Spiritual Journey...Why?
- Michael Dennis
- Feb 21, 2010
- Series: Spiritual Journey: Rhythms
This morning I am going to challenge us as a church to enter into a spiritual journey together. It’s going to be awesome. We have put together a packet of devotional reflections that have been written by people in our church, people who are single, young married, older married, male, female, and they all revolve around the theme of setting aside the next 35 days to draw closer to Jesus.
The theme of the next 35 days is called “Rhythms…How We Live” because we all have rhythms. Not dancing rhythm because nobody wants to see that, but we all have those things we do in life that bring rhythm to our day. We take our showers, we get our coffees, we have weekends, we have seasons, we have birthdays and holidays, and we see this rhythm in life. We eat three times a day, we breathe and our heart beasts in rhythm, and some of us are a little particular about our rhythms and we can get snippy if our day gets out of rhythm, and it is because God created us to have rhythm and ultimately for our lives to be in rhythm with Him.
Our desire is over the next 35-days these rhythms would be infused into our lives and that they wouldn’t end after the 35-days but that they would continue, and ultimately Jesus would bring us to a new place in our relationship with Him. Because sometimes we can start to feel like this is as good as it gets. We get in a rut, we get content, and our life starts to feel like it is out of rhythm and in some ways our hope is that this 35-day journey would be like a really good glass of wine.
Stay with me now. When I first started drinking wine I started off with Oak Leaf from Wal-mart. It is $3.00 a bottle. It was convenient, it was cheap, and it tasted okay. It had become familiar over time and when we were with friends they would talk about wine like it was so exciting and I would nod my head in agreement, but for me, $3.00 bottle of Oak Leaf from Wal-mart just didn’t create that much excitement.
Then one day someone gave me a bottle of Silver Oak. If you have never had a bottle of Silver Oak it is amazing. It was smooth, bold, and full of flavor and scents and it exposed me to taste buds that I didn’t know existed, and now I know what it is like to have a really good glass of wine. Now when my friends talk about wine…I know have tasted and I have seen that it is good.
Over the next 35 days we want to open up some new spiritual taste buds so that we might see more of who Jesus is and all it can be to walk in an intimate relationship with Him over the next 35 days. We want to peak into the heart of Jesus, open our eyes, our desires, and it will be intense, but what if over the next 35 days Jesus takes us as a church collectively and individually to a completely different place? What if we dedicated ourselves in such a way that we are changed and we don’t ever want to go back?
During these 35 days we are going to read through these devotionals together, we are going to learn about what some might call spiritual disciplines, but maybe it’s semantics but I like calling them “avenues of grace” so that we can be in rhythm with God. We are going to explore prayer, Scripture, Sabbath, giving, celebrating, and we are going to examine our life and fast from things that are distracting us from growing closer to Jesus.
It can be the inter-net, food, television, a meal once a week, phone, radio, anything that sucks time from our day and it isn’t just to go without, but to replace it with Jesus and prayer. It is going to be awesome. It is going to be intense and all of us can do it because we were created to be in rhythm with God.
I know that sometimes we can hear something like this and immediately we feel the weight, guilt, failure and some of us feel like we are going to screw this up and we feel overwhelmed, but I want to put you at ease from the very beginning. You can’t screw this up. Listen to Ephesians 2:8-10:
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
How are we saved? By grace through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God and Sometimes we tie our relationship with Jesus to our productivity and if we feel productive we feel good about our relationship with Jesus. If we do certain things, if we don’t do certain things, if we go to church, give money, nice to people, read our Bible, pray then I am a good Christian and God loves me. But that isn’t the gospel. That is moralism and being good people and when we have those thoughts it is the opposite of the gospel because it is tied to what we are doing to please God and the gospel teaches us, in and of ourselves, we can’t do anything to please God.
In fact, it will go so far that if we want our productivity, our efforts to be what puts us in a good relationship with God then we need to be 100% productive at all times in everything we do. We can’t have really good days, and then okay days. We need to be perfect. Jesus even took it a step further and said we even need to have 100% perfect in not only what we do, but also in our thoughts and if we slip in one area, one time, one thought it is over.
That is why God entered human history so that He could be our perfection 100% of the time and when we place our faith in Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection then we are placed in the perfection of Christ and through faith we become 100% perfect. Verse 9 teaches it is not a result of our works, but His works. This not only applies before we meet Jesus, but after we meet Jesus.
Maybe some of us might ask, “Then why are we doing this 35-day spiritual journey?” Look at verse 10. It teaches us we are His workmanship, we are His creation, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Verse 10 teaches us these spiritual disciplines are what we are created for, we are created to be in rhythm with Him and to walk in those good works.
