Bible study:
However you do it: Consciously reconnect with God on a daily basis. Find what works for you and do it in a disciplined and intentional way. Do what you need to do to reconnect with God.
Divert daily
Withdraw weekly
Abandon Annually
Prayer:
God is more interested in us giving him our attention than he is in us giving him our time.
Being attentive to God constantly is better than giving him time occasionally.
Giving:
There's a lot of discussion about whether tithing is biblical or not but... Mike has found that throughout his married life the discipline of tithing has done him good. Over the long haul God has given us more than we could ever need and it has killed the idol of materialistic accumulation.
Proportional giving is: set aside at the end of each month...
Giving is a bit like prayer. Sometimes you've got faith and energy to prayer, other times you have to do it 'in cold blood'.
Kill things that threaten your dependancy on God.
Personal Contentment:
Book: the rare jewel of Christian contentment.
The three main ares were your contentment will be challenged: obscurity, suffering, success.
It means being happy in your own skin. Jesus introduce himself to Paul as 'Jesus of Nazareth'. Happy to be identified by his human identity, to be known by his human identity.
Define yourself by who you are and not by what you do:
Henri Nouwen: House of the Lord vs house of fear. That's a choice. Daily choose to live in the house of trust and not the house of fear.
Develop a relationship with the Holy Spirit:
The HS will increase our capacities through internal growth by his working within us.
All of us at some point in our life will have rope like circumstances around a tree trunk in our life. Something that we cannot get rid of. In God's purposes the rope of circumstances may stay around the tree trunk of life. The only way you can get a rope of the tree is for the tree to grow and snap the rope.
God will through the Spirit allow us to go through situations where we have to grow internally for us to become the people God wants us to become.
To change the landscape of our lives and characters God sometimes uses big moments - earthquakes, explosions etc. But the most common way he changes the major landscapes of our life is by the regular and pervasive power of the river of God - the Holy Spirit.
Keep listening to the Holy Spirit. When God is speaking to you:
He speaks to the fella in the cellarRelentless obedience:
not the fanatic in the attic
If you're determined to be relentless obedient it will mean: wonderful promises about fruitfulness. In Genesis God speaks to Noah and says 'you have been spared that you might be fruitful.'
When God asks you to do something you will be unconsciously incompetent. As you start doing it you become consciously incompetent. You then move toward conscious competence and finally unconsciously competent. What God will then do is promote us to unconscious incompetence again. He keeps moving you out to the edge for fresh stories and challenge. The moment we stop risking things is when we become disobedient.
It will also mean that you encounter opposition. Walking with God means that in the end your priority is that ultimately you're concerned more with pleasing him that with pleasing other people.
Key: Obedience in the midst of great mystery.
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