Month: April 2010 (Page 3 of 3)

Devotions from Margaret Silf’s book, Wayfaring

All of us need courage to face the darkness within us and allow God to shine His light on it.  Our faulty perspective blinds us and we need to cooperate with the Lord as He shows us what is hidden within us. “A decisive act of the will is required to turn away from those things that are entangling us further and further into untruth, deception, and delusion, and to turn in the direction of what we know, deep in the core of our being, is true.  Many times a day we must turn towards the truth and this takes effort. It helps to spend time alone in prayer, reading scripture, sharing with a spiritual director, and being part of a faith community.  As we take time to do this we will soon learn how to recognize when we are running true and when we are running off course. We have an inner compass and God is the center. When we deflect from all that is most true within us, this inner compass will waver and we know that we need to take corrective action. 

We are called to be healed so that we might become healers, forgiven so that we might be bearers of mercy, taught so we might become teachers, challenged in our untruths, so we might become challengers of untruths, restored to life that we might become life-givers etc.

Devotions from Margaret Silf’s book, Wayfaring

We are all encrusted with distortions of evil that come between us and our true self and cause us much pain. We can choose whether or not we want to remain enslaved or if we want to own these tendencies and acknowledge them in light of His grace.  We are good at deceiving ourselves into living as if we were self-sufficient and use all kinds of ways to defend our illusions and compulsions. But like Jesus said in John 12:24 our ego-selves need to fall into the ground and die that we can be eternally free.  But so often we would rather build defense systems and use lesser goods to fill the emptiness inside of us. This cascade of deception and illusion affects everything we do as individuals, and our individual choices and actions also affect others.  A dysfunction in any part of the body ultimately affects others too.  We can ask ourselves in what specific ways have I chosen “my kingdom” during the past few days, and put out of my mind the possible effects of my choice on others?  Do I shift the blame for my faults on others? To choose to let God free us requires a radical reappraisal of ourselves, and we need to  allow Him to transform us.  The journey with the Lord is a journey into love and freedom.

Devotions from Margaret Silf’s book, Wayfaring

Our society measures our worth by our achievements and even the religious structures tend to underscore this in more subtle ways.  We need to recover the value of our Being.   God calls us into a deeper awareness of the wonder and beauty concealed in the heart of our being.  We must trust that God is becoming incarnate in our personal life story and that He is continually loving us into life, whether we think we deserve it or not. We need to embrace the truth of it. Our part is to be open and humble and let the truth be revealed to us. We are kind of like an agate stone. When the stone is cut, the layers are revealed and the crystals at the heart of our being.  Often we prefer not to let the hard crust of our  being  be open and exposed. But if we do allow Him, the Godseed within us begins to grow into the unique fragment of Him that our lives are destined to reveal. Let us reflect today on what makes us feel alive.  How have we been opened to God in ways that were not even of our own devising?   Let us go forward knowing that we are known by God in all our brokenness, and loved beyond measure.

Devotions from Margaret Silf’s book, “Wayfaring”
This author talks about God’s invitation to walk our own living pathway in companionship with He who is the Way!  We are on a pilgrim journey and it is not a tourist outing.  It is a journey that challenges us and shapes our souls in ways we can not predict. The way ahead of us is a journey of the heart- the journey of our true selves toward the true center and source of all Being.  God sees the deepest parts of us and also our potential. Our part is to say Yes to the presence of God within us and to the growth of becoming what He alone has planned. We have a shallow picture of ourselves and others and often is distorted.  Only He knows the infinite treasure in the heart of our true selves. Our part is to open up to Him Who shows us in so many ways that we are the object of His unconditional love, with no requirement to prove ourselves. We have a hard time to deal with that possibility that we are loved just as we are and our efforts to please do not make a bit of difference to His love for us.  Let us go into this day believing that BEING is more important than DOING.

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

We may desire a problem-free life, but that would be death by boredom. IT is in working to solve problems and overcome challenges that we become the person God wants us to be.  Every problem is an invitation from the Spirit, and when we say yes, we are in the flow.  Let us ask for a task to keep us learning and growing.  Faith is an amazing life-giver. Optimistic faith-filled people may live a decade longer than people with a negative attitude. Caleb was one of the twelve scouts who explored the Promise land and at 85  was not detoured by what he saw. He wanted to go after the most difficult enemy in the hill country, not a condo at Shalom Acres!  God has wired us so that our bodies, minds and spirits require challenges and causes greater than ourselves.  “Challenges undertaken for the greater good bind us to people. The pursuit of comfort, however, leads to isolation-and isolation is terminal.” 
Life is not about comfort. It is about saying, “God, Give me another mountain.” Our mountain will not look like anyone else and has our name on it.  It will tap into our greatest strengths and passions.

