Putting God in His Place Part III

Another part about centering our lives on Christ is relationships with His people.

Social networking on line is huge! MySpace, Facebook, forums, chatrooms….On Facebook it’s all about sharing pictures and who writes on your wall, On MySpace it’s picking your top 8 friends, which are the ones that show up on your first page. Even the cell phone companies have a plan where you can pick your 5 (or however many) special friends to be in your network! I don’t think these things are meant to exclude anyone, it’s just that everyone has such a strong desire to included!

We aren’t meant to go through life without friends. We need relationships for support, encouragement, fun, relaxation, accountability and to make us feel like we matter. People are searching for that online. Why not at church?

While sometimes we crave a chance to get away and be by ourselves – no one likes to feel lonely. And the worst kind of loneliness is when you are surrounded by people, but have no real relationships. Polls taken have shown that most people have 10 or fewer real friends throughout their lifetime. I think this suggests that people are going around with an unmet hunger for acceptance, which can cause all kinds of bizarre and even harmful behavior. And I think this explains the internet social networks too.

A couple generations ago people didn’t move so much. A large percentage were born, lived and died in the same town and had a lifetime of friends built up there. That’s not the norm now. Jobs don’t last and people move. Divorce splits up families. Busyness keeps neighbors from sitting on their front porches after dinner talking.

Relationships require constant tending. Every human being was created with a need for love, trust, service with others and to be close to others.

As a church we need to be there for everyone who walks through our doors. We need to provide insights and courage to help others live a life of faith. We need to help others be better people because we expect them to be. Kids in school who have a teacher who expects good things of them, who acts like he or she believes the student is capable of greatness – do better. Employers who expect their employees to be talented, upstanding, etc – usually have employees who are. We should love people unconditionally while at the same time show them the potential we see in them.

Which means the church has to be a center of acceptance and love. No quarreling, no bitterness, no cliques, no Peyton Place - just encouraging each other to discover meaning and to follow Christ.

The author of the book Growing Your Soul says that when we do this, empty churches will fill up again. Faith living will begin. Believers will salt society in factories, governments and corporations. The Bible will be respected again as the authority for living. Pastors will be reenergized. Brokenness will be healed and peace will reign.

Where can we find a church like this? The most effective answer is to improve the one we’re in. We need to infuse every relationship in our church with the life of Christ. Then every person will feel valued and discover how fulfilling a Christ-saturated life can be.

Isn’t it true that when someone loves you it’s easier to love them back? If someone encourages you – it’s easier to encourage someone else? So logic would say – go ahead and make the first move. Get the ball rolling. Treat every person you meet as a person who has the potential to be a friend AND to bring you closer to God.

Of all the gifts you give to family and friends, none is better then the gift of yourself. Let people know you’re available to them. And then be available. Go out of your way to be helpful. Listen fully to the person talking to you. Love grows with expression just as commitment expands with practice.

Share dreams and spiritual discoveries with others – When we share our spiritual journey with someone else it keeps us from back sliding – it makes us accountable. Spirituality needs relations to really grow and flourish so our faith journey will be strengthened

Give people a reason to know that your support is dependable and lasting. Paul wrote “out do yourself in generosity, in loving, in service.”

Avoid anger, forgive quickly and forget retaliation! Practice unexpected kindness. Rejoice in other people’s good fortune. Sympathize with their pain and sorrow.

If we do all of these things as individuals – our church will become like this as a whole.

Putting God in His Place Part II

Centering our lives on Christ clarifies our self-understanding and provides us a sense of direction for living. Basically centering our lives on Christ shapes our thoughts, monitors our conversation, questions our attitudes and evaluates our achievements. It helps us sort out the passing from the eternal.

It helps us develop healthy, happy homes, restore relationships, give up destructive habit patterns in both thought and conduct. It takes away our fear of the future. While it won’t keep bad things from happening to us – it will help us deal with those things when they do.

To begin shifting our thoughts from self to Christ we need to pay attention more to our motives and intentions and less to our good appearance and impression. And actually this is probably the biggest stress reliever we could adopt.

