Seize Your Life! Part 2 - Taking Responsibility

In Part 1 we talked about making room in your life for the Word. The Bible is God’s most direct way to speak to us – it communicates His thoughts, feelings, and commands perfectly. If we are not just blowing smoke at God, then spending time in His Word and praying are going to build our closeness to God.

If you’re at all like me though, you have questions for God that aren’t spelled out the way you want in the Bible. The Bible doesn’t tell you which college to attend. The Bible doesn’t tell you which job to take. The Bible doesn’t tell you if your girlfriend is “the one”. For a number of years after I became a Christian I had no idea where God was taking me. In many ways I was like a leaf on the ocean, blown to and fro by invisible wind and obscure currents. I knew God was keeping me afloat, but I didn’t know where life was taking me.

It was around that time that I came across a verse that I mentioned in part 1: “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.” – Psalm 37:4. I pondered what it meant. I had many desires – a wife, a wicked job, a seaside house with a boat, truck and a quad. Even children. Did it mean that if I went after God, he will give me all my desires? In a moment of insight, the Holy Spirit revealed to me what it really means. When you find your delight in the Lord, he becomes the desires of your heart, and reveals himself to you. What did that mean for me? It meant that I needed to make a decision. Will I or will I not delight myself in the Lord?

I had to take responsibility for my faith. If I was going to follow God, I had to make a decision. I had to cease to be borne along by emotion and dedicate myself to the task. It was unfamiliar territory for me. My first step in that direction came after dropping out of University. I chose to go into Forestry School because there were great seasonal jobs that paid well, and it afforded me to go to school where I chose and not incur debt. That choice of where to go after that was a commitment I made to God to attend Bible College for a year.

That commitment got me work that I enjoyed – I got to ride quads, drive trucks, and explore the mountains and forest which were all incredibly fun for me. The goal of Bible College led me to the west coast, where I began to connect with people – and met my wife. Not at Bible College incidentally… but that’s another story. I would have never met her if I had not gone into Forestry to enable me to go to Bible College, and had I not chosen to go to Bible College on the west coast. He gave me the desires of my heart in his time, when I chose to delight myself in the Lord.

Since that time, I have had to make many other choices. One thing that has been consistent through it all – as I have chosen to follow him, he has blessed me. In my obedience, he has given me what I needed. Even through something as mundane as deciding to read my children Bible stories at night, it met my desire to spend more time in the Word with him. My opportunity to disciple my children became an opportunity to disciple myself.

When we reach for God, he shows us where he wants us. John 14:21 says, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.” It’s that simple. We obey him and love him, and he loves us back and reveals himself to us. And if you have had contact with the risen Lord, you won’t be wondering what he would have of you anymore.

Seize Your Life! Part 1 – Finding Space in Life for the Word

This will be the first of a three part series, called “Seize Your Life!”  Its theme is how to seize your whole life to do what God wants you to do.  It is written out of my own experiences, seeking out what God wants of me in my life. 

I’ve always pondered Psalm 37:4  - “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart.”  Since coming to Christ at age 16, I have long struggled with finding the space for pursuing him in the busyness of the life that he has given me.  I would find myself in my teens and 20’s, struck by something and convicted that I need to read the Bible more.  I’d pick it up and voraciously read chapter after chapter – sometimes even book after book.  I’d stop and say to myself, “Wow, that was fantastic!  I feel so great when I read the Scriptures!  This was good for me!   I need to do this more often!”  And then, months would go by before I did more than read the quoted verses on the Powerpoint during the sermon.

The world is about distracting us from feeding on the Word, like the Bible teaches.  There is always something else to do, someone contacting us (especially if you’re a social media butterfly like myself), some other urgent duty calling.  I needed to really remember that it is not a faraway deity that I had claimed as Lord, but a friend; a brother.  Jesus needs to be my best friend, my boss, my blood.  That doesn’t happen – it can’t happen unless I am willing, and actually want to spend my time on him.

I don’t have a hard and fast, “This is how you do it” post for you.  But I do have three things that I have grabbed onto as I recognized I needed to get the space for God into every day.

• I got a Dog.  Serious!  A dog needs walking right?  Suddenly I had extra motivation to get up early before work, and take her for a walk.  But guess what?  That gave me the space to start reading a chapter of the Bible every morning and a page of “My Utmost for His Highest”, plus I found myself with a 15 minute prayer walk with the dog, every morning!
• I looked for technology to help.   There are a number of really neat tools you can get to help you with spiritual disciplines.  I encountered Prayer list programs for mobile devices, integrated into Bible programs even.  I found that you can have the Bible sent to you through many different means, from emailed daily readings to RSS feeds.
   
• I began to take a bible everywhere with me.  Even without electronic media, there are a wealth of “Daily Bible” books you can pick up.  Just carrying one around with you allows you to pick it up and hammer through a bit on a moments’ notice.  Going to the Dentist?  You’ll be waiting in the waiting room for a bit.  Commuting to work?  If traffic grinds to halt behind an accident, what else are you going to do?  But there is another benefit to doing this.  It gives you a chance to give away your Bible.   You’re walking around in one of the most unchurched cultures in the world, right this minute.  There are millions of people in North America who think they know who Jesus is but have never read the Bible.  What if your Bible was the one they read?

The point of all this is we really do have space in our life for what we aren’t doing.  I have become convinced by my own experience that there is no excuse for not pursuing the Word diligently every single day.  When I was at a youth snow retreat last month, the speaker, Dave Bogue, had a brilliant analogy which compared the Bible to a love letter.  Someone tells you they love you.   You send them all kinds of letters telling them more about you, your likes and dislikes, what your family is like, and where you envision your life is going with your love at your side. But in return they simply came up with excuses day after day, week after week about how they just “didn’t have time” to read your letters.  Would you really believe they love you?  How long would you deceive yourself into believing they did? Now, the Bible isn’t just a love letter.  It actually teaches us how to love.  If we refuse to read it, how long can we lie to God and ourselves?