A Short post on SOTD

I know that this is a short blog, but I feel that it is needed as we go back to school and become increasingly caught up in our busy daily routines.

A while ago, i was having a conversation with a friend of mine at one of the beach nights. the topic turned to SOTD comments, and we were discussing the fact that the numbers seem to dwindle by the end of the week. he said something to me that I still remember, and i would like to pass it on.

He said, “The problem with SOTD is that too many people simply can’t “find the time” to read their Bibles or post online. The problem with that is, they have completely missed the point. it’s not about cutting time out of your schedule to read God’s Word; it’s about making the study and application of God’s Word the focus of your schedule.”

This is a mindset we all need to start sharing. Once we stop looking at reading God’s Word as something we have to do and start viewing it as THE MOST IMPORTANT thing we do (and treat it accordingly), we will find that our lives become closer to God and that we will feel more of a spiritual connection to Him.

Conditioning’s On You

Ever since I started football again last spring, the coaches have been pushing us to get better. One of the major ways that they do this is through conditioning: running us until we have no breath or energy left… and then running us a bit more for the fun of it. In theory, the more sprinting we do now, the more prepared we will be come Fall. However, every team has their share of kids who don’t try at all, and Laguna Hills is no exception. These kids never try hard, and so in addition to hurting the team, they will not get any better.

One of our coaches loves to tell us, “Conditioning’s on you.” And he is right. The more effort we put out, the greater our return will be. If we decide to check out and not try, we will go nowhere while other teams get ahead of us. And no matter how much better we get, there’s always a next level to be attained.

The same is true of your Christian lives, especially as it pertains to our spiritual growth. We are either growing daily through what we do, or we are stagnant, not doing anything and not going anywhere as a result. The writer or Hebrews was very clear on how important growing in our faith is in Hebrews 5:11-14:

“We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.”

The sad truth is, many Christians simply have no desire to grow spiritually. They look at Christianity as a “Get out of Hell Free” card and make no effort to deepen their understanding of God or His plan for us. This thinking is in direct contradiction with 1 Peter 2:2, which says that we ought to “crave pure spiritual milk” like “newborn babies.” The idea is that we need to have a strong desire to grow spiritually that drives us to do everything we can to expand and deepen our understanding of God. There are many ways to grow spiritually, but here are 3 that I think are important:

1. We need to be in the Word. We cannot truly have a desire to know God and ignore His Word. Instead, we need to be studying it and meditating on it more than we do anything else. That’s one reason why Scripture of the Day is such a powerful tool. It allows us to read a common passage and share insights that we have on it as a group. This can help you to get more out of a given chapter than if you scanned it by yourself.  Personal Bible studies are very beneficial as well, as they allow you to read through a certain book at your own pace and focus on passages that you can learn from and apply. Being in the Word every day is key to growing spiritually. If we go without reading it, it becomes much easier to become disconnected and get sucked into a routine that leaves God out altogether. And when we read, we need to make sure that our mindset is on God and what He is trying to teach us through His word. If we are distracted, we will not get as much out of it.

2. We need to Apply Teaching. James 1:22 tells us to “not merely listen to the Word, and so deceive yourselves; Do what it says.” WE are blessed at CBC to have great pastors such as Pastor Bobby, Pastor Lucas, and Pastor Mike who are dedicated to preaching God’s Word to us in a relevant way. But listening to the message is not enough. Every sermon has at least one application point, and one way we can grow spiritually is by applying the message. If we sit through Bobby’s sermons every week and do not do what he shows us the Word says to do, then his preaching is in vain. All the great messages that we hear do nothing for us spiritually unless we act on what we have heard. Whether it was conviction to fight a certain are of sin in our lives, a command to be more bold in our evangelism, or directives for how to live a life above reproach in a corrupt world, we need to realize that the message is being taught with the intention that we will obey the teaching. As Luke notes in Acts 17:11, we do need to test the teaching to make sure it is in line with God’s Word. But once that fact has been established, the only thing holding us back from obeying and growing is our own sinful desires.

3. We need to Fight Sin. We cannot experience growth if we are being held back by sin. Sin in our lives will keep us from experiencing the kind of spiritual joy that we have when we are growing in Christ. So we need to make sure that we are not being controlled by sin in our lives. We need to fight sin and have others hold us accountable so that we do not feel that we can get away with it. The deeper into sin we venture, the further away from Christ we will feel, and the less we will desire to grow. Victory over sin is part of spiritual growth, so we need to make sure that we are battling sin instead of giving in to it.

