My Number One

When God really wants to teach us something or remind us of something, He often uses many different experiences in our lives to emphasize it. This has definitely been the case for me during the past few weeks.

The pastor at our church has been preaching a short series through the Lord's Prayer, petition by petition. In his sermon on the first petition, "hallowed be thy name," he introduced a key point for the series: we try to fill God's place with other things that we hallow and praise, but whatever we praise will control us. Only when we put God first will He control our lives and make us complete. The second petition, "Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven," has a similar focus. The primary point of his sermon on this petition was active and passive obedience and submission to God's will. Whatever we submit to will control us, and so we need to submit to God to have a thriving Christian life.

In my personal reading time I have been going through books ranging from Money, Possessions, and Eternity by Randy Alcorn to Emotional Purity by Heather Arnel Paulsen, and I have been struck by how all of these authors emphasize contentment with God's will and a close relationship with Him as the foundation or even the solution to so many problems that we experience in this life. When God is our number one, our all in all, our first priority, we no longer feel compelled to seek satisfaction, identity, and fulfillment in wealth, power, or relationships. God may graciously give us those things in His good timing, but even when we receive them, we will treat them as gifts rather than the Giver if our hearts are God's first. Our pastor preaches a similar message in many of his sermons.

I sometimes read Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest as a devotional. It teaches that we must be filled with God and with the Holy Spirit in order to accomplish His purposes in our lives.

Hmmmm.

Maybe God wants me to concentrate more on my relationship with Him and make Him my number one priority in my life? Maybe He wants me to focus on being filled with the Spirit to be His agent on this earth?

It has been challenging to see His standard for Christian living and to see how far I am from that standard. Over the next few weeks I am going to attempt to analyze my life from His perspective and see what needs to be changed or removed. I definitely can't do this on my own, so I would appreciate prayers for the Holy Spirit's help.

~Mac

Hiding It In Your Heart

So much for blogging once a week. Nothing really stood out as something I should blog on, and I guess I fail at finding blogworthy things on a daily basis. Oh well!

Yesterday evening I was at a book study and the discussion turned briefly to Scripture memorization. I think I got a bit of a wakeup call! I do memorize Bible verses - our whole family memorizes a verse every one to two weeks. I just realized that I could and should be doing a lot more memorization on my own. Even though we have easy access to the Bible (right now), there is no substitute for having the Word in your heart, where it can be easily recalled in a discussion, to fight off a temptation, to meditate on, or to aid in making a decision. I believe the more Scripture we truly have in our hearts, the more our lives will reflect that. Plus, there's no telling when the Bible will not be as readily available in printed form, and when that happens, we will wish we had memorized more!

All that to say, I am trying to figure out a plan for memorizing more Scripture. I think I'll start with some of my favorite passages, but I don't want to approach this in a haphazard unstructured way. If any of you have suggestions, categories or lists of verses, or strategies that you use, please comment :-)

~Mac