May our deepest longing be to be alive with God, to become the person God made us to be, and to be used of God help God’s world flourish.  He wants to shape us not only to be His servant but His friend.

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want To Be

When adversity comes into our lives we can rise to the challenge and see abilities that have been hidden is us that would otherwise remain dormant.  We don’t really know what we are capable of until we have to cope.  Sometimes we lose everything but find out God is enough.  “God isn’t at work producing the circumstances you want. God is at work in bad circumstances producing the you He wants.”  Our circumstances – even the best of them – are temporary. But the person we become goes on forever.  If our focus is on the mountain we are driven by fear. But when our focus is on God, we are made alive by faith.  If we did not have the mountain, we would not know that faith could be in us!

Another benefit from adversity is that it deepens our friendships.  When we share our suffering and grief, we have a deeper appreciation for others and shared grief finds love.

Grief can also change our priorities about what really matters. When we go through suffering it can enable us to see the foolishness of chasing after temporal things and cause us to go toward the eternal.

God remains sovereign and can bring something good out of something bad.  As Julian of Norwich said, “He did not say, ’you shall know no storms, no travails, no disease,’. He said, ‘You shall not be overcome.’”

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want To Be

Paul says in Rom. 5 that we should rejoice in our sufferings, and he believed that suffering can lead to growth. Is it possible that adversity in our lives can cause us to reach our fullest level of growth and development?

Robert Roberts describes 3 attitudes of looking at the ups and downs of our lives: 1.Hope. We have the belief that our future holds good prospects and we welcome tomorrow.  2. Despair.  We have longing but we believe that it will go unfulfilled and the future is painful. 3. Resignation.  It is kind of halfway between hope and despair and we convince ourselves that what we want is not really a big deal. The best version is hope and the Spirit never leads us to despair. Our hope in not based on circumstances!

How can we go through adversity and come out the other side stronger than before?  We can call it post-traumatic growth! Adversity can lead to growth in a way that nothing else does.

Think of all the many people in scripture that God used their trials to bring them closer to Himself, and produced perseverance, character and hope. More tomorrow.

Devotions by John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

Being a Christian doesn’t cover up bad work. We should do our very best, with all our might, that will honor Him. . “If I cannot experience the Spirit in the work I am doing today, then I can’t experience the Spirit today at all.”

It’s alright to ask God to make our work successful ? Of course!  As long as success is not our god.

 “When we discover the gifts God has given us and the passions that engage us, and put them to work in the services of values we deeply believe in – in conscious dependence on God – then we are working in the Spirit.”

We are the ones that make our work significant- not the other way around.  Our work is a primary place where our calling gets lived out.  We reflect gratitude and worship even as we work. Any work that has meaning can be a blessing to people and to the earth, can be a calling.  A pastor might think of his work as a means to get a good income and therefore only a job. But a garbage collector can see what he does as part of making the world a better place and therefore it is a calling.

Let us ask God today to make our work go well.  Take 5 minute breaks throughout the day to get refreshed and ask God for strength to work well and sense your calling.

Martin Luther said, “What you do in your house is worth as much as if you did it up in heaven for our Lord God.”  Somebody is looking. Someone is keeping track. It is worth it!

Devotions from John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be

How do we find God in our work? How do we allow our work to move us toward the person God wants us to be? Jesus must have valued work for he spent more than ¾ of his life as a carpenter.
God has placed His desires in us for the calling He has for each of us and that will bless others.  When we are working, the joy and power we feel is the presence of His Spirit.  We were born with strengths and when we discover them we can put them to use and focus on developing them. There are certain activities that thrill and challenge us, and others that bore and drain us. When we discover our strengths, we are learning what an indispensible part of what it means to be made in the image of God. Dorothy Sayers said, “Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.”

The best moments of our lives don’t come from leisure or pleasure, but from being immersed in a significant task that is challenging and matched up with our abilities.  It is like we are in a flow and being swept up by something outside ourselves. Should we complain when we are about to do that for which we were born and placed on earth? May we see our work as a form of love and connect with the One who in turn uses the flow to shape us.