Dear Ones,
Hope you make space in your day for the Lord. We had a fun party last night and the entertainment was a couple excellent accordion players, and a sing along to many familiar songs. This morning is women’s Bible study and this afternoon we are invited to friends for fellowship and prayer.
Devotions from Judy’s heart
In our spiritual walk, it is good to be spontaneous but also to have some spiritual disciplines to help us move in the right direction. It is kind of a balance of freedom/disciplines so we don’t veer off to one side or the other and can go at a good pace, not slowing down so much we atrophy or speeding up that we burn out. We can enjoy spontaneity but also need structure. When Al first approached me some years ago to teach with him about spiritual disciplines, I wasn’t sure I liked that word and would have rather called them something else. But I had to come to understand that disciplines are only a means to an end to become like Jesus.

I like what Dallas Willard says about them. “The disciplines are activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is, strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself, as we ‘yield ourselves to God, as those that are alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God’”.

Our part is to slow down and make space for the Lord to do His work of transformation in our hearts. We can’t transform ourselves for even if we do all the spiritual disciplines, we may become self-righteous and controlling and forget we are to live by grace. The disciplines are simply an aid to help us in growing to be like Jesus. He empowers us by His Spirit and disciplines help us to access that power.

Tomorrow I will name some of the disciplines, many that Jesus modeled in his own life like prayer, fasting Sabbath, solitude, rest, scripture etc. But like John Mark Comer writes that “anything can become a spiritual discipline if we offer it to God as a channel of Grace… God works and we work. God has a part and we have a part.”

Challenge for today: Open yourself to practice a spiritual discipline that is new to you and allow the Holy Spirit to work in a deep way!
Blessings on your day and prayers and love, Judy