Friday 27 September 2013

3 Reasons For You To Have Personal Daily Devotions

The time lapse between my last post and this one obviously shows that I am yet to become a time management guru but I will like to share a few tips that have helped me maintain consistent times of fellowship with God. But first, I’d like to establish just how important our personal devotions are. 

An hour spent with God is worth a lifetime with man
Thank God for tweet-like prayers and shower time worship but there is more to our relationship with God than those. If you spend with your spouse the same quantity and quality of time that you spend with your doorman (except your husband is the doorman), you know that trouble looms ahead for both of you. So is our relationship with God. Our personal devotion is similar to ‘keeping in touch’ with a loved one. How much time you spend together is not only a reflection of your relationship but also its determinant. So you both can start out as BFFs but end up as strangers- it is only a matter of not spending enough quality time together. 

1.      Apart from just keeping in touch with God, fellowship with Him offers lots of benefits to us. First, the essence of our Christian faith is to know God (Philippians 3:10). Jesus Himself said, “This is eternal life, to know God”. Now, how do you really know someone except by spending time with them, reading stuff about them or listening to them? How are we going to really know God if we don’t spend time with Him? How are we going to spend time with Him if we mismanage our 24hours such that we can only cover the basic demands of life-Not that personal fellowship is not basic, it is just that unlike your job, nobody really holds you to ransom for not showing up.)

2.      In addition to knowing God intimately, consistent fellowship helps us to build the power to resist temptations. A very wise guy said somewhere in the book of Proverbs that “if you fall in the day of adversity, your strength is small”. It is easier to overcome temptations when we keep in touch with God. In fact, one of the devil’s tricks is to gradually lower the depth of our fellowship when a major trial looms. The idea is to get us weak enough to fall headlong into his ditch when the temptation finally shows up. Spending sufficient time with Him is the only way we are ever going to be able to walk in the Spirit that we may not fulfil the lusts of the flesh. 

3.      Also, It is in the place of daily fellowship that we can exchange thoughts with God and thereby grow in grace and become more like Him even here on earth (Romans 12:2). A very dear friend, who I consider as my own Barnabas once told me that “I would rather teach people how to fellowship with God than teach them how to get healing or prosperity or any other thing because I know that in the place of fellowship, anything can happen including healing and prosperity.”

We want God to use us to conquer territories and establish His will here on earth but we have to know what the said will is. God used David, Daniel, Moses, Gideon, Paul and even people we would consider losers in today’s world but many of them spent time with Him, praying, studying and listening to Him 

The Bible consistently revealed that even Jesus made maximum use of His time. He would get up to pray at dawn, work hard during the day (John 4:34), retreat from the crowd when necessary (Mark 6:31), and multi-task by napping during commute time (He wasn’t driving of course J) (Matthew 8:24). He even wept over a city that did not know her time of visitation (Luke 19:44). He was that conscious about managing time.

Now, if Jesus our Lord managed his day so that he set apart time for fellowshipping with God, how are we going to walk worthy without having a similar practise? Let us take a step beyond wishing and desiring intimacy with God to acting on those desires.

How about you? In what ways have your personal devotions helped your faith and life generally? Please share with us in the comments section.
Cheers,
Miss August.

Pic from: http://www.championcenterlv.com/danielfast/day-1-daniel-fast/

Tuesday 17 September 2013

Him Time vs. Me Time




After sliding from publishing 3 posts a week to publishing zero posts in a month, I learnt that proper time management is extremely important for a successful Christian life.
Redeeming the time for the days are evil

Many Christians sincerely wish to be closer to God and share a deeper relationship with Him. Some actually do something about this desire and go on to develop personal disciplines that help in this regard while some of us build our mansions on ‘Wishes Boulevard’; vainly expecting that one day, we will suddenly become close to God. News flash, it is not likely to happen. Like a young preacher aptly said, “If you find yourself suddenly close to God without any effort on your part; the name of that spiritual state is called death.” How very true! Intimacy with God does not happen suddenly, it requires a measure of effort from our own end.
Granted, God has made the first move by making salvation free for all through the death of Jesus, but it doesn’t end there. While God has expressed His commitment through Jesus and His permanently welcoming arms, we have to express our own commitment through the quantity and quality of time that we choose to spend with Him in fellowship and service. Yes, time- that precious gift we hardly have enough of since we have to attend to our jobs, families, friends, hobbies, and other vital needs aka watching TV, or surfing the web.
This post is not an attempt to evoke guilt or shame but the truth is that it is almost impossible to enter the fullness of God’s thoughts and purpose for our lives if we don’t spend significant time in His presence daily. How else are we going to worship Him, how are we going to study and meditate on The Word day and night like He told us to (Joshua 1:8) ?  If we don’t find time to study the word, how are we even going to know what He has prepared for them that love Him? How are we going to know the things He wants us to stop, change, adopt, or do (Habakkuk 2:1)? If we don’t know them, how are we going to do them? 
Going without quality personal fellowship is what keeps many of us as immature babies in the kingdom, and God knows we have enough babies in the Body of Christ today. Babies are members of the family and they are a delight but they are yet to enjoy the peak of the family’s essence. Isn’t that why we grieve more when a baby dies? We don’t have to remain babies; there is room for growth.
We are all saved by believing in and confessing the Lordship of Jesus but we are not all on the same level in establishing the will of God on earth. This is not because God loves some folks more than others but the Scriptures cannot be broken- God consistently seeks and uses people who make themselves available to Him (Isaiah 6:8). Are you going to be available to Him? One of the best ways to let Him know you are available is to give Him your time. 
How has your time management skills influenced your relationship with God and other areas of your life?