Here are some suggestions for centering our lives:

Think small – It’s not all going to be mountain top experiences. Bigger is not always better and louder is not always more true. There is a lot of good to be found in ordinary days and quiet times. We should cherish each day. And resist distractions – our world is full of airplanes flying over, barking dogs, ringing phones, crying babies, beeping computers and blaring TVs – how can we hear God above all that racket? We need to be still sometimes.

Make a faith statement with your living. Thomas R. Kelly said that a centered life is a heaven directed life and our way of life advertises what we believe. Our choices either give credibility to our values or undermines them. And our lives catch people’s attention the most when we are spiritually strong dealing with problems.

Listen to people and events. God can teach us in a thousand ways, but we need to cultivate a willing receptivity to understand His will and purpose. We need to dig in to Scripture. To ask questions of other Christians who may be further along the journey then we are. We need to ask – What is God saying to me here? We can learn something from every person we cross paths with if we let ourselves

Practice God’s presence. This tunes us in to Him. To practice His presence, we may think of Him reading the letter we’re writing to someone, listening to a phone call we make or a conversation we’re having, reading the book we’re reading over our shoulder, sitting in the same room we are, etc.

Be satisfied with enough. It seems like everyone has a problem with money. They either don’t have enough – they have enough, but want more or they worry about keeping what they’ve got! We can trust God to take care of our needs.

Try to act like you think Jesus would in a situation.

And we learn how He would act through Bible study and prayer. God meant prayer to simplify life. It’s like a kid who has a problem, going to his or her dad for either the answer or a solution or just a hug. The kid feels better just going to his dad. Humans have made it more complicated. We are the ones who have divided it into 5 classes, “Adoration, Confession, Petition, Thanksgiving and Intercession.” We tend to stick thees and thous in when we would never say that in a normal conversation – and how often when we are asked to pray in a group do we say – “lets have a short prayer” – Have you ever heard anyone say “lets have a long prayer”? Why do we feel like we need to say “this will only take a second.”?

There are lots of questions people have about prayer – do we need all the answers before we pray? No – I don’t really understand how I can talk on the phone to someone half way around the world, but I do it! And it works!

We work so hard at getting the prayer “just right” so God will be pleased and give us what we want!

But, prayer really is just talking to God. Telling Him what we think, what we’re worried about, what our hopes are for a situation or for the future. Asking for His help – which could be anything from taking the problem away to giving us the strength to live with it!

The more time we spend in prayer and reading the Bible – the more we will begin to see where God is coming from in things. Sometimes just talking to God about a problem organizes it in your mind, calms you down enough to get perspective and helps you see what He might think of the whole thing, which then gives you an idea how to handle it.

Commit to stop dabbling in religion and give your all to God through your church.
Do we come to church on Sunday mornings out of habit? Or to worship God? Do we come to be entertained? Or to Praise His name? Do we come because we think it’s right that our children should go to Sunday School? Or to show them by joyful example how to live their lives?

If we would all just quit dabbling in religion. Quit thinking that just showing up for a little while Sunday mornings was enough, and commit ourselves to jumping in wholeheartedly – we would have a church on fire for God and people would flock here to join us!

Practical Steps to Increase Your Spirituality

I just finished teaching a class from the book Growing Your Soul – Practical Steps to Increase Your Spirituality By Neil B. Wiseman

This is a very good book, whether you want to just read it and apply it to your own life, or teach a Sunday School class from it.

It starts out saying that everyone is created with a hunger for holiness. A hole that only God can fill. It says this hunger intensifies as we grow because of:

- Moral erosion in society
- Technology, which not only isolates us from real relationships, but creates a “too busy, anxious” environment
- Good life seductions – a rush to succeed and keep up with everyone else
- Ceaseless motion – too many activities, not enough quiet time with God
- Shallow religion – the church is often failing people by not showing what Christianity can do.

Then the author talks about what we can do to make our lives Christ centered. He says that Christ-saturated living transforms common life experiences into moments of grace, ordinary events into adventures of possibility and power and life’s struggles become sanctuaries and sacraments of strength.

The book goes on to cover how to organize our lives around Christ, how music is a way to increase our spirituality, how God answers prayer and how to “do something wonderful every day.”

I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, so that is just a tiny hint of what’s in there. If you were in my Sunday School class you would have heard about 3 hours from this book.

I do recommend it to anyone who wants to grow their soul and increase their spirituality.