Disciplined Spiritual Life

Last weekend we had the Men’s camp of our church. It was a great time of fellowship with people, time with God, learning from the word of God, some good discussion etc. It was good to be away from the busy crowded cities and being in a lake shore. It again proves the fact that when we are in places like this we can relate more and praise God for his wonderful creation.

We had Dr.P.U.Paulson from UBS, Pune, India as our resource person and it was a great blessing to have him. We learned lot of things from this camp and I would like to write about it in the coming days here. I will be writing about Christian Leadership, forgiveness, Christian devotion, predestination etc.

To start up I would like to deal with some thing which God taught me- Disciplined Spiritual Life

Many times we see that we are so much busy with the things of this world that we don’t have a disciplined spiritual life. We reach office in time, we keep our doctors appointment, car service appointment etc. But when it comes to matters regarding God we fail. We will reach office in time but not our church. We will eat food everyday but sometimes we miss Bible reading. We keep our appointments with friends and meet them at correct time but we rarely have a fixed time for prayer. We will make sure that we reach the fitness club in time, reach the ground in time so that we can start the match in time but no such discipline when in come to our spiritual matters.

One of the reason is that we don’t see the immediate consequence. Lets think that we have a test today and the result will be known today itself. We will pray about it becuase we are going to see the consequence today. But we don’t pray and read the bible because we lose nothing if we don’t do it today. But we should understand that the main reason behind it is that we don’t have hunger for God and somehow we have pushed Him down in our priority list. Most of the time we do all the things according to priority and we never reach till that point were we could spent some time with God. Don’t you feel that the world has become so busy and we are also part of it and we are not realizing how our life is going? We even don’t have the time to sit and think about our life.

Summary is that we don’t have a disciplined spiritual life. But in other areas we are forced to have discipline because we will see the consequence immediately. We reach office in time because we will have to. We reach a shop before it is closed because we know the consequence of reaching there after it is closed.

Now think for a moment-Do we have discipline in spiritual matters? Many of us cannot wake up in the morning and pray. But lets say tomorrow you boss asks you to report at 5:00 AM. What will you do? You will be there by 4:55 AM because you don’t have other options.

Now I am sure that you want to improve in this area. So what to do. Let me give you some practical ideas that I learned.

1. Have a fixed time when you will spend time with God.
2. Start with small target. It can be 15 Min. but it should be fixed for everyday.
3. Make sure you follow that. Lets say you fixed 6:30 AM - 6:45 AM. Now imagine that you were in a pray meeting whole night and just slept at 6:00 AM. But still make sure that you spend 6:30-6:45 with God. What I mean is let that be your priority.
4. Once you feel you are settled with the 15 min. then increase the time.
5. Don’t allow any other things of the world to take priority during this time.
6. Try to avoid activities in your life, which can affect your Spiritual Life.
7. Never try to postpone your time. Don’t say that today is Saturday so I will shift my time to 8:30 to 8:45 instead of 6:30-6:45.
8. If you can try to give small punishment to yourself. Lets say you will decide that I will skip my breakfast if I don’t spend time with God or it can be anything. What it will do is that it will remind you whole day and motivate you for next day. One of the best way to discipline yourself is that take a decision not to eat anything unless you have spent time with God (This is just a suggestion. Only do it if you can).
9. Above all pray to God to give you the grace to maintain a disciplined spiritual life.

What I have written is few practical things. But all this will fail if you don’t have a hunger for God. You can’t eat food unless you fell hungry and if you don’t feel hungry then you have some problem and you need to consult a doctor. In the same way if you don’t have spiritual hunger then something is wrong with you.

Every day our father in heaven is waiting to listen our voice and talk to us. But many times we just disappoint him by just ignoring because of our other priorities. From today don’t disappoint him. He gave his only Son Jesus for us. He asks nothing else from us but a close walk with him.

Will we decide to have a disciplined life?