Category Archives: Personal Growth

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Establishing Spiritual Disciplines

Creating Habits That Will Foster Spiritual Formation

Growing my faith, my relationship with God, is my top priority. Above all else, my relationship with Christ must come first. Everything else in my life hinges upon this. But in order to do that, you have to develop a series of disciplines that will help you grow and mature in your faith.

Establishing Spiritual Disciplines

As a minister, all too often, I have conversations that center around how to grow and mature in our faith. I have discovered that most people have no idea what to do to deepen their faith. Most of the people I have these conversations with want to deepen their faith, they just aren’t sure how to go about doing that.

As a result, I’ve decided to write a series of posts about spiritual disciplines. These are habits that I believe are necessary to grow in our faith. These are habits that are either prominent in Scripture, or have been proven through the lives of other, spiritually mature believers.

Not everyone grows in the same fashion or speed. What might be a breeze to one person may be a difficult discipline to master for another. But I firmly believe that each of these disciplines play a part in our becoming who God has created us to be.

Over the course of the next few weeks and months, I will be writing a series of posts about these disciplines. Each post (or posts, maybe) will define each discipline, and give some practical ideas on how to implement this effectively in our lives.

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Invest In Wisdom

Investments You Need To Make For Growth To Happen

Most of us long for personal growth and spiritual growth. Often, those two areas can overlap. If we want to grow, there are a few areas of life where we need to invest time and effort to make growth possible.

Invest in Wisdom

Luke’s Gospel gives us a brief glimpse into the childhood of Jesus when he tells of Jesus in the Temple at the age of 12. It’s an interesting snapshot of the childhood of Jesus, and helps us understand his purpose here on earth. But then Luke makes a brief statement that we can kind of overlook as just a summary of Jesus’ early life. If we look closer, this statement actually gives us four key areas in which Jesus was intentional about his growth, and we can follow that example in our own lives.

In Luke 2:52, we read, “Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.”

In one sense, that is exactly what we assume it to be: a summary of the life of Jesus between the age of twelve and the start of his public ministry. But a deeper look shows us four key areas of growth that we can pursue in our own lives, just as Jesus did. When we invest in these four areas, growth will follow.

The first area that Luke highlights is the area of wisdom. This is a critically important investment in our lives. And one that we need to be very intentional about pursuing.

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Spiritual Retreats

A Reminder To Seek Solitude

Life can get busy. And in those busy moments, it can be hard to remember to take the time to slow down and rest in the presence of God. It can be hard to seek solitude and rest.

Seeking Solitude

Slowing down is hard for me. I’m a doer, perhaps not by nature, but by a habit ingrained long enough for it to seem like it’s my nature. I like my routines. I’m pumped when I’m productive. I feel anxious often when I’m not busy doing something. It can be very hard for me to slow down.

Several years ago, I read Leading on Empty, by Wayne Cordeiro. In this book, he stressed the importance of getting away on what he referred to as Personal Retreat Days. After reading that, I jumped into that discipline with gusto, but over time, it kind of slipped to the side and was more and more neglected. I knew that I needed it, but it always just seemed to be something that got pushed aside by other, more “important” things.

Within the past two months, a couple of different things have taken place to remind me of the necessity of getting away for a time of silence and solitude, and to simply seek God’s presence.

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Life Update

The Current Circumstances Of Life

Sometimes, life gives you some unexpected circumstances and situations. That’s where I find myself right now; and I kind of expect to be here for a while. That’s not what I had planned for 2022, but it is what I’ve experienced, and have to deal with for the moment.

Broken Foot

On Christmas Day, I fell down our stairs and broke a bone in my foot, giving it a pretty bad sprain to go along with it.

But let me back up.

Last summer, I experienced a flare up of some lower back pain that sent me to the Emergency Room. They diagnosed it as a pinched nerve, and told me that it would gradually subside. And it did… to a degree. But it never really completely returned to normal. For a while, I walked with the help of a cane, but eventually managed to leave that behind me.

However, my leg was still mostly numb and unfeeling, and my foot had no sensation of whether it was off the floor or not, causing me to stumble frequently.

That’s what happened on Christmas Day. My foot drug, this time on the stairs, and down I went. We ended up in the Emergency Room that day, with a follow up at an orthopedic doctor the next week. A bone in my foot was broken, so I received a cast for a few weeks before moving to a walking boot. However, while in the cast, I developed a pretty significant blood clot in my leg. So now, we’re treating that as well.

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Enjoying Life

Jesus Came To Give Us Life To The Fullest

Sunday marked the beginning of our Christmas series at my church. We will be looking at three different perspectives of the birth and incarnation of Christ from John, Matthew, and Luke. I’m excited about what God has in store through it.

Enjoying Life

As I studied the nativity accounts in both Matthew and Luke, and as I have been preparing for some future preaching series, I spent a lot of time looking at the reasons why Jesus came to earth. John’s gospel offers a lot of insight into that question as he covers the teaching ministry of Jesus.

One particular verse stood out to me. It’s a short statement Jesus made, and I’ve read it over and over, quoted it numerous times, and generally understood it. But something about it really jumped out this time through it. It’s found in John 10, right in the middle of Jesus’ discussion about being the Good Shepherd. In verse ten, Jesus tells us what the purpose of the enemy is for us, to steal, to kill and to destroy. But then he says this:

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

Jesus came so that we could have life. How many times have you read that? How many times have I? Probably too many to count. But have you ever stopped to consider just what “life” Jesus is talking about?

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Reestablishing Routine

Intentionally Choosing To Eliminate

For the past year or two, it seems my routines have been out of whack, and it’s been more than a little frustrating. So what do you do when that happens? Eliminate those things that distract!

Eliminate

I am a creature of routine. I much prefer when things go the same way, every day, without change. Change messes with me more than I’d like to admit, and as I get older, I find myself more and more routine oriented… and more and more frustrated because of it.

Routines are good. They can be very beneficial. They can help you make the most of your time, utilizing your days for the most effective impact on your life, on the lives around you, on your community, and the list could go on.

But if there is one thing that is certain, it is that things change. Routine can only work up to a certain point, because the fact that things will change and shift is inevitable. Finding a balance between the two can be tough to do.

I have been in a season of life recently that has messed up my routine. This has impacted various areas of my life, including my desire to write more, to read more, and to study more. And honestly, I’m hard pressed to identify where the time is going that I used to invest in these areas.

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Strategically Simplifying

Choosing The Best Things

For the past few weeks, I have been evaluating some of the things in my life, and reducing or reorganizing a lot of it. What I’m doing has been called by many “simplifying.” But I’m trying to be much more strategic than that.

Strategic simplification

Often, the things that we have can get in the way and become a distraction to us. I believe that is the case much more often than people realize, and when “things” get too important, we lose track of our proper priorities.

The Bible calls that idolatry.

But what we need to stop and realize is that it’s not the thing itself that is the problem, it’s our motives and attitudes towards it. So when we start looking into our lives to simplify things, and to remove distractions, we need to look more into our hearts than into our homes. Because that’s where all of this is rooted.

So I have been seeking to be strategic as I simplify my life some. I have been reevaluating a lot of stuff. Do I really need to keep this? It this something that God can use through my life to accomplish good for his Kingdom? Or is this something that I am attached to too deeply? Those are the kinds of questions I’m asking.

But it’s not just about the physical possessions. Sometimes it’s other things as well. And sometimes, in order to simplify our lives, we need to strategically add some things in as we take some others away.