It isn’t good works so that we can impress God, good works so that God can love us, good works so that we can become arrogant and look down on other people, but the good works God has prepared for us. The good works you see in me are not from me, they are from Him, for Him, and of Him. We can’t screw this up. Through faith in Jesus we have been loved beyond all comprehension and through faith we get to walk in those works. When we get those confused, when we become impressed with our efforts, discouraged from our lack of efforts, we simply need to go back to the gospel and cling to Jesus because He is sufficient. Maybe this morning that is completely confusing. What if over the next 35-days Jesus could take us to a place in our relationship with Him where we were able to see a deeper layer of the truth that is in the gospel?
Over the next 35 days we will get to experience what it looks like to be in rhythm with Jesus Christ and becoming a people who are not earning God’s love, or at risk at losing His love, but dedicating the next 35 days to be in rhythm with Him.
I can tell you on the front end that some of us are going to be a little timid going into this and some of us are going to put it off and ease into it. If that is where you are its okay, but I just want to encourage you to jump all in and give Jesus our whole heart and see what He does.
If you are at a place where you don’t know Jesus then I encourage you to read these devotionals as well and each day ask the question, “What is keeping me from trusting Jesus?” Maybe over these next 35-days He will show Himself to you in a new way. Overall it is going to be exciting for all of us as we enter into this journey together.
For the rest of our time I am going to walk through an overview of each rhythm and give us a peak into what the next 5 weeks are going to look like.
On Monday morning we are going to start off learning about prayer and fasting. Scripture teaches us we have a loving powerful and mighty God who is eager to hear from us and He wants us to talk with Him and listen to Him. It is two-way communication. I think most of us understand the talking part and we throw up our prayers in words and thoughts, but as we enter into this fast / prayer my heart is that we would grow in listening to God.
Some of us get a little scared when we hear someone talk about listening to God because we think of crazy people who drink kool-aid, but the Scriptures teach us God wants to speak to us and He speaks to us through primary means: In Creation, in Scripture, and through the Holy Spirit within us.
We listen to Him through creation because we see His beauty, His design, His intellect, and Romans 1 teaches us since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power, His divine nature have been clearly seen and His creation speaks to who He is. Second, we listen in the Scriptures and throughout the Scriptures He is wanting to speak to us. We also listen through the Holy Spirit indwelled within us when we place our faith in Jesus. This is how you know you are a child of God because the Spirit is within us and Jesus says these are my sheep and they know my voice, they listen to me, and when we hear from God our heart affirms it and when it isn’t from God we have little antenna’s that go up and the Spirit speaks to us and lets us know something isn’t right.
As we go through this spiritual journey take some time to consider who or what you are listening to. In the midst of making a key decision whose voice do we listen to? Is it our spouse, our parents, our boss, our friends, our savings, or is it God? Maybe right now you are thinking, “God doesn’t speak to me…” and maybe it is because we aren’t listening to what He has to say. Throughout Scripture we see God speaking to His people and He speaks to us today and these next 35-days is a chance for us to listen.
The second week we will look at Scripture and some people see the Bible as a book of rules of what to do and not to do, some see it as a book about heroes we need to be like, and the only hero in the Bible is Jesus. Over these next 35-days we want to press into the Scriptures and see the Hero of the Bible.
Recently I got a children’s Bible called “Every Story Whisper’s His Name” and every family should have this Bible. It is great for children and great for showing us how every story points to Jesus. It is awesome!
Even if you don’t have children you should get this book to help you see how every story from the Old Testament to the New Testament points to Jesus and we only see that when we press into the Scriptures. As we press into the Scriptures and see everything in the Bible pointing to Jesus we are going to see Jesus in every story.
This last Thursday a Joseph Stack flew a plane into a federal building and killed and wounded people and at one point that man was experiencing good things. He had a family, a house, learned how to fly a plane, and he was in a good place and experiencing good things, however, something happened, something caused pain, confusion, anger, and it was to a point he thought his only solution was to burn his house, fly his plane into a building, and cause harm to himself and other people.
God never intended him to experience that pain by himself, he never meant for him to be alone and He came to take that pain for him, take that confusion, that anger, that hurt, and take it to the cross so that man could experience redemption and restoration. Josph Stack’s story is the story of Scripture, the story of humanity, and we see it literature, in film, television, and how humanity start off in the midst of blessing and in the midst of pain we look within to avoid and fix it on our own, and throughout Scripture it teaches us that pain is only fixed in Jesus Christ. It is only when we draw close to Scripture that we are going to see Jesus in every story.
