Today we ask, once again, how can you have a consistent and meaningful devotional life? 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 (see Matthew 6:5-15). 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.

Using the Lord’s Prayer as a Model

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… 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 ourselves are not limited to just, give me my daily bread this day. The whole forgiveness aspect, which is also included in the Lord’s Prayer, 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.

Hearing From the Lord

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. You’ve got to be very careful with this. 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… that’s another phrase for praying in tongues, which I have talked about before on Little Lessons. If you didn’t hear those Little Lessons on praying in tongues, you can look them up, starting with this lesson. 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.

Letting God’s Word Penetrate Us

“ We need God’s Word to penetrate us, to change our lives.

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” (Colossians 3:16). 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 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, in their gatherings. The circulation of Paul’s letters and so forth, which the early church didn’t even have many of 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 (see Hebrews 8:6).

Where to Start – Some Free Devotional Options

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, you might want to check into this free devotional.

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 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 7, 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. There’s a lot of help out there, at least from me and many others if you are kind of intimidated by reading the Bible yourself and you’re just getting started.

Let God’s Word Sink In

But I encourage you 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, and repeats the process. So that’s a picture of meditation. Thinking about it, and dwelling upon it. Memorizing it. Letting it 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.

The post How Can You Have a Consistent and Meaningful Devotional Life? – Part 2 appeared first on David Servant.

How can you have a consistent and meaningful devotional life? We’re going to talk about daily devotions, having a devotional life. And what that means is, spending time consistently, usually every day, once a day, in prayer and in meditation in God’s Word.

And before we talk about how to do that consistently and meaningfully, we ought to just gently, first of all, talk about what it says about us if we don’t really have a devotional life.

I think many followers of Christ and professing followers of Christ would have to confess that they are falling short in that area. Certainly I’ve been guilty of that at times within my Christian life. But always acutely aware of the fact that something’s wrong with my spiritual life if I’m neglecting prayer and meditation daily in the Word of God.

What Our Neglect of a Consistent Devotional Time Says About Us

If we’re too busy to spend time every day focused purely on the Lord, what does this say about us?

And I know, I know, believe me I know. We’re all so very busy, there are so many things to do. But yet, our conscience is always telling us that we have time for this, we have time for that, we do it every day. Like we never miss sleeping five or six or seven or eight hours a night. We rarely miss a meal, we take care of personal hygiene and so forth, and we’ve got time for so many things.

When it comes down to the honest truth, we have time for the things that are the most important to us. And so what it says if we don’t have a consistent devotional life is that it’s not as important to us as it should be.

“ If we don’t have a consistent devotional life, it’s not as important to us as it should be.

Devoting Ourselves To Prayer

So it’s just good to start off by facing up to that. And again, I’m trying to say it with as much gentleness as I possibly can for a number of reasons.

One of which, again, is that I know what it’s like to be so, so, so busy that these things get pushed aside.

But if we’re just honest with ourselves, and just think about it for a short time, we’re going to be convicted that we need every day to be in prayer, and in the Word of God. And this is certainly Biblical isn’t it? The New Testament tells believers to be devoted to prayer, and so devoted to it that husbands and wives might forego the normal relationships that they have between them sexually, or they might by agreement devote themselves to a time of prayer, special prayer (see 1 Corinthians 7:5). And the King James adds, “and fasting.”

So that’s obviously more than just a five minute prayer. That’s obviously a real, real focus on prayer.

A Weak and Powerless Church

If we study the book of Acts, and we see the emphasis on prayer there, it might help us to understand why the church today seems so weak and powerless. We’re not as dependent upon the Lord as we should be, and our prayerlessness could be the most telling thing about why we have so little manifestation of the Holy Spirit in our midst.

Prayerlessness could be our greatest declaration of how little we really do depend on the Lord. So those of us who are ministers, who are supposed to be serving the Lord full-time vocationally in ministry, we certainly ought to be devoting a significant amount of time on a regular basis to prayer, and to meditation on God’s word.

“ Prayerlessness could be our greatest declaration of how little we really do depend on the Lord. —DAVID SERVANT

Having a Consistent Devotional Life

So once you’ve decided, wow, I need to be doing this, then how do you go about, first of all, having a consistent devotional life?

Well, like anything else that you’re consistent at, you have to just set apart a chunk of time. And I recommend that the best time is in the morning, because you’re starting your day, and this is one way to honor the Lord, focusing on Him first.

When the disciples asked Jesus, teach us to pray, and He taught them the Lord’s prayer, the Lord’s prayer gives us a little clue that it’s kind of a morning prayer: “Give us this day our daily bread.” So that sounds like a prayer you’d pray early on in the day.

The Blessing of Insomnia

So you’ve got to start off that way. And again I know that we’re all so busy. I’m blessed in this respect that at age 59, I don’t need as much sleep as I needed at one time, and typically I wake up without even trying, very early in the morning, every day at 3:00 or 4:00 AM.

And it’s just absolutely no trouble for me at all to get up and spend some time, an hour or two, on my devotions, and then I actually go back to sleep for a little while many days, and get up and start my work day. And you may not be so blessed, but if you’re kind of cursing your circumstance, saying “Oh, I’m suffering insomnia,” you might look at it differently and say “Oh, I’m so blessed! I can’t sleep and so the Lord’s giving me some special time to seek Him and pray, and I know that the Lord is a rewarder of those who diligently seek him, and so I’m going to be blessed as I pray and as I seek the Lord.”

The Discipline of Rising Early

But regardless, if you’re not blessed like me and waking up in the middle of the night or early in the morning, then you just have to set your schedule.

And if you want to pray in the mornings, and you’re typically getting up only with enough time to bathe and put down a little bit of breakfast and rush off to work or something, or whatever you do, you need to figure out a way to get up earlier. And of course that requires perhaps going to bed earlier.

And so this is a discipline, and the New Testament tells us that we should discipline ourselves for the purpose of godliness (see 1 Timothy 4:7-8). This doesn’t just happen.

People who pray consistently have made a decision, a quality decision, to spend time with the Lord, and they’ve carved out part of their day.

Making the Most of Little Time

So again, I’m recommending the morning, and I’m recommending prioritizing and taking a look at all the other things that obviously are important enough to get done in your day.

And this is not to heap condemnation on anybody. I have more time because of my need for less sleep than many people, but don’t think that “oh, if I only have a half hour, then it’s not worth it.” If you just prayed the Lord’s prayer verbatim, it takes about 30 seconds, so that’s a start, isn’t it?

You can just read a couple of verses. Something is better than nothing. Don’t let the devil persuade you that you might as well not do anything, because you don’t really have quality time. Give the Lord whatever time you can.

And again, we’re not limiting devotions just to the morning. They can happen during your lunch hour if that’s convenient for you, right before your dinner time, after, in the evening, whatever. Sometime is better than no time.

Okay, well we’re out of time for this Little Lesson, but on the next episode, I’ll talk about making those devotoinal times meaningful. Thanks for joining me, God bless.

The post How Can You Have a Consistent and Meaningful Devotional Life? – Part 1 appeared first on David Servant.