If we start to apply teaching and dig deeper into God’s Word more and more, we will start to see great changes in our lives. The more we grow in our relationship with Christ, the more about God we can understand and appreciate. We will have more joy and a greater sense of peace and purpose. The more we experience victory over sin, the closer to God we will feel and the more we will desire to leave our old nature behind and follow Him wholeheartedly. God has many blessing to bestow upon His children, but we need to make sure that we are striving to better know Him and His will for us.

Praise to Jesus Christ

At beach night tonight, we read Psalm 40 in our small groups. One verse in particular stood out for me:

 ”5 Many, O LORD my God, are the wonders you have done. The things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare.”

Psalm 40 is a prayer of David’s, and he makes sure to spend time praising God for Who He is and what He has done. There are many verses I could use to cross-reference this, but I think that the problem is not that we don’t realize we need to praise God in our prayer; the problem is that we don’t take the time to actually do it.

Too many of our prayers are one-sided, us asking God for what we want. This is a major reason that the Revival spirit wears off in many of our hearts: we lose the connection with God that we had in prayer. The more we focus on ourselves in prayer, the more we lose focus of the whole point of prayer, and so it makes sense that we would start to feel more disconnected spiritually. 

To solve this, we need to take the time to give God the glory for Who He is and what He has done. I plan on writing another blog soon about praising God for Who He is specifically, because this is an essential part of our worship of God through prayer. We also need to ensure that we give God the glory for the things he has done in our lives and the lives around us.

If we shift the focus of our prayers from ourselves back onto where it belongs, we will find that we stay more revived spiritually. The key to maintaining a close connection with God is staying focused on Him, and our prayers should follow this pattern as well.

Servant’s Heart vs. Hypocrisy

Jesus spoke in Matthew chapter 6 about the way we are to conduct our lives. he starts off the chapter by saying, ”Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.” And several other times in the chapter, when referring to giving, prayer, and fasting, he tells his disciples not to be like the Pharisees, for “They have received their reward in full,” referring to the praises of man that they received. This got me thinking a while back. Why, then, do we honor those who serve in the church? Are we not taking their reward away?

I’ve come to realize, however, that the issue at hand was not the recognition the Pharisees received. the problem was their hearts. The Pharisees made shows of every religious act that they did so that people could see how good they were. Jesus rightly noted that what they were seeking was recognition and praise from man, and so God could give them nothing more. They got exactly what they wanted.

The Pharisees were first-class hypocrites. They were the ones who were supposed to be leading the Israelites in the worship of God and seeking after His glory, but instead they were living to bring glory to themselves. In his book The Ultimate Priority, John MacArthur Jr. reminds us that “Whatever you do, … if your motive is to impress men or get personal adulation, God cannot truly bless your efforts. If we try to steal a little glory for ourselves, we have stolen the blessing and joy that comes from God.”

Instead of being like them, Christ wants us to have a servant’s heart. When we serve, give money, do good, etc., we need to be concerned solely with bringing glory to God and not about what others think. If we selflessly give of our time and energy without expecting anything in return, we bring Glory to God and He will reward us for it.

Likewise, those who we see tirelessly serving Christ’s church with the right heart need to be commended for it. In a world that increasingly promotes hedonism and self-glorification, those who still keep the right mindset should be given our thanks and our encouragement.

Free Grace?

In the mornings, I go to the gym to work out with the football team. I try to take advantage of these times to be an ambassador for Christ. This morning, i was talking to one of the kids there about the concept of sin and holiness. he professed to be a Christian, but it was evident that it was nothing more than lipservice. he brought up the point, “Well, you should know that God will forgive me. And besides, I’m not like those kids, who i happen to know are going to go smoke pot after this.” I immediately noticed 2 major flaws in his reasoning. One, he was using other sinners as a comparison of how “good” he was. And 2, he believed in free grace.

The apostle Paul made this point very clear in Romans 6:1-2: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” 

The fact that Jesus Christ died so that we could be forgiven does not give us any free reign to go on a sinning spree. The problem with people who hold this view is that they have completely missed the point. Instead of overflowing with conviction and thinks and using that as a motivation to STOP sinning, they look at it as an opportunity to keep living as the world does and go back to being “good” later. Galations 2:18 says that we cannot ‘rebuild what [we] destroyed.” If we are truly dead to sin and alive in Christ, then we will have no desire to continue living in sin.