The third week we are going to learn about giving and we get a little scared when we talk about giving because our culture doesn’t naturally give. We naturally hoard.
We get really excited about being giving to us and we forget we have been given so much so that we can be a blessing to others. Sometimes we end up seeing ourselves as giant buckets that God is just filling up with His blessings and we want Him to fill up our buckets of blessings just in case we might need them one day. When really we should see ourselves as conduits and God is blessing us so that His blessings move through us into the lives of others. That is why we have our 3.2.1 cards so that we can be praying and serving others so that we can bless them and God’s blessing can move through us to others. We can bless them with a word of encouragement, taking them out for lunch, buying them a gift, praying for them, and it can happen in our church, our jobs, our city, our country, and all over the world. I can tell you an immediate need right now in the world is in Haiti and adopting / fostering children from Haiti. We are talking to people on the ground right now that are telling us if the orphans who have lost limbs aren’t adopted then they will die because Haiti isn’t set up to take care of orphaned amputee’s. Maybe it isn’t you that adopts someone from Haiti, but how could God’s blessing move through you into the lives of others?
The fourth week we are going to look at the Sabbath or rest and sometimes we have just reduced rest to taking a day off work, vacations, weekends, naps, however, Scripture teaches us our rest only comes from being in the will of the Father.
John 4 talks a little bit about this when Jesus stops at a watering well after a long journey and it says the disciples go into town to get food from their journey. While Jesus is waiting for the disciples to return with food He talks to a woman at a watering well who was confused about God, living in shame because she had experienced marriage and divorce over and over, and as he talks to her Jesus identifies her pain and that she has been going to the well of marriage and men over and over and every time those wells left her emptier and emptier. Jesus shares with her that men and marriage are never going to satisfy her thirst until she drinks from a well of living water that only comes through Jesus.
It is a powerful story, but the best part is when the disciples return to give Jesus food so that He can rest from this long journey and Jesus replies, “I have food that you know not of” and the disciples were really confused thinking who else gave Him food and Jesus replies, “My food is to do the will and the work of the one who sent me.” Jesus’ rest came when He was in the will and the work of the Father and over the next 35-days we can press into Him and Jesus will teach us what it means to find a supernatural rest that is only in Him.
The last week we will talk about celebration and as Christ-followers we have more to celebrate than any other person on the planet. Have you ever had someone do something for you that they went overboard and it just seemed like too much? They spent too much money on a gift, on a party, too much time, and it was just way over the top. Holly and I have a friend that when he would invite us over to the house he just goes over the top. There are appetizers, salads, main meal, desserts, coffee’s, and after every part of the meal he would ask, “Won’t you have another?” Another salad, another steak another piece of pie and it is over the top.
Do you know how much Jesus loves us? It is way over the top. We don’t deserve it. We don’t deserve Jesus coming and taking on humanity and taking all our sin upon Himself, and in that moment He becomes our sin and it is so disgusting that the Father turns from Him and Jesus cries out, “Father, why have you forsaken me?”
He loves us so much He takes our pain, our penalty, and in the midst of that pain HE cries out, “My God, my God, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing.” Jesus is taking our pain on our behalf because He loves us so much and it is over the top kind of love we have so much to celebrate!
Do you ever think we have so much we need more time to celebrate and more time to party and more time to enjoy God’s goodness? I believe Jesus wired and created us to celebrate and that is why we love parties, dancing, music, food, color, and we love to party and when our faith is in Jesus we get to celebrate and over the next these next 35 days we get to draw close to Jesus and let Him teach us how to celebrate because one day He is going to come and restore all of creation to one giant never ending party and it starts the moment we meet Jesus.
This is going to be fun. If you look in the packet you will see it guide you through this spiritual journey step by step. There is a place for you to write down your commitments, a place to write down who is holding you accountable so you have someone to celebrate this with. Throughout the devotionals there are places for you to take notes and write down thoughts. Then at the end there is an appendix that just gives further explanation to these spiritual disciplines. It is going to be fun.
On Sunday we will get together and talk more in depth about each week. You want won’t to miss because this is going to be fun and we are going to get to through this together.
I promise you if you participate in this journey it will change your life and this morning we want to start it off with communion and just celebrating what Jesus had done on our behalf. As we break the break the bread and drink the juice it is a symbol of His body being broken and poured out on our behalf and during this time start to think about what Jesus is putting on your heart this morning? What are you wanting to see Jesus do radically in your life that only Jesus can do? In our children, in our marriages, in our friendships, the dark areas of your life of sin and opening our heart and giving it to Jesus so that He does the unthinkable? What do you want to dedicate to Jesus and see Him move in an unthinkable way over the next 35 days.