There is one thing that is imperative if you are desiring to live and experience the Cross Life. You must have a devotional life. It is impossible to follow the Lord Jesus daily, if you don't spend time with Him daily. The devotional life of too many believers is anemic, if not actually dead. From the time we are young believers we are taught the importance of a "quiet time" with God. But in a very noisy and, as I wrote about a few weeks ago, distracting world, it sometimes seems next to impossible to have a quiet time with God. But beginning today, and for a few weeks, I would like to try to share some things that will hopefully help anyone reading this blog have a more productive and consistent devotional life.
First, a consistent and fruitful devotional life will require a commitment. It will not happen unless you make it happen. That means your daily time with the Lord must take priority over other things in your life. Again, it is so easy for us, and I speak from personal experience, to be distracted by the world and neglect our time with God. We have good intentions, but find ourselves easily drawn away from the Lord by other demands. What can you do? Surrender it to the Lord and ask Him to enable you by His power to begin to be consistent in your time with Him. Your devotional life needs to grow out of a desire you have for a closer walk with the Lord. Don't make it into something you "have" to do, but it needs to be something that you "want" to do. If time with the Lord is seen as a duty or an burden, then you will never become consistent and will gain nothing from it. But when it is a joy and a blessing, it will become something that you look forward to daily. That is where we want to be.
In the coming weeks I want to delve into the devotional life further. To do so I will be referring to a small booklet on prayer which impacted my devotional life powerfully a number of years ago. It is available as a free download from the Chapel Library of Mt. Zion Bible Church. It is entitled "The Hidden Life of Prayer", and deals specifically with the prayer aspect of the devotional life. Following are two links you can use to download it. The second link is for the Spanish version.
http://www.chapellibrary.org/files/archive/pdf-english/hlop.pdf
http://www.chapellibrary.org/files/archive/pdf-english/hlops.pdf
Begin reading this little booklet and we will use it as a resource to guide us as we learn more about a devotional life in the weeks ahead. I pray the Lord will bless it to your hearts and use it in your lives to draw you closer to Lord that you may begin to experience and walk in the Cross Life.
