Five Fundamentals For Your Devotional LifeSample

A More Abundant Life

A life lived like Jesus can be truly unremarkable. The vast majority of it might be incredibly normal, seemingly uneventful, and at times quite boring. After all, nine-tenths of Jesus’ life was spent in small-town Nazareth, engaged in ostensibly ordinary things like learning, working, sleeping, eating, and spending time with family and friends.

Being ‘on fire’ for Jesus isn’t all miracles and ministry or transfigurations and trials. In fact, it is quite the opposite. As C. S. Lewis put it, to “imitate God … our model is the Jesus, not only of Calvary, but of the workshop, the roads, the crowds, the clamorous demands and surly oppositions.” Following Jesus includes undesirable things like early mornings, lost earnings, and caring about the inane problems of others. But its lack of excitement is what separates faith from fantasy like wheat from chaff. Most of the time, “God doesn’t call us to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things with extraordinary love.” And God, in turn, endows each moment of ordinary life with His own eternal and extraordinary love.

Real devotion is grounded in real life, as Isaiah said in Isaiah 55:6. Such devotion doesn’t restrict itself to scripture and religious ceremony, but eagerly seeks God’s glory amongst life’s little drudgeries, like doing the dishes. Its express aim is to “do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). As such, true devotion is as content being in the valleys living for God’s glory as it is being on the mountaintops living in God’s glory. Whatever pleases the Lord is well with such a soul.

If we’re unwilling to seek God in the life we have, we’ll do no better in the life we’d like to have. False sanctity feverishly seeks ways to honor God in the future. Genuine faithfulness preoccupies itself with the present. It focuses more on what it will do, not what it could do. This is also much less interesting and exciting, but it is also more important. For real devotion is sometimes hardest to find, not when it is dangerous or demanding, but when it is ordinary and boring.

Application:

Talk to someone you admire about how they made it through life’s many doldrums and still remained faithful to God.