Today we ask, once again, how can you have a consistent and meaningful devotional life?
Hi!
Welcome to Little Lessons.
We want to continue following up on our previous little lesson talking about a devotional life,
and how is it possible to have a meaningful devotional life?
Well, it has to be heartfelt, right?
You don't just want to be saying redundant prayers by rote.
Jesus said, "The Gentiles think that God will hear them for their many words, but when you
pray," and he gave a guide that we normally call the Lord's Prayer.
You could follow that prayer verbatim.
It's a great prayer, of course, but you can also take the principles of that prayer and
apply them, and expand your prayer time to make it even more meaningful.
Obviously, if we're going to praise the Lord, we're not limited to just saying, "Hallowed
be thy name," and if we're making requests, we're not limited to simply, "Thy kingdom
come, Thy will be done," but it does show us that we ought to, first of all, focus on
honoring, worshiping, praising, adoring the Lord.
As you do that, it just, you know, gives you a wonderful, wonderful feeling thinking about
how great God is and how big He is, and He's the maker and creator of the universe, and
He's got everything in His hands.
You know these declarations that you can make about how great He is, how holy, and righteous,
and pure, and, you know, it's really a spiritual exercise, that, I'm sure helps you more than
it helps Him, because He already knows all those things about Himself, but you're extolling
His virtues.
You know, obviously our prayers for requesting stuff for ourself are not limited to just,
give me my daily bread this day.
The whole forgiveness, which is also included in the Lord's Prayer, you know, it could be
expanded upon.
See what you can learn.
I think probably everyone who's watching this knows more of the principles that are found
in the Lord's Prayer than only what you find in the Lord's Prayer.
Let that be a great pattern for your prayers.
Of course, it ends with a praise and acknowledgement, you know, "For Thine is the kingdom, and the
power, and the glory forever, and ever."
I love that declaration.
You just can't say that too much.
Then, of course, we love for the Lord to speak to us, and many mystical people who spend
a lot of time in prayer, begin to think that they're hearing from the Lord on a regular
basis.
That, you've got to be very careful there.
You know every thought that you have while you pray is not necessarily the Lord.
On the other hand, as I pray, and oftentimes when I pray in the Spirit, or that's another
phrase for praying in tongues, which I have talked about that before on Little Lessons.
If you didn't hear those Little Lessons, you can look that up; several lessons on praying
in tongues, but that's the Holy Spirit praying through you.
It's marvelous.
You would expect that you might get some revelation, or some wisdom, or guidance, or something
from doing that.
I can testify that I do.
I often get instructions.
I hate to even use such a strong term as that, but I get instructions, or ideas, or wisdom,
or thoughts, whatever you want to call it, things that I'm supposed to do that day that
I'm praying.
I can take care of those things then.
I often get insight into God's word.
Then that would be, of course, the second part of hearing from God.
In our devotional life, that would be spending time meditating in His word.
Notice I said meditating and not just reading.
Reading the word of God is a very valuable thing, but we want it to penetrate us, and
change our lives.
Paul wrote, "Let the word of Christ dwell within you richly."
Whew.
We find lots of scripture about the importance of meditating in God's word day and night,
and that's a way to renew our minds.
You think about how blessed we are, the majority of the history of Christianity, Christians
haven't had personal Bibles that they could just pick up and read.
It wasn't until the invention of the Gutenberg printing press there, I guess it was in Germany,
I'm thinking the 1400s, when they could crank out copies of the Bible.
Even then they were way out of price.
The average person couldn't afford them, and it's really just not that too far back in
recent history, where books became affordable to the average person.
We have that blessing of getting access to the word of God by reading it ourselves.
Early Christians only had what they could memorize, what they heard, you know, amongst
other ... in their gatherings, you know, the circulation of Paul's letters and so forth,
which the early church didn't even have many of those at first, because it took a while
for Paul to get going, and for those letters to get going.
They had the Old Testament and they would listen for those things, and memorize them,
and try to internalize them.
It's much more important that we do that.
If you're going to spend time in God's word, well, I would suggest spending most of your
time in the New Testament, because we are under the New Covenant.
This is not to say that it isn't worthwhile to spend time reading the old covenant, the
Old Testament, because God hasn't changed.
But the covenant has changed and we've got a better covenant established on better promises.
I've done my best over the years to help Christians in their devotional life through a number
of means.
I wrote a book called Family-Style Devotions.
It's written in very simple language so that parents can read it to their children every
day, and then I have some follow up questions.
It actually studies the entire life of Christ.
We're not just discussing ethical and moral things, you know, about, don't take your brother's
crayons.
But we know everything Jesus said and did, we look at it, and put it into a kid's level
of understanding.
If you're a family with children, might want to check into that at davidservant.com, Family-Style
Devotions.
Then we've got a couple other devotionals.
HeavenWord Daily is a book that I wrote, that takes you through the New Testament in one
year's time.
You only have to actually do it, I think, five days a week.
Then I have a commentary that helps to explain and answer questions, and so forth, and in
one year's time, you'll go through the whole New Testament.
We kind of figured it just takes anywhere from seven to ten minutes a day to read that
day's chapter, and then to read my commentary.
Then we have a video devotional, which is HeavenWord Seven, a seven minute broadcast,
going through the New Testament verse by verse, chronologically.
That went on, I think, for three years, before we shut that one down.
Lot of help's out there, at least from me and many others, okay, if you are kind of
intimidated by reading the Bible yourself and you're just getting started.
But I encourage you, you know, at bare minimum, read a chapter from the Bible, and then just
think about it.
Maybe you might, if you have time, read the chapter more than one time.
Try to get it to sink in, and internalize, meditate.
One of the old Hebrew words for meditation is more literally said to chew the cud.
The cow chews the cud, swallows it, brings it back up, chews it again, swallows it, brings
it, you know, so that's a picture of meditation.
Thinking about it, and dwelling upon it.
Memorizing it.
Letting it, you know, sink in and saturate you, okay?
This is a Little Lesson, so, we can't say everything about everything.
Thank you so much for joining me.
God bless.