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/

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