David writes that God leads us into ‘green pastures’ and ‘beside quiet waters’, even when we are in the midst of the ‘shadow of death’.

Psalm 31:8 is a powerful truth for our prayer life. We need to come into agreement with this truth, thanking God and confessing with our mouths that God has not given us into the hands of the enemy, and he has led us (and continues to lead us) into a spacious, restful place.

We can begin to pray this verse and agree with its truth. Here are a few suggestions of how to do that:

  1. begin by reading it out loud and verbally agreeing with its truth.
  2. if you struggle to believe that it is presently true in your life, talk to God and tell him why you feel that way.
  3. ask God to open your spiritual eyes to see the ‘spacious place’ that he promises for you. (again, the power of this isn’t in us magically declaring something and ‘willing it’ to be true; we want real connection and relationship with God; we can agree with God’s truth even while we honestly struggle to believe it)
  4. express the verse in your own words. connect in verses like Ps. 23, that talk about the same thing. Thank God and talk to him about what you are reading and feeling about it.

What we need is eyes that see and hearts that believe. Take this verse and make a point of praying through it for the next 4-5 days and see what kind of impact it has on your Spirit. You’ll be surprised!

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Treasure Houses of the Spirit

Posted in Devotional Prayer, General Discipleship, Spiritual Disciplines, tagged , , , on January 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

A more reasonable estimate of human costs and values will lead us to think that no labour is better expended than that which explores the way to the treasure-houses of the spirit, and shows mankind where to find those goods which are increased by being shared, and which none can take from us. - William Inge

Author Dallas Willard references this quotation in the opening chapter of his book The Spirit of the Disciplines. The majority of Christians live life ‘catching God on the run’; that is to say, in the midst of the day to day busy-ness of normal life. The problem is that such an approach will invariably result in missing the ‘treasure-houses of the spirit’.

Paul wrote that the Holy Spirit ‘searches all things, even the deep things of God’ (1 Cor. 2:10). I am not satisfied with only knowing the introductory things of God; I want to know the deep things of God. This is not some form of impractical contemporary mysticism. Quite the contrary! Even a cursory reading of the New Testament will show that the apostles deeply desired that the church would grow in their revelation (living understanding) of the deep things of God.

Prayer is one of the most significant pathways toward the ‘treasure-houses of the spirit’. I love that phrase because it creates excitement in me to search out the treasures of God. In my previous post, I wrote about the importance of developing and using a personal prayer list. Why? Because only a conscious, long-term, disciplined approach to spiritual growth will result in encountering those divine treasure-houses. Obviously a prayer list is only a tool to aid in prayer and prayer is only one facet of spiritual growth. However my point is that we will not simply stumble into the ‘divine treasure-houses’ that are available to us. There may be some exception here or there but as a rule, the majority of believers will miss out on what the apostle Paul described as ‘glorious riches’ that really could be ours if we would but pursue them diligently!

I urge you to give careful consideration to what you want most in life. David wrote of God: “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” (Ps. 16:11) I want to encounter the God who will give ‘eternal pleasures’ to those who will have the vision to lay things aside in order to come and labor and search for them!

What are you laboring after in this life?

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How to Develop a Personal Prayer List

Posted in Devotional Prayer, General Discipleship, Intercessory Prayer, Spiritual Disciplines, tagged , , , , on January 27, 2010 | 11 Comments »

I am a strong believer in helping people to a develop personal prayer list. For many people the idea of a ‘prayer list’ sounds dry and boring but actually it is a powerful tool in our prayer life. We want to ensure that we don’t neglect certain areas or themes in prayer. Let me use a weight lifting example: I’m not a big weight lifter but I’ve been to the gym enough to see that people who are serious about weight training have a list of exercises that they go through in their work out. Often they will have a small booklet with them and check off how many sets they did and what the weight was for each set. If you’re serious about weight training you want to ensure that you’re hitting all the various muscle groups in a systematic way. (otherwise you might end up with huge biceps but tiny lats!)

It’s important to have a systematic approach to our prayer life as well. There are a number of different areas in prayer that I want to practice and gain strength in and one of the important means for doing that is to develop a personal prayer list.

Here is how I approach it: I have  a list that has 3 main sections: “Personal Devotional”, “General Intercession”, “Specific Requests”. The section names are not important; you can call them whatever you want, but let me explain the differences and why each section is important.

Personal Devotional prayer is a section that applies to my personal spiritual life. It contains Scripture passages that I like to pray for myself on a regular basis. A example of that would be the great commandment in Matt. 22:37 to love God with all my heart, soul, and mind. Another example would be Galatians 5 and the list of the fruit of the Spirit. These are important passages that I want to make sure that I’m praying into my life on a regular basis. (I also have sub-categories within this section, but that’s for another post!)

General Intercession is a list of prayer areas that are ongoing and that I want to cover regularly. Some examples would be my marriage, my wife and my kids. I also have areas related to my job. In each one  I have specific Scriptures that I pray through. The key here is that the areas are ‘ongoing’ or ‘long term’ rather than ‘seasonal’ or ‘temporary’.

The Specific Requests section is where I have included more ‘temporary’ prayer needs. This is the part of my prayer list that changes regularly. It includes what I would call ‘traditional prayer requests’, such as people with illnesses or other ‘short term’ needs. When people say “can you pray for this or that”, those requests go in this section.

There is so much more to say about how to develop a prayer list, but for today I simply wanted to introduce the concept. Always keep in mind that the purpose is to help strengthen your prayer life. A prayer list is a tool to serve your vision to connect your heart to God through prayer. The unfortunate reality is that most people do not have a disciplined, balanced approach to their prayer life, and developing (and using!) a prayer list can be a significant tool to help remedy that in our